WRITING INSTRUCTION

Writing

▣ WRITING INSTRUCTION 
▶ BREAKING THE INITIAL BARRIER 
■ As we have seen, writing is a solitary creative task that not everybody feels comfortable with. Therefore, one of the initial steps in writing instruction must involve breaking the barrier and alleviating the anxiety that may accompany the writing task.



■ Such anxiety usually stems from the student's fear of failure - not being able to think of what to write about, not knowing how to express it adequately, not being able to compose successfully, and, as a result, feeling incompetent. The teacher's first goal in writing instruction must be to convince students that everybody can write successfully for some purpose, even if the resulting writing products are pretty different. 



■ Perhaps the most critical barrier to break is the feeling that "I have nothing to write about." Preparatory work before writing is crucial here. Brainstorming activities, discussions, and oral interactions of various types, such as role-play activities through which students can discover they have a lot to say about the subject, can be most helpful. On the other hand, there is no better way to break the barriers to writing than through writing itself. Another good technique is to encourage students to write about anything at all.



■ Personal writing may be a good starting point, even if there is an understanding that no one will read the product except the writer. This is an excellent time to start a self-awareness program concerning writing.



■ At the initial stage, even students who are experienced writers in their first language may feel that they will never be able to reach fluency and ease in writing in another language, and therefore they have the additional "barrier" of language. These students need to find out that there is a lot of excellent and practical writing that they can do in the new language quite quickly. A sequence of easy writing tasks needs to be developed in the form of games, role-play activities, and other non-threatening writing opportunities.



▶ CHOOSING A TOPIC AND CHOOSING THE GENRE 
■ To create a communicative written message, the writer needs to be motivated to write and impart information of some type. The major success of a writing teacher may stem from their ability to develop writing tasks that suit the students' needs and interests.



■ Choosing a topic or a theme for writing is an essential initial step for classroom writing. Once the students, as a group or as individuals, have identified a subject on which they want to write, the next step would be to think of the reader or the audience to whom the written product would be addressed. Identifying the intended reader leads to a whole list of considerations that need to be thought out before the actual task of writing.



■ Sometimes we are writing in a situation where the genre is given, and the audience is well defined. We can make these decisions when we engage in the writing process. In most classrooms, writing is perceived as being addressed to the teacher. 



▶ TACTICS FOR PLANNING THE WRITING PROCESS 
■ L2 writers seem to do less planning and have more difficulty setting up goals and organizing the written materials to meet these goals than L1 writers. 



■ Many different ways of planning for writing activities have been suggested in the literature. One of the best known is preparing an outline for the text that one is going to write. Another common and more intricate planning technique is the preparation of a flowchart. 



▶ READING AS A MODEL FOR WRITING 
■ Many writing courses and certainly most autodidactic strategies in writing involve using well-written passages from literature or passages written by others as models for one's essay. At the nominal such advances serve as stimuli for writing by providing content people want to react to. Thus, many writing classes begin with reading texts, analyzing them, looking at them from both the reader's and writer's perspective, and finally using them as models for writing or using them as a piece of communication to respond to. 



▶ THE PORTFOLIO 
■ The portfolio, which is usually an ongoing collection of different writing assignments kept by the student in a folder or workbook, has become an essential concept in developing writing skills and giving teachers a fairer and more perceptive way to evaluate. 



■ A portfolio is also helpful in preparing a more extended writing project that involves collecting information and a variety of data on a topic before the actual writing is done. 



▶ WRITING AND REWRITING 
■ One of the essential things a writing class should aim is to bring the students to the point where they are willing to revise and feel comfortable editing what they have written. Two primary techniques are helpful in this context: peer review/feedback and self-questioning.



■ Conferencing with students seems to be a more appealing way to respond to students' work. This is gradually becoming a more acceptable way of working on revision in writing classes, perhaps thanks to portfolios. Such conferencing does not always have to occur between teacher and student. Two students can also do it, each playing the role of the writer once and then the part of the "evaluator," who is perceived more as a potential reader.



▶ A TOP-DOWN OR BOTTOM-UP APPROACH? 
■ In this section of the chapter, we have taken a top-down approach to write by emphasizing the content, the organization, and the structure of the written passage rather than its linguistic form. However, we maintain that in the long run, to ensure that the written quotation has communicative power and long-lasting effect, it also needs to be well written in terms of the proper choice of words and use of cohesive devices, grammatical structures, spelling, and punctuation. We contend that these bottom-up features should be focused on later in the writing process when the initial barriers have been removed, and the student is willing to engage in the creative communication process through writing. 



▶ CONCLUSION 
■ The ultimate goal of teaching writing in a second language program is to encourage students to develop techniques and self-evaluation strategies that will enable them to write according to their personal needs. Language classrooms should provide students with a variety of writing opportunities.