TEACHING WRITING TO SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Teaching writing to Secondary school students
Teaching writing: Difficulties and solutions
What are the difficulties you are faced with in teaching writing? What are possible solutions to those difficulties?

What problems do students often have in writing English? How can teachers help them resolve those problems?
The process of writing
Planning

drafting

editing

final draft
What students need to do in order to write?
Know the aim – why they are writing
Know the audience – who they are writing to
Know the genre – what type of text they are writing
Have enough time for
- thinking about the topic
- brainstorming ideas
- planning ahead carefully
- drafting as many times as they can
Have constant feedback from teachers as well as from their partners during the writing process.
Writing as a process
Being motivated
Planning
To write
Getting ideas together
planning
drafting
Revising
Replanning
redrafting
Final version
Adapting process writing into the new textbook
This example is taken from Unit 7, Tieng Anh 8, p. 68.
Ask students to read the notice in the textbook. Ask them some questions to check comprehension.
Set the context.
Put them in pairs. Ask them to talk to each other about the event.
Tell them that they need to write a notice. Ask them what the notice needs to include.
Elicit how to write the reason for the event
Ask students to write the first draft.
When they finish their first draft, get them to exchange their drafts, read and give comments on language accuracy and content. Then they hand back.
Get students to edit their own drafts- correcting, deleting, adding.
Collect and redistribute the notices. Students read and compare what they have written.
Teacher collect completed notices for marking.
Ideas of teaching writing
(lower levels)
Parallel compositions
Parallel letters
Picture compositions
Creative writing
Draw three columns on board and write words into each column.
Hope
Love
Hate
Anger
Time
Age
Fire
is a/ an
Spoon
Fork
Knife
Banana
Brush
egg
ASK THEM TO WRITE DOWN SIMPLE SENTENCES WHICH THEY LIKE.
For example: Hope is a banana…
Call up students to read their sentences. Remember to give comments and praise
On finishing, ask the students to choose their most beautiful sentence and
develop a 3-line poem like this:
Love is a knife
It sharpens the senses
But cuts your heart.
Developing writing coherence
Look at page 52, Tieng Anh 9 and answer this question: What is the purpose behind activity a?

Introductory activities
Identify the “old” information given in the first sentence and then the new information in the second sentence.
1. a. Near a large forest lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children.
b. The boy’s name was John and the girl’s name was Mary.
2. a. My mother has written a new book.
b. It’s about gardening.
Explicit teaching
Awareness-raising

Giving feedback
Criteria for assessment:
Communicative quality
Logical organization
Layout and presentation
Grammar
Vocabulary
Handwriting, punctuation and spelling.
Giving feedback
Limit error correction
Get learners to correct their own errors as far as possible
Simply underline easy-to-correct mistakes
Use a code for more difficult errors
Partially make the correction
Write in the correction for very hard-to-correct errors
Giving feedback
Use codes for correction
WO= word order
V٨= verb problem
WW= wrong word
SP = spelling
۸ = missing word
G = grammar problem
P = punctuation