24/06/2023, 21:22 Advanced writing skills - Macro vs micro skills - World TESOL Academy

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Writing Advanced writing skills – Macro vs micro skills

 Teaching writing - To produce great pieces of writing, learners will need to develop a range of different skills and competencies.
Introduction These can often be grouped into two overall areas – macro skills and micro skills.

 Teaching writing to
beginners - Foundations
Macro skills

Teaching writing to Macro skills are those that focus more on content and organization.

beginners - Activities
Examples of activities that focus on macro skills would be:

 Advanced writing skills -

Macro vs micro skills
Ordering paragraphs or sentences coherently
 Advanced writing skills -
Forming effective “topic sentences” (sentences placed near the beginning of a paragraph to
Getting over the hump
outline its overall thought/intention)
Creating cohesion using transition words (words that link thoughts/phrases together)
 Advanced writing skills -
Activities

Writing is all about having a message and communicating it successfully to other people. To do this, learners need
to develop macro skills that enable them to form ideas, organize them well, and then express these ideas in a

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24/06/2023, 21:22 Advanced writing skills - Macro vs micro skills - World TESOL Academy

suitable style.
 Advanced writing skills -
Activities continued
To help more advanced students focus on building macro writing skills, you’ll want to encourage them to produce
larger and more complete pieces of work (1-page essays, larger stories, short plays, advertisements, etc.) and then
 Teaching writing -
help to assess these pieces in terms of how well they transfer ideas, meet the targets of the writing (eg. a
Summary
motivational story), and how well they’re structured.

 Teaching writing - Quiz

Micro skills
Writing skills at the micro-level are related to promoting accuracy or using the correct written form.

Such micro-skills include:

Learning how to spell and punctuate correctly

Using correct grammar and structure.
Selecting words and phrases appropriate for the kind of writing

With micro skills, learners would focus more on individual words and sentences. Exercises relating to micro skills
would usually be more controlled and focus on accuracy.

Some examples of such micro-level writing activities would be:

Substitution exercises (replacing certain words in sentences to alter its meaning)

Sentence extensions (trying to expand example sentences)
Reordering exercises (adjust the order of words in a sentence to produce a certain type of result)
Spelling or punctuation exercises

By helping more advanced students to focus on these different areas – both macro and micro skills – you’ll enable
them to create more natural and effective pieces of writing.

Back to: 120-hour TEFL/TESOL course > Writing

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24/06/2023, 21:22 Advanced writing skills - Macro vs micro skills - World TESOL Academy

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