Writing for communication in school

There exists a different approach to teaching written speech depending on the students’ age. At the junior stage, students prefer to speak and write closer to what they have just read or what they have just listened to. Only at the senior stage, they try to speak and write in their own words. All exercises in written communication are subdivided into preparatory and communicative.

Preparatory exercises

Preparatory exercises are various drills with models (transformation, extension, etc.). Most important ones are the exercises in extending the suggested utterance. This kind of exercise helps forming the mechanism of prediction and anticipation.

One more kind of preparatory exercises is drills in reducing or paraphrasing the utterance/text. This means choosing the key sentences and making them reduced. In the result, students progress beyond very controlled writing exercises to freer paragraph writing. To express ideas freer, a plan in nominative word-combinations or simple sentences or a plan in questions might be of great use for students.

However, students will make the transition from guided to freer writing more easily if the teacher helps them in 2 ways: a) by giving a short text as a model; b) by doing oral preparations for the writing.

a) Giving a short text as a model

Students read a short text and perhaps study particular features of it, e.g., the way sentences are joined, the use of verb tenses or the use of the passive. They can write a paragraph that is similar but involves some changes.

b) Doing oral preparations for the writing

If all the students were writing about one and the same thing (e.g., the same town) it would help to go through the exercise orally with the class first and ask students to suggest what to include in the description. The main problem here is to find a suitable basic text.

Another way of guiding paragraph writing is to do oral preparation beforehand with the whole class. The students make suggestions and the teacher builds up an outline or a list of key expressions on the board. The students then use this as a basis for their writing. This approach has several advantages:

– it is flexible, it can be done in different ways according to the interests and ability of the class;

– ideas about what to write come from the students themselves. This makes the activity much more interesting and involves the class more;

– it does not require specially prepared texts or other material.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13