Name: Cortiz, Leonido Jr.

Course/Program/level: BSED ENGLISH-3

Instructor: Dr. Maria Lucil H. Dollado

ENGLISH 17 Activity:
Submit 5 writing activities and 5 assessment of writing skills.

Introduction
Learning to write is usually one of the most difficult tasks a
foreign language student has to cope with. Even native
speakers at university level very often experience serious
difficulties in showing a good command of writing. Language
teachers, then, tend to include writing skills in their foreign-
language syllabus because they consider these skills essential for
their students’ academic success. But, what is the real value of
writing?

Writing activities

When teachers plan their writing activities they have to consider

the level of their students and the difficulty of the task. We could
mention two different ways of grading writing tasks:

i) According to the length. Much of the writing tasks in an

elementary level class is at the sentence level and their texts are
usually limited to just a few sentences. Then, students gradually
produce longer and more elaborate texts.

ii) According to the degree of control the task exercises over the
student’s expression. Writing tasks for beginners tend to be fairly
controlled; as they progress and improve their writing, teachers
often guide them in many different ways before they are asked
to write something freely.

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 Hence, we can distinguish three types of writing activities:
controlled, guided, and free. Below are some examples of writing
exercises which illustrate these three types of tasks.

CONTROLLED WRITING ACTIVITIES:

Copying phrases or sentences which have been mastered orally

or which are written in the book is an extreme example of a
controlled writing activity. Students do not usually enjoy these
mechanical exercises, and we wonder how effective this activity is to
develop writing skills because meaning is not taken into account at all.
It seems clear that we can make this type of activities much more
meaningful if we make students think and understand what they are
writing.

Copying

E.g. The following sentences are from reports to police by

a witness regarding two suspects. The sentences have been mixed up
by a secretary. Sort them out and write them under the appropriate
picture.

He was about 40 He was about 60 PICTURE 1 PICTURE 2

He was thin He was fat He had a beard..................... 1
........................ ... 1

--------------
He
had long hair.......................................... 2.— ------------------ 2.
He was wearing glasses......................... 3. ------------------ 3.
He was wearing a hat............................ 4. ............................4.

(Taken from Wingard, «Writing,» 1981)

Gap-filling

E.g. Write out the complete sentences.

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 Mary . ... to school by bus.
or
Mary - school - bus

Re-ordering words or sentences.

E.g. Write the sentences correctly.

• Henry / with / a hole / had / in it / a bucket.

• He / to mend it / how / he didn’t / wanted / but / know.
• He / Liza / for help / asked.
•

Substitution

E.g. Write a true sentence like this about yourself.

-Peter likes playing baseball and reading science fiction.

-Barbara can speak German.

Correct the facts

E.g. Re-write the sentences so that they match the picture.

At the market, I saw an old

woman sitting in a chair. She WRONG
PICTURE
was selling eggs. It was
raining.

(Taken from Doff, Teach English, 1988)

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 Caption writing

E.g. Look at the picture and write four sentences about what the
people in the picture are doing.

1........................................ 3. ............ ........................

2........................... ............. 4. -------------------------
PICTURE
Substitution table

E.g. Write three sentences in the appropriate sequence.

They met to New York

Peter went at a restaurant

He ate Peggy

1....................................................................... ---
2........................... ........... ................................
3. .............................................. ----- -

Open dialogues

E.g. Fill in the dialogue.

A: Hello, Sue. Well, this is a surprise. B:...

' A: Yes, it must be five years. What are you doing these
days? B:... A: Oh, so you don’t work at the University
any more then. B:...

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 Conversion

E.g. Rewrite using IF in each sentence.

• Nick arrived late because he missed the train.

• His boss was angry because he arrived late.

Sentence completion

E.g. Complete the sentences adding «because» and an appropriate

reason.

• A book was lying on the floor of an empty gym ...

• I’ve worked hard at the office ...
• This will be the most exciting match of the year...

Dictation

The traditional dictation might be adequate for practising

spelling, but it does not really develop other writing skills, since
students do not have to think much about what they are writing or
find ways of making up sentences. Adrian Doff in the thirteenth
chapter of his training course Teach English suggests an alternative
to this traditional dictation, which focusses more on meaning. This
activity has four steps:

i) Write these prompts on the board:

Giovanni- fishing
friend’s house - bus - river
tree - fishing
a few minutes - Giovanni - small fish

ii) Read the text. Ask students to listen but not to write anything.

Giovanni decided to spend the day fishing. He went to his

friend’s house and they took a bus to the river. There, they sat
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 down under a tree and began fishing. After a few minutes,
Giovanni caught a small fish.
iii) Ask students to write a version of the text, using the prompts
on the board. It does not have to be exactly the same as the original;
the first sentence could be, e.g. «Giovanni decided to go fishing. »

iv) Go through the exercise orally, asking different students

to read out sentences.

GUIDED WRITING ACTIVITIES:

There are two basic ways of guiding the students’ writing:

• By providing students with short reading texts or oral passages

which serve as models for them to follow, as the product approach
suggested.

• By doing some oral or written preparation for the writing

beforehand with the whole class, as the process approach
suggested.

• a) Writing based on a model:

Parallel writing

E.g. Read the following paragraph about Mary’s day and write
a similar one about your own day.

or

Read the following description of a room and write a paragraph

describing the room in the picture.

Summarising

E.g. Read the following text, find out what the main ideas are
and write them in your own words.
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This activity could be planned as a group composition:

i) Divide the class in groups of about 5 students.

ii) Divide the reading passage (a story or dialogue) in different
sections.

iii) Give each member of the group a different section of

the reading passage and ask them to write a summary.

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 iv) The group puts the individual summaries together and
discusses the right order of the ideas.

Answering questions

E.g. Answer the following questions and write a paragraph.

• What did you do for your holiday last year?

• Who did you go with?
• How did you go?
• Where did you stay?
•

Information transfer

E.g. Listen to the curious anecdote that Liza tells and write an
account of what happened.

b) Oral/written preparation:

The teacher helps students to prepare the composition asking them

for ideas or expressions and building up an outline on the board. Then
students write it down individually or in groups using the previous data
as a basis for their writing. See all the activities we mentioned above
when we discussed the process approach.

Brainstorming

Students rapidly exchange information about a topic or about

something they have selected to read.

Free association

Put the topic on the board. Students quickly say whatever words
come to mind when they see the topic word.

Word mapping
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 The teacher writes a topic on the board and asks students to
help him organise related words and concepts in clusters around the
central topic.

Ranking activities

Students rank a set of features according to priorities.

Quickwriting

Students write as much as they can in a given time (e.g. 3 minutes)

on a topic, without worrying about the form of what they write.

FREE WRITING ACTIVITIES:

The traditional composition in which the teacher asks the

students to write about their own experiences (e.g. after holidays),
narrate stories (e.g. a funny anecdote), or describe pictures, is a good
example of a free writing task. All the help students may have is a title
or the first/last^ sentence of the composition. It is not an overstatement
to say that even advanced students find these activities rather
difficult and frustrating, since they tend to make a lot of mistakes. That
is the reason why some oral or written preparation in class during the
planning stage might help them to tackle the problem with a different
attitude. Here are some free writing activities, taken from Jeremy
Harmer’s The Practice of English Language Teaching ( 1983), which
could be done following the abovementioned principles and techniques
of the process approach.

Describe and identify

Students write descriptions of people or places and the rest of the

class or other groups have to guess who the people or places are.

i) The teacher divides the class into two teams.

ii) The students write a description of a famous person (or a
member of the class) without mentioning that person’s name.
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 iii) A member of one of the teams read his/her description. If
someone from the opposing team can identify the person the team
scores a point. If not there is no score. The teacher may

take away a point from the team reading the description if a) the
information about the person is wrong or misleading, or b)
the English is totally indecipherable.

Story construction

Students write a fairy story in groups.

i) Students are put into groups. Where possible, they should be

of equal numbers.
ii) On a piece of paper they write the following sentence:
«Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived in a
large castle at the edge of a forest. »
iii) The students are then instructed to continue the story by
writing the next sentence.
iv) Then they are told to give their piece of paper to the student
on their left. They should now continue the (new) story they
have in front of them by writing the next sentence. The
procedure is repeated until the papers have gone round the group
but one. The teacher then tells the students to write the
concluding sentence.
v) The stories are now turned to their originators. Students can
read the resulting tales to the rest of the class.

Relaying instructions

Students write directions which other students have to follow.

i) Students are told to write directions from the place where

they are
studying to some other place in the same town or city. They
' are told not to mention the destination by name.

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 ii) They give their directions to a partner who has to guess
what the destination is by following the direction.

Exchanging letters

Students write each other letters and then receive a reply. They
could be letters of invitations, letters to the «agony column» of a
magazine, complaining letters about goods they have bought after
seeing an advertisement, or letters in which students apply for a job.

How to assess student's written work?

As important as planning activities to help students develop their

writing skills is assessing their written work. It is invaluable to both
students, who can learn from their errors, and teachers, who can
check the students’ progress and identify specific problems.
However, correcting written work is usually a time-consuming activity
which teachers do not particularly enjoy doing.

Fairly controlled writing tasks (such as gap-filling, reordering, open

dialogues, etc.) can easily be corrected orally in class - students can
correct each other’s work in pairs and then the whole class goes through
the answers together. This type of correction not only reduces the
teacher’s workload, but it also involves students in the revision and
editing of their own pieces of writing so that they can learn from their
errors.

However, there are times when students have to write more freely
in English and it is necessary to correct their work individually. Then,
there seems to be no escape from the tedium of marking compositions. It
is therefore necessary to plan a clear assessment programme of writing at
the beginning of the academic year.

Activity 4

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 Think about how you assess the written work of one of your courses
and try to answer the following questions.

1) How many guided or free compositions do your students write

every term?
2) How many of these compositions are written individually and
how many in groups?
3) How many pieces of writing do you assess orally in class?
4) How often do students correct each other’s work?
5) How many compositions do you read and mark outside the class?
6) How much writing do you take into account for the mark at the
end of the term?
7) How does writing contribute to this term mark?
8) What do you look for in these compositions?
. (grammatical correctness, spelling, ideas,...)
9) Have you got a particular correction technique?
10) Do your students rewrite the compositions you have corrected?

Of all these questions the one that refers to the techniques of

marking free compositions needs special attention. Though correcting
written work can be a very subjective task, teachers should try to do it
clearly, precisely, and effectively, that is to say, students should make
sense of the corrections, understand the mark given, and learn from their
errors.

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 Activity 5

Read the following composition written by a student, correct it

and give a specific mark.

Though each teacher may have a different correction technique,

below are some helpful suggestions:

i) Mark positively. The teacher’s corrections should not have a

discouraging effect on students, so instead of deducting points for each
mistake they have, we could respond positively to their strengths and
reward them with what they have got right. Though at the end the result
might be the same, the point of view is completely different. Besides,
as Tricia Hedge states:

Ideally when marking any piece of work, ticks in the

margin and commendations should provide a counterbalance to
correction of «errors» in the script. ( 1988: 10)

ii) Design a specific and reliable correction system. Thus we need to

decide:

• What aspects of writing will be taken into account (content,

organization, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, etc.)
• What type of descriptors will be used (numbers, letters,
words such as «excellent» , «good» , «fair» , etc.)

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 • What criteria will be established to understand what each
descriptor
represents. These criteria could be arranged in holistic scales
(general
descriptions of writing ability) or analytic scales, which separate
the aspects of writing into different units.

Example of holistic scale for writing ability:

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5 Constructs grammatically correct sentences and phrases and
shows full mastery of appropriate vocabulary. Text is
organised coherently. Correct spelling at all times. Excellent
content and presentation. Message wholly relevant.

4 In general, grammatically correct sentences and phrases but

some errors which do not effect understanding. Does not use
appropriate vocabulary at all times. Some difficulties with
organization of text. Some errors in spelling. Good content
and presentation. Message mostly relevant.

3 Grammatical errors and use of vocabulary affects

understanding as does organization of text. Many errors in
spelling. Satisfactory content and presentation. Message not
always relevant.

2 Text understood with difficulty due to inaccurate grammar and

inappropriate use of vocabulary. Poor content and
presentation. Message generally lacks relevancy.

1 Impossible to understand text due to frequency of grammatical

errors and incoherence of organization. Poor spelling.
Message irrelevant.

(Taken from Harris & McCann, Assessment, 1994)

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Examples of analytic scale for writing ability:

A
DE
QU DE
A QU

๐ ๐ 00
T AT W
E E EA
K
A) General development
1 Content
2 Organization
3 A sense of audience
B) Specific components
4 Grammatical skills
5 Complexity of sentences
6 Use of vocabulary
7 Spelling
8 Punctuation
9 Presentation

1 Organization of content 20%

(clarity, coherence, paragraphs)

2 Range (grammatical structures, vocabulary)

15%

3 Complexity of sentence structure 15%

4 Accuracy of grammar, sentence structure, 30%,

spelling and punctuation

5 Fluency (feel for the language,

20%
appropriateness, use of idioms, etc.)

100%

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 (Adapted from Hedge, Writing, 1988)
iii) Mark selectively. When we find a lot of mistakes in a
composition, it is a good idea - specially when we carry out
informal assessment -to focus our attention on some particular aspects,
such as basic grammatical mistakes or organization, and ignore the
rest, otherwise students will see their page painted in red and feel
discouraged. We can leave the other mistakes for another time.

iv) Use a clear correction code. In order to give feedback

to students, teachers could create a system of abbreviations
which they write in the margins of the composition to indicate
the type of error detected, so that students can try to identify
and correct them themselves later on in class. Some correction
symbols could be the following:

• Sp = spelling mistake
• T = wrong tense
• Wo = word order
• Pr = prepositions
• L = linking
• V = vocabulary (inappropriate language)
• P = punctuation
• 0 = a word missing
• ? = unclear meaning
• Pa = paragraphs
•

If what we want to do is to assess the students’ writing skills

formally, that is to say, to include some writing activities in a test,
we should think of the writing activities we have been doing in class
and choose the right ones. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find the
ideal test format for writing; each one has some advantages and
disadvantages. Some might be easy to mark, but very difficult to set.
Others might be more realistic and communicative, but only good for
higher levels.

06
 Activity 6

Which are the advantages and disadvantages of each test format for
writing?

Pr Con
o s

s
Essay questions
e.g. «Write about a day when everything went

Guided writing Using pictures, notes,

diagrams (giving ss some input of info)

Punctuation (punctuating texts)

Summary
e.g. « Read the text and summarise it in 20 lines»
Note taking
e.g. « Read the text and write notes»
Dictation
e.g. «Listen and write down the text»
Combined
e.g. « Read the letter and write a reply»

(Adapted from Harris and McCann, Assessment, 1994)

Self-assessment possibilities

We all know that it is not easy to assess and correct one’s own
written work, however we should encourage our students to get involved
in the revision, editing, and correction of their own pieces of writing.
Thus, marking compositions becomes the students’ responsibility as well
and a good way of improving their writing skills.

Activity 7

Look at the techniques for self-assessment and peer assessment

below. Have you ever used any of them yourself? Have they been
successful? Can you add other techniques?

Self-assessment:

1. When the teacher hands back written work students

identify their mistakes and correct them.
2. The teacher and the students discuss and negotiate the criteria
involved in assessment.
3. The teacher corrects the compositions but does not write a
mark. The students get the compositions back and decide what
the mark is following the criteria set beforehand.
4. Students work in groups and read, criticise, and proofread
their own writing.
5. Students examine a set of questions that prepare them for
revision activities.
6.. ..

Peer correction:
(Students sit in pairs and read each other’s work. They look for
mistakes in each other’s writing and attempt to correct them,
giving a mark.
2. A group of students correct the writing done by another group.
3. In the case of group writing, if each student in the group writes
a section, they exchange their pieces of writing with other
members of the group and mark the draft for revision. 3
4.. ..
 When we think of self-assessment we are basically thinking of
how we can help students become aware of the way they are
learning, their problems and needs. Therefore, a questionnaire which
makes them consider their writing process is a good tool in the hands of
the teacher. Below is an example of a questionnaire that prepares
students for revision activities.

• In composing your draft, what was the biggest problem you

experienced?
• If the teacher were to read your paper right now, what would
be the first thing the teacher would say about it?
• If the teacher were going to say something really nice about
your draft, what would it be?
• Write a criticism of your draft. Imagine that your draft is in the
hands of a critical English teacher. What would the teacher write?
• On the basis of the comments you’ve already received from
your teacher, or your classmates, what changes do you intend to
make when rewriting?
• List three important details in your papei;
• Look at your opening sentence. On a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10
(highest), what score would you give it?
• If you had something to add to this paper, what would it be?
• If you had to cut something, what would it be?
• What do you need to do to your paper between now and the day
it’s due? How long will it take?

(Taken from Whitlock, 1984)

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