Teaching Writing

Good writing is seen as the sign of mastery of subject matter and language skill in addition to communication skill. How can we help our learners acquire a good writing skill?

What is writing? Writing is about communicating our thoughts in written form so others can understand easily and without any ambiguity. What does writing well require? A thought or an idea, and good language skill. Good language skill is about having a good vocabulary list, language elements, grammar rules etc, in the subconscious long term memory.

What path shall we take to help the learners acquire this great level of language skill?

“Lots of reading helps improve writing skill” says Krashen. So, lets help them with lots of reading before we ask them to write. How do we then improve reading skill? Give them books of their interest that are slightly above their language skill level. To enjoy reading and also build language skill the reader must already know about 70% of the words they read. See Krashen’s (i+1) hypothesis.

How do we then build this 70% vocabulary skill before we ask them to read? Input, Input, and lots of comprehensible input! How can we give them lots of comprehensible input that they can understand, retain for long term, and use in any context easily? Give them language skill using Total Physical Response (TPR), Teaching through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS), Free Voluntary Reading (FVR), Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Content Based Instruction (CBI) techniques; that is, actions, stories, tasks, interesting and compelling content.

Most importantly, no language drill, no worksheets, no dictations, no spelling tests, no memorization, and hence no rote learning please.

The picture below shows a path towards building mastery of writing skill.

The picture above says that if we give them 100 units of comprehensible input, they will take and retain about 50 units of them, and can only output 25 units. So, to write one page worth of material, they need to have at least two pages of language skill in them, and to have two pages in their language bank, they must be given at least four pages worth of comprehensible input.

Conclusion

So, let us give them lots of input using TPR, TPRS etc, help them language skill using TBLT, CBI, help them improve their reading skill using FVR, which will help them write well.

Thanks

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