MR. G's WORDS ABOUT WRITING SKILLS

ENHANCING WRITING SKILLS    

THINKING ABOUT WRITING LITERACY IN MY CLASSROOM

Communicative intentions and styles are so varied. So the ways in which we, teachers, can motivate learning, understanding and extended usage of a language are.

I have devoted my class planning to grab assorted series of activities through which permanent feedback is given at a time as assessed. In these terms, I combine classic and contemporary strategies. All of them aimed to enforce autonomy and critical thinking through cross-cultural, inter and transdisciplinary work for making interest kind of viral.

Here you are some of them.

• Transcription: 

Just a bit, to assure the class features get clear for the students so they know where we head to.

• Dictation: 

Once in a while, it can help students recycling, incorporating, reinforcing and learning new words, expressions and it's a worthy strategy for spelling practice.

• Word-mapping: 

It helps the same as spelling reinforcement but also prepares students for facing definitions and context itself. With this regard: Mind maps, word bubbles, word lists, word charts or classifications rise as the preliminary elements to aboard a topic that leads the learner into those specific elements of the process she/he might aim to.

• Brainstorming: 

Being a speaking activity that involves pronunciation, it allows students to have their first approach to speaking correctly, to correct and to be corrected while speaking or writing to complete their lists with words or short sentences that they usually know but which use has nose-dived in the disuse. 

• Note-taking: 

Having students used to notetaking is a hard task. However, once achieved, the results will correspond to that effort and checking will become into an interchange more than an assessment for you and your students.

• Processing information: 

Having research process mediated by strategies such as rephrasing, paraphrasing and presenting information in creative ways, is a challenge but also an opportunity to find strengths and work on students' weaknesses from the scratch at the same time they use their own knowledge, at their own pace, more naturally and with the plus of self-motivation for showing their creative work to their partners.

Writing examples: 

When working on grammar or vocabulary, examples will be necessary and it´s the time for having them using their accuracy at top of its capacity. Some examples are sentences related to a specific situation (this will lead to the use of specific vocabulary and structures), to a specific structure or vocabulary. as specific or flexible as needed.

Text Creation:

Elaborating different kinds of texts with specific communicative objectives (text messages, letters, reviews, comments, summaries, articles, essays, short stories, diary logs, etc), demand from learners a  good effort, as from the teacher a lot of patience. Consequently, from a good explanation, a good instruction and clear corrections (from editing marks), there will come a lot of nice writings which will be a pleasurable reading.