Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity is one of the specific objectives of the Erasmus+ Programme. Lina Edu Intensive English Course enables course participants to develop their language skills: speaking, writing, reading, and listening.
Moreover, a week ago, we gave a workshop on this topic, including an assessment rubric for language teachers. Today, as an introductory part, you will read what we discussed at the beginning of the webinar.
We will also organise future webinars on other topics needed to strengthen your skills.
Developing language skills is a long-lasting process that requires patience, continuity, and guidance. However, productive skills, such as speaking and writing, are considered tougher because you need to use the acquired language to express yourself, in oral or written form.
Is writing more difficult?
It is often said that if you know how to organise your thoughts, then the flow of your oral or written expressions will be pleasant.
There are essential factors for successful writing, and we reluctantly admit their importance because we don’t usually like them: patience and practice.
Since writing takes time and a lot of sitting at the desk to make progress, and it is a solitary skill that doesn’t tolerate teamwork easily, we can say it can be the most difficult skill to develop and the most avoided one!
How to make students write?
If you need to teach writing, then it’s a real challenge!
So, here you can find a piece of advice we gladly share.
Let’s start with a shorter form of a text, a three-part structured text.
Guidelines/Instructions for Your Students
- Before starting writing, organise/plan paragraphs/parts.
Tell your students to think in advance what they will write about. Don’t let them take a pencil immediately and write without any plans. Give them a few minutes to think and “go into” the subject
- determine what to write in every part/paragraph
Let them make a plan for what it should be there in the introduction, body and conclusion
- avoid repetition
Be specific and persistent with this rule! Let them choose synonyms, make a paraphrase or transform the sentence to avoid repeating themselves.
- use the assessment rubric while writing a text/essay
Insert the assessment rubric in the writing test and tell your students to read it repeatedly while writing the text. That way, they are cautious about their linguistic options, how they express themselves, and the accuracy of their grammar or the text’s coherence.
- follow & stick to the given assessment elements in the rubric
If students are not familiar with what their writing will be assessed by, then no outcomes are achieved. Following the rubric’s assessment elements makes students focus on the text, and they will not quickly lose their way.
- use the given vocabulary/grammar structures
Targeted vocabulary bits and grammar structures are assessed. Therefore, students need to know what is expected of them: how much linguistically they are ready to improve and how much topic they have acquired.
- mind spelling
Lastly, spelling efficiency and accuracy are significant troublemakers in writing skills. Here, to improve it and make it more correct, students need to practice hard. That’s the most challenging teacher’s task, and can only be solvedtaking baby steps, little by little. Suppose teachers consistently make their students concentrate on the words they are learning to write by different techniques and changing tasks. In that case, this gradually turns into students’ habit and the need to correct spelling to the self-correction phase.
Here, the limitation of the number of words proves correct!
Why? Because you can easily measure the student’s spelling accuracy then!
About that issue of the need to limit the number of words, read the following article.
There is much more on developing writing skills, exercises to motivate students to write, and creativity that follows in other forms and fits perfectly to a written text, you can discover this in our course: https://linaedu.eu/erasmus-course-intensive-english-course/
As a suitable end…get some written beauty on a moment in autumn by our students:
Luck
Hungry squirrel standing
An acorn hits her small head
She eats happily
