The Productive Skills – Writing
Posted by admin in Education Writing on August 29, 2011
Speaking and writing are the ‘productive skills.’
Writing
Nowadays, there is very little need for long, formal written work in the classroom. With the advent of email and word processors with spell checkers, most people do very little written work except for short notes to friends and colleagues. Students may however have very specific needs such as those preparing for examinations where written work is still of great importance. Writing allows students sufficient time to process information whereas speaking doesn’t. Writing is also an avenue for those students who have limited confidence speaking in front of the class. Furthermore, writing allows for the practice of grammar rules and examination techniques. In order to convey a similar amount of information, a written text is shorter than speaking because the student has time to be more specific.
It should be remembered that students learn to read and write faster when they have real reasons to communicate. This could be in the form of journal writing or letter writing. Furthermore, it may be a good idea to create situations where they will need to write real invitations, requests, thank-you notes, and letters to pen friends, cards for special occasions, morning news, commercials, and opinions. You could even get the students to conduct surveys and interviews or make their own books by drawing or cutting out pictures, writing captions and word balloons. It is important to be clear as to the aims of the writing task before the lesson. Are you encouraging fluency or accuracy? A good starting point is to begin with a fluency activity and only focusing on accurate use of language at a later stage.
Writing With Dysgraphia
Posted by admin in Education Writing on August 29, 2011
When thinking about dysgraphia, people usually don’t think of it as a learning disability. Writing is just difficult for my child. Or, my child has poor handwriting, but so do doctors. Yet, dysgraphia is real and the sooner that we consider it a learning problem and deal with it as such, the sooner we can deal with it in a positive manner.
Dysgraphia by definition is a learning disability resulting from the difficulty in expressing thoughts in writing and graphing. It generally refers to extremely poor handwriting. Since the handwriting is so poor and difficult for the student to perform, is the learning disability a result of the handwriting, or are they not connected? I have found that working on the student’s handwriting first and then working on the mechanics of writing is the most successful method of dealing with this disability.
Teaching Interactive Writing with ICT Tools
Posted by admin in Education Writing on August 29, 2011
I- Introduction
I have been teaching English as a foreign language in secondary schools in Tunisia for many years. Although I have always used stimulating strategies to encourage my students to write and I have motivated them in various ways to produce good writings- letters, poems, short stories, articles, questionnaires…, I was acutely aware of their reluctance towards writing as a regular activity and their anxiety whenever they were handed their papers back. It was evident that they preferred to do something more enjoyable than a task they considered hard, tiring and boring!!!
When discussing this issue with my colleagues, I found out that they faced the same problems with their students and some of them desperately recognized having resorted to neglecting and avoiding this activity in their English classes. They either left it till the end of the session because of time constraints or gave it as homework. Hence, writing is neglected and ignored.