Building the Writing Habit

Building the Writing Habit

This chapter will discuss about:

A.    Building confidence and enthusiasm

B.     Instant writing

C.     Collaborative writing

D.    Writing to each other

E.     What to do with ‘habit building writing

A. Building  confidence and enthusiasm

Some students are always happy to have English assignment in writing but others can be less keen. This unwillingness may derive from anxieties they have about their handwriting , their spelling, or their ability to construct sentences and paragraphs. Additionally, they rarely practice writing.

To help the students who lack of familiarity or confidence with writing, we need to spend some time building  the writing habit- that is making students feel comfortable as writers in English  and so gaining  their willing participation in more creative or extended activities by:

1. Choosing writing  tasks and activities

We can choose writing activities which have a chance of appealing  to the students and which have, if possible, some relevance for them. For example, writing fairy stories might appeal to children but could fail to inspire a group of university students

2. Knowing what students need

2.1. Information and task information

Students need to have the necessary information to complete the task.  This means that they need to understand clearly what we want them to do and they need, also,  to be absolutely clear about  any of the topic detail that we give them. For example, if we ask them to respond to an invitation, they need to have understood the details of the invitation, who they are writing to, and what it is they are writing to achieve, etc.

2.2. Language

If students need specific  language to complete a writing task we need to give it to them.

2.3. Ideas

Teachers need to be able to suggest ideas to help students when they get stuck

2.4. Patterns and schemes

One way of helping  students to write, even when they may think they do not have many ideas, is to give them a pattern or a scheme to follow.

B. Instant writing

Instant writing means any lesson where students can be asked to write on the spot, without much in the way of preparation or warning processes. It can be used  whenever the teacher feels it is appropriate because it is not part of a long writing process.

The following  activities provide some examples of instant writing:

1. Sentence writing

• Dictating sentences for completion

For example, we can dictate the following:

“My favorite time of day is ….”

And students have to write the morning, or the evening, etc. This can be extended of course. The teacher can say: “Now write one sentence saying  why you have choosen your time of day”

• Writing sentence

Students can be asked two write two or three sentences about  a certain topic. For example, suppose students have been working on the topic of ‘hopes and ambitions’, they can write three sentences about how they would like their lives to change in the future.

 

• The weather forecast

At the beginning of the day the teacher asks students to write about themselves and their day as if they were writing  a weather forecast: “what is the weather like now”? are you happy or tired, listless or energetic? How are you like to feel later on, in the afternoon?”

2. Using music

Choosing the right music is vitally important.  The many ways music can be used to stimulate instant writing are the following:

• Words

One activity is to play a piece of music and have students write down any words that come into their mind when they listen.

• What is the composer describing?

A lot of music is written to describe particular scenes or places. For example, the piece Vltava by the Czech composer Smetana describes a river.

• Film scores

In this activity students listen to a piece of music and then create the opening scenes for the film that the music suggests to them-they should describe the scenes before the dialogue starts.

• How does it make me feel?

The teacher can play students musical excerpts and get them to write their reaction as they listen. They can be given prompts which will help them to do this, such as: ”What color do you think the music is?” Where would you most like to hear it and who would you like to have with you when you do?”

• Musical stories

Students can write stories on the basis of music they listen to. If the music conveys a strong atmosphere it will often spark the students’ creativity and almost tell them what to write.

 

3.  Using pictures

Among the many ways of using pictures for writing  are the following:

·         Describing  pictures

One way of getting students to write about  picture is simply to ask them to write a description of one. But  when getting students to describe picture we need to be sure they have the vocabulary  necessary for the task.

·         Suspects and objects

A variation on picture description is to give students a variety of pictures and ask them to write about only one of them.

·         Write the postcard

We can give them postcard scenes and then ask them to write the postcard which they would expect to write to an English–speaking friend from such location.

·         Portraits

Students can write a letter to a portrait, asking the character questions about his or her life and explaining  why they are writing to them.

·         Story task

There are a number of different task which students can be asked to undertake:

1.      For the dramatic pictures (such as people in street protest, or someone who has come  face to face with a wild animal) students can be asked to write what happened next.

2.      Students can be given a series of pictures of random objects (an airplane, a bicycle, a pack of cards, a dog, a fire place, etc) and told them to choose four of them, and write a story which connect them.

3.      Students can be given a series of pictures in sequence which tell a story. They have to write the story which the pictures tell.

4.      Students can be given a picture and a headline or caption and asked to write a story which makes sense of the picture and the words.

4.  Writing poem

The following activities show how pre-established patterns can be used to help students write poetry:

• Acrostic poems/ alphabet poems

An acrostic poem is on where the first letters of each line, when read downwards, form a word, e.g.

Blue sea, sunshine on waves

Easy days

Afternoons of heat and playfulness

Charm of summer, anger of the storm

Home, and the itch of sand

• Model poem

Here the teacher can give a certain poem as model for the student to write.

C. Collaborative writing

Successful collaborative writing  allows students to learn from each other. Below are the way we can practice collaborative writing:

1.      Using the board

One way of making collaborative writing successful is to have students write on the board. Two activities show how the board can be used in this way:

§ Sentence by sentence

We can ask students to come to the board one by one in turn to complete the sentence based on certain topic that they have decided. Each time a new student  goes up to the board in such activities, the rest of the class can help by offering  suggestion, corrections, or alternatives.

§ Digtogloss

In digtogloss the students recreate a text or story that the teacher read to them. One purpose of the activity is to focus the students’ attention on specific items of language by getting them to analyze the difference between  their written recreations and the original which they have heard.

2. Writing in groups and pairs

Below are the ways to practice writing in group and pairs:

§  Rewriting (and expanding ) sentence

In one sentence-rewriting activity, students are presented with a stereotypical statement and asked to amend it to reflect the opinion of the group. This provokes discussion not only about the topic but also about  how to write a consensus opinion appropriately. The teacher (with the class) has chosen a topic for the students to consider. The students  are then presented with some example of stereotypical statements, like this on the topic of gender difference:

 ·         First line, last line

Students can be given either the first line of a story (e.g. When she look out of the window she saw a red car parked across the street) or the last line (e.g. He told himself that he would never go to the cinema by himself again). Then they  have to write a story to include one or the other. They discuss the situation in their pairs or groups and create a story which follows on from the first line or ends with the last line.

• Directions, rules, instruction

We can ask students to write “instructional”  text for others to follow. This could take the form of writing directions to a place (for example, how to get to their school from the station or the airport, etc)

• Story reconstruction

We can enhance the value of the story activities which involve a sequence of pictures by adding  a jigsaw element. This means that each students is given a different piece of jigsaw and by sharing what they have seen  or heard, they have to reassemble the bits into a coherent whole.

D. writing to each other

A further way of provoking students engagement with writing is to get students to write to each other in class time or with the people outside the class by using the following way:

·         Pen pals, e-mails, and live chat

Teachers have always encouraged students to correspond with pen pals from different towns or countries. This is significantly easier and more immediate with e-mail exchange between ‘key pas’ or ‘mouse pals’.

·         Letters backwards and forwards

We can move on from the kinds of notes and e-mail we have been looking at by getting  students to write letters to each other – and reply  to letters too. Students could read an article and then write a letters to an imaginary giving their opinion. The letters are then given to different classmates who each have to write to the same imaginary newspaper either agreeing or disagreeing  with the letters in front of them.

E. What to do with habit building writing

We have stressed that one of the purpose for the writing  activities we have been looking  at in this chapter is to give students engaging writing task that will help them become fluent writers. What we should do with the results of this kind of writing is to let students enjoy them. Let  them read and see each other’s work; encourage them to read out what they have done or let them put it up on a class website, for example.

F. Conclusion

In this chapter we have:

·         discussed the desirability of building  the writing habit, especially for those who are unused to writing  and fear the cannot do it.

·         shown how by choosing the right tasks (bearing in mind the need for engagement) students will be keen to write.

·         talked about the need to help students to have something to say by giving appropriate task information, necessary language, and occasion, patterns and schemes to follow.

·         discussed the need to make writing worthwhile-through sharing and displaying written work in some way.

·         detailed a numbers of activities for instant writing including sentence writing, using music, pictures and poems.

·         looked at examples of collaborative writing, stressing the beneficial effects of students working together to produce written text, with or without a scribe.

·         looked at ways in which we can get students to write to each other whether by passing notes, by e-mail, in live chat,or by writing simulated letters.

·         said that teachers need to give positive acknowledgement  as well as more formal language feedback.