Teaching Integrated

Language Skills

Today we are going to study

Writing

Source: McDonough, J., Shaw, C., & Masuhara, H. (2013). Materials and Methods in ELT: A
Teacher's Guide. Oxford: Blackwell (3rd edition).
TEACHING WRITING

Along with the other three skills, writing has

developed and accumulated many insights into the
nature of language and learning. However, as well as
having much in common with other skills, we shall
see that writing differs in some significant ways to do
with the purpose of writing in class and in everyday
life, and the relationship between these two settings.
TEACHING WRITING

Reasons for Writing

Shopping list Notes from a book
Official forms Parts of a prospectus
Telephone messages ‘Reminder’ lists
An essay Letter to a friend
A meeting agenda Business letters
Comments on student Invitations
work Diary
Birthday card Office memoranda
E mails Text messages
Word and phrase searches on the Internet
Reasons for Writing Reported by Teachers:
Writing Materials in the Language Class

‘Traditional’ writing activities

There are a number of types of writing task

that most of us will be familiar with, both as
teachers and from our own language learning
experience.
‘Traditional’ writing activities

Controlled sentence construction:

• providing a model sentence and asking students to

construct a parallel sentence with different lexical
items
• inserting a missing grammatical form
• composing sentences from tabular information, with
a model provided
• joining sentences to make a short paragraph,
inserting supplied conjunctions
(but, and, however, because, although . . . ).
‘Traditional’ writing activities

Free composition: Sometimes students are simply

invited to write on a personal topic – their hobbies,
what they did on holiday, interesting experiences and
the like. Other materials provide a reading passage as
a stimulus for a piece of writing on a parallel topic,
usually with comprehension questions interspersed
between the two activities.
‘Traditional’ writing activities

The ‘homework’ function: Particularly in general

course books (as distinct from materials devoted
specifically to the skill of writing), it is quite common
to find writing tasks ‘bunched’ at the end of a unit,
either as supplementary work in class or set for
homework and returned to the teacher for later
correction.
The Written Product

Traditional writing classes were product-

oriented. When teachers look at students’ written
work, they usually pay special attention to sentence
structure, spelling, word choice and possibly
paragraph construction.
Note that current literature on teaching writing
also considers elements that go beyond linguistic
domains, such as genre, purpose and socio-cultural
factors, in describing L2 writer’s texts.
The Written Product

Typical organizational principles for materials

include paragraph structuring, particularly related to
functional categories, and the use of a range of linking
devices. Sentence-level and grammar practice is not
omitted but is set in the context of a longer and
purposeful stretch of language. Writing, then, is seen
as primarily message-oriented, so a communicative
view of language is a necessary foundation.
The Written Product

Audience
It is now widely accepted that writing is a
process of encoding (putting your message into
words) carried out with a reader in mind. Certainly the
overall organization is best considered in relation to
audience and purpose. The degree of ‘crafting’ that
needs to be done, and at what level, will also be
determined to some extent by the addressee. Stylistic
choices, in other words, depend on why and for whom
we are writing.
The Written Product

Audience
The classroom has its own purpose and
structure, and is not simply a reflection of the outside
world.

Our students, then, can write

• to other students: invitations, instructions, directions
• for the whole class: a magazine, poster information
• for new students: information on the school and its
locality
• to the teacher (not only for the teacher) about
themselves and the teacher can reply or indeed
initiate
• for themselves: lists, notes, diaries
• to pen-friends
• to other people in the school: asking about interests
and hobbies, conducting a survey
• to people and organizations outside the school:
writing for information, answering advertisements
• If the school has access to a network of computers,
many of these activities can be carried out
electronically as well.
The Writing Process

We shall now look at the writing process

from the two related points of view of the
writer and the classroom.
The Writing Process

The writer’s perspective

Writers, it seems, do a great number of things
before they end up with the final version – the
‘finished product’. For instance, they jot down ideas,
put them in order, make a plan, … change words,
rephrase bits, move sections around, review parts of
what they have written, … , check through the final
version, … , refer back to something they have read –
and many more things, some of them quite
idiosyncratic.
The writer’s perspective

Materials for teaching writing are increasingly

beginning to incorporate process-based insights in
various ways.

Hedge (2005) provides a comprehensive range

of process-oriented classroom procedures teachers
can make use of: Communicating, Composing, Crafting
and Improving.
The writer’s perspective

Communicating represents the first stage of the

writing process. The activities suggested in this
section are designed to help learners become used to
writing as self-discovery and as a means of
communication.
Examples of activities include producing a class
magazine, exchanging letters with teachers and peers
and writing a newscast, all of which require the
learners to write within a specific genre and context to
a specific real-life audience.
The writer’s perspective

Composing is the second stage in which the learners

experience the mental processes of gathering and
organizing ideas before actually starting to write.
Activities in this stage include making mind
maps, using a diagram of ideas, brainstorming and
cubing (i.e. considering a topic from six different
points of views, such as description, comparison and
application).
The writer’s perspective

Crafting is the third stage, in which learners are

guided to produce well-structured written work.
Activities involve writing a book review, a description
of a person, a biography and an essay with contrast
and comparison. In these activities the learners are
provided with opportunities to raise their awareness
of how written language (e.g. paragraph, discourse) is
organized in different kinds of texts.
The writer’s perspective

The final stage is Improving, when the teacher and

the class collaborate to improve the quality of
writing through awareness activities such as
conferencing on plans and drafts, peer editing,
reformulation and checking accuracy.
Writing in the classroom

We must remember that our students are

language learners rather than writers, and it would
not be particularly helpful to have them spend all
their time writing alone.
The classroom can be structured in such a way
as to provide positive intervention and support in the
development of writing skills.
Writing in the classroom

The classroom can provide an environment for

writing at each of the three main stages of (1)
gathering ideas: pre-writing and planning, (2) working
on drafts, and (3) preparing the final version.
The primary means by which this can be done
is by establishing a collaborative, interactive
framework where learners work together on their
writing in a ‘workshop’ atmosphere.
Writing in the classroom

In the multidimensional view of writing, there

are clearly a number of different possibilities available
for the sequencing of materials and activities:

1. Varying/increasing the size of the linguistic

‘building blocks’, from single lexical items → sentences
and sentence joining → the construction of
paragraphs and finally → whole texts. This requires
attention to all levels of language, from sentence and
text structure to a sense of the coherence of a
completed piece of writing.
Writing in the classroom

2. Paralleling the stages in the process of putting a

whole piece of writing together. Although writing
processes have little in themselves to do with
proficiency, the degree to which the process can be
put to use obviously does have.

3. Task complexity. It can be argued that personal

(expressive) writing is in some sense ‘easier’ than its
institutional or professional counterpart. A letter to a
friend, or a short story, nevertheless are not as
constrained by rules as, say, a business letter or a
report or an essay.
Conclusion
It is probably true to say that there is a
gradual shift from guiding learners through
grammatical patterns against the background of
‘composition’ requirements, to a concern with
paragraph and text structure from a communicative
perspective … and awareness of real-life practices
outside the classroom.
Materials for the teaching of writing, then, do
not neglect the basic skills, but are increasingly
likely to see writing in terms of purpose, audience,
and the development and organization of thinking,
for real world, for learning and for educational
purposes.
SAMPLE LESSON
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SPEAKING