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Effective Writing Strategies for Students

Writing is a crucial skill that can be challenging to teach, as it requires different mental processes compared to speaking. Various writing activities, such as copying, controlled exercises, guided writing, process writing, and unguided writing, can enhance students' writing abilities. Incorporating writing tasks into lessons, rather than just assigning them as homework, can also be beneficial for student learning.

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Mostafa Shendy
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12 views1 page

Effective Writing Strategies for Students

Writing is a crucial skill that can be challenging to teach, as it requires different mental processes compared to speaking. Various writing activities, such as copying, controlled exercises, guided writing, process writing, and unguided writing, can enhance students' writing abilities. Incorporating writing tasks into lessons, rather than just assigning them as homework, can also be beneficial for student learning.

Uploaded by

Mostafa Shendy
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Unit 1: Writing

Writing is one of those skills that is often considered difficult to teach, after all teachers often don’t
know how to improve their own writing. Yet it still remains an important skill.

Some students may need to improve for academic purposes, for business, or just to communicate
with friends/colleagues in English.

Although it is sometimes thought of as an individual activity, there are ways to actually incorporate
activities which improve writing ability into your lesson. But first we need to see what writing in a
foreign language involves.

Writing requires quite different mental processes from speaking, as we have time to prepare,
organise material, take our time and check for errors or inaccuracies.

However, there are also challenges: in order to write successfully there are a number of elements to
consider. We need to think about the purpose of our writing and who we are writing for/to.

This will affect not only the content but the register, style and structure of what we write. There’s a
lot going on, it’s not just about producing grammatically correct sentences!

There are different writing activities we can do to work on some, or all, of the above elements. This
depends on the type of exercise we do with our students and how controlled the practice is. Some of
the different task types are listed as follows:
 Copying – Young learners in particular, or students who use a different alphabet from the
Roman one used for English, often need to copy characters or words in order to learn how to
formulate them.
 Controlled exercises – Learners write single words or phrases in response to questions.
There is little room for error as the task is so focused.
 Guided writing – Using samples or models of longer texts to demonstrate to students
appropriate language and structures for the task
 Process writing – Students choose what they want to write but you guide them through the
process
 Unguided writing – Students write without too much assistance

Although you may prefer to set writing tasks for homework, there are ways of usefully incorporating
writing into the lesson itself. You can do this in several ways from analysing sample answers, to
discussing ideas, to helping students decide how to organise their work.

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