This entry is about how to plan a writing skills lesson and the reason for it and the accompanying videos is that often trainee teachers and sometimes also teachers cannot identify the main stages of a writing lesson. Writing, like all the other skills, needs to be approached by looking at what specific sub skill(s) we want to focus on in the classroom as simply saying 'We'll do some writing today' or 'We'll write a letter today' is enough.Needless to say, we need to exactly which are of writing we are going to focus on in that given lesson e.g. genre or text types, accuracy, fluency, coherence, cohesion, punctuation, layout, paragraphing, etc. Often when observing writing lessons either on teacher training courses or as part of the internal teacher training development program, stages are not clearly identified and this usually means there is not enough of clear scaffolding for students to complete the tasks successfully and benefit from going through the process.
Now, there are different ways to approach writing depending on what you want to achieve with your group of learners, what level they are, what their immediate writing needs are, the course syllabus and the time available. Here I just want to offer a set of suggestions on what stages may be followed when approaching Writing skills in the ESOL classroom as found in the literature available.
I created both a longer video which addresses all the stages one by one and also give ideas for each stage - ideas which I have tried and tested over the years :-)...
and a shorter one using PowToon for those on the go and which may help you quickly revise those ideas you are already familiar with.
Bye for now and I hope your find this post helpful.
