Taking every aspect of our everyday professional life into consideration, it is obvious that it is a complex one, one requiring that delicate teacher’s sense, that sense which cannot be categorized by any means and not many people need to have it at their working places. It is the one where we anticipate some troubles coming out of nowhere or see cheating from a distance like a hawk-eyed detective, and I am not trying to trivialize anything here. Those “superpower” skills are developed to their finest by long, rich, teaching experience, but also by “living” this profession. As well we, consciously or not, use our general knowledge to make our classes more interesting. We usually leave that slight trace of personalization in our classes, meaning that we apply our wider knowledge and skills in order to help our students be more expressive and linguistically efficient and mature. We add that value that is well and truly needed to make our students more skillful at expressing their thoughts.
I did not use to give so much thought to how much I use my personal general knowledge, possible talents, or “superpower” skills to develop my teaching process until one moment, few years ago, when I caught myself thinking hard, but creatively about how to give a proper example of an introduction to my students while practising writing a short, structured text. There, at that point, I found that writing a good introduction was an equal challenge in teaching our students the basics of being skilled at writing and upgrading their writing skills. My love for writing has motivated me, as a teacher, to embrace all the struggles that I have faced in teaching writing, and I need to admit that my writing attempts from the past and an awe-inspiring respect for literacy have helped me a lot to improve my methods in teaching writing.
Writing greatly leans on inborn talents and it is normal to hear the following questions: How can you teach someone writing? Is it possible to teach a person with not so developed expressive potentials how to convey feelings and thoughts in a literate manner? A constant, sometimes even unconscious self-reflection about my teaching brought me to the revelation that teaching writing is the most demanding teaching task I was dealing with.
There are many points we need to refer to when we teach writing, but the essence lies in these three.
1 Organization of thoughts
We need to teach our students to respect the importance of the text structure. They must realize that it is the basis of every successfully written composition, and that without properly laying its foundations, their text will be literately inadequate no matter how fine the expressions are that our students use. We start a spark for being punctual, correct, and neat in sorting out their ideas, choosing the right words, and finding synonyms if they are lacking vocabulary abundance or are just inexperienced to handle expression gaps. How do you explain to a thirteen-year-old student to calm their thoughts, clear the rest and organize them in a structured way? The fact is that we cannot leave our students without leading clues and expect some literate results. The task should be precisely and clearly written with a short model, even better if goes along with the text points. This is a usual phase when we ask ourselves if we are competent enough to set that kind of task. Yes, we are, but it is time demanding to think deeply about the flow of thoughts in some given topic, and we usually need to prepare the task the same way as if we were going to write it by ourselves. Once we prepare ourselves for tough task structuring, we are completely ready to let ourselves go in this teaching adventure. How to set the writing points? Is the order right? Does the first writing point refer to the introduction? Which writing point leads to the conclusion? These questions are needed to help our students weave the track of the story.
2 Structure
Let your student practise a simple, three-part structure: introduction, body, conclusion. Let them begin with an argumentative essay with questions which are not so complex or difficult and where this structure is expected. These is an ideal piece to practise the structure. It is also possible to achieve the structural “talking” in narrative essays, which is the most common form, along with descriptive ones in higher classes at elementary school. Then, we need to teach our students how to start their text, with a maximum of two sentences, because if they cross that line of introducing the topic, then they are already entering the body. In the introductory part students need to give only an interesting hint to attract a reader’s attention or announce the topic, but carefully avoiding being open and clearly discovering the point. Here, teachers’ writing skills and knowledge of creative writing are manifested and they are again needed to lead our students to the higher levels of their writing proficiency.
Although the body seems to be the easiest part of the text, we should also pay attention to how to lead our students to write it properly, depending on what th write-up is. The second difficult step to take is to write that third sentence that the body opens with. That sentence needs to continue the opening to the development, and it needs to be connected to the introduction. Here, I usually tell my students to imagine writing as making something using blocks and building it layer by layer. There we need to know how to make our students get the story to its peak and how to build their story to its end. If we see that we do not make any progress with our students’ comprehension of what we want them to do, then we can easily relate to speaking and making presentations, since that form needs to be structured as well. Students know that transitions among slides should be smooth without sudden breaks or jumps. If they are able to picturize the creation of the text, they can easily transfer their thoughts from one part to another, without losing the thread.
Closing the text is also a tough nut to crack, and what refers to connecting the introduction to the body, the same goes for the body and conclusion. That transitional sentence needs to be well-considered, because it cannot be conclusive but leads to the final thought
The same golden formula for our young writers is to keep it short and not to repeat the idea in the conclusion. It should be put in a way that nobody can continue the text after that concluding thought. Visualising helps here again. Let your student “see” an envelope with the firm, wax-seal that nobody is allowed to open, or a solid lock that keeps the door safely closed. I often tell my students that their conclusion needs to be so good that it makes me silent, without any comments. Then their sighs very often follow, like it is an impossible mission!
3 Assessment
Assessment is an inevitable part in your students’ writing improvement. It does not matter if it is formative or summative and its importance is equally present in both forms. Our students, by being assessed using a rubric, can easily self-reflect on their writing skills and be aware of their improvement. The reason why the rubric helps them to get to a higher writing level is that they are also led by the assessing elements in the writing process, in other words, if students precisely know what they are expected to follow and at what extent apply the demanded knowledge in their writing, then we help them again to organize their thoughts, think about applied grammar structures and spelling rules.
Motivation can be a tricky part that we need to deal with when it comes to practising writing. It is important not to forget that our students, just like us, need to be in the mood to write creatively and successfully. There are many ways to motivate students to write including gamification. One of the most favourite writing tasks in my class is team writing. I give my students an introduction and they need to build the story by adding their sentences one by one but also, they need to ensure that the story makes sense, has a logical flow and given language structures are used in the context. If you add the component of drawing the story cover, an advertising poster which announces publishing the story or illustrating different parts of the story, then your students will feel more encouraged to express themselves and enjoy that process at the same time.
Example: You can use these sketches and tell your students to write stories fitting the suggested covers, done by 8th graders. It would be really interesting to exchange their stories afterwards! I do not know if that little writer in our teacher-selves is our “superpower” and makes our students super literate, but surely there is an unbreakable bond.
Author:
Ivana Bokavšek
English teacher, teacher adviser
June 2022
