Writing Skills

Reasons for Writing

 At this point it would be helpful to note down your reasons for needing – or wishing
– to write in the course of a typical week, and the form that your writing takes. Try to
think of all possible contexts. Can the kinds of writing you do be grouped together
in any way?
 How do you think your own list might compare with that of other people you know:
perhaps a friend who is not a teacher, or your students?
Moreover, in some cases, we ourselves initiate the need to write – different kinds of letters, a
shopping list, or a short story, perhaps – whereas in other cases, the writing is a response to
someone else’s initiation, as when we respond to an invitation or a letter. The final point to
make here is that our writing has different addressees: family, colleagues, friends, ourselves,
officials, students and many more.
Reasons for writing, then, differ along several dimensions, especially those of
language, topic and audience.

Types of writing
 Personal writing
 Public writing

 Creative writing
 Social writing
 Study writing
 Institutional writing

Writing Materials in the Language Class

We have seen in previous chapters that some attention to ‘real-world’ language and
behaviour is regarded as increasingly important in the current English language teaching
climate. It would be difficult to argue the case that writing in the language class should only
mirror the educational function (writing essays and examination answers, taking notes from
textbooks etc.) except perhaps in certain ‘specific-purpose’ programmes such as English for
Specific Purposes (ESP) (e.g. nursing, business) or English for Academic Purposes (EAP). At
the same time, it is not immediately obvious how the notion of ‘authenticity’ and the
opportunities for transfer from real world to classroom can be maintained to the extent that
this can be done for speaking and listening skills.
This brief and generalized summary indicates several trends in the ‘traditional’
teaching of writing from which current views have both developed and moved away:
• There is an emphasis on accuracy.
• The focus of attention is the finished product, whether a sentence or a whole composition.
• The teacher’s role is to be judge of the finished work.
• Writing often has a consolidating function.
Teaching Language Skills
We have listed addressees along with a few suggested topics, but of course the possibilities
are considerably greater than this. Our students, then, can write.
• to other students: invitations, instructions, directions
• for the whole class: a magazine, poster information, a cookbook with recipes from different
countries
• for new students: information on the school and its locality
• to the teacher (not only for the teacher) about themselves and the teacher can reply or
indeed initiate (Hedge, 2005, for example, suggests an exchange of letters with a new class to
get to know them)
• for themselves: lists, notes, diaries (for a fuller discussion of diary writing see Chapter 12)
• to penfriends
• to other people in the school: asking about interests and hobbies, conducting a survey
• to people and organizations outside the school: writing for information, answering
advertisements
• If the school has access to a network of computers, many of these activities can be carried
out electronically as well.

The Writing Process

Hedge (2005) provides a comprehensive range of process-oriented classroom procedures
teachers can make use of. Her book on teaching writing consists of four sections:
 Communicating,
 Composing,
 Crafting and
 Improving.
Writing in the classroom
Writing, like reading, is in many ways an individual, solitary activity: the writing
triangle of ‘communicating’, ‘composing’ and ‘crafting’ is usually carried out for an absent
readership.

A few typical examples, all involving oral skills, must suffice:

• ‘Brainstorming’ a topic by talking with other students to collect ideas.
• Co-operating at the planning stage, sometimes in pairs/groups, before agreeing a plan
for the class to work from.
• ‘Jigsaw’ writing, for example, using a picture stimulus for different sections of the
class to create a different part of the story (Hedge, 2005: 40–2).
• Editing another student’s draft.
• Preparing interview questions, perhaps for a collaborative project.