Producing a finished product

We will involve our students in an extended WRITING PROCESS �57 if they are going to
produce something which they are going to display in public or put i n their portfolios -
or which is going to be graded.

Teaching
writing 3 Preparing for writing
Before we ask our students to do any substantial writing, we need to encourage them to
start planning what they are going to write.

• Students can get into BUZZ GROUPS �52 to discuss the topics they have chosen and
think of any words and ideas that might be involved.

• We can put a SPIDERGRAM or WORD MAP � 22 on the board. The students can come up
and extend the diagram with new ideas.

• We can ask the students to group their ideas in a logical sequence.

• We can give them a checklist to think about as they start (and continue) to write and
review their work.

From analysis to production

• We can demonstrate COHERENC E and COHESION �34 by giving the students paragraphs
and sentences in the wrong order. They have to reorder them and discuss why they
made their choices.

• If we want our students to write within a certain GENRE �32 or type of writing, we
will get them to start by doing GENRE ANALYS IS. This means looking at various examples
of the kind of writing they are going to do to see how the genre is normally written.
For example, if we want INTERMEDIATE or UPPER-INTERMEDIATE �41 students to write
their own online newspaper article, we might ask them to look at a number of online
texts in order to answer questions like the following:

1 What is the audience for the article? In other words, who do the writers expect
will read it?
2 Who wrote the article?
3 How many headlines are there?
4 What l anguage is used in the headlines? What tenses are used? ·what language
(if any) is left out?
5 How many paragraphs are there in the text?
6 What content is in the first paragraph?
7 What is the content of the other paragraphs?
8 What verb tenses are used in the article?
9 How does the article end?

Portfolio writing
We can ask our students to keep a PORTFOLIO (a collection) of their writing. At the end of
a semester or a year we (and they) can use this as part of their FINAL ASSESSMENT �88.

• We can give the students examples as models for their own writing. For example, we
can show lower-level teenage students a text l ike the one on page 1 3 3 . The students
now have to write about their own friends, saying where they live, where their parents
are from, what l anguages they speak, how long they have known their friends and
what they do together.
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• Portfolios can also contain the students' POETRY '63, emails, letters, cards and any
other kind of writing they wish to do, They can keep their work in folders or online if
they are using an ONLINE LEARNING PLATFORM.

Writing journals

We can encourage our students to write JOURNALS in which they talk about the things
that interest them most,

• It is a good idea to encourage students to write journals because they can use them to
reflect on what they are learning - and the more writing they do the better.

• Journals are a good place for teacher-student dialogue. We can find out what our
students are thinking, and encourage them to use writing for real communication.

• W hen we respond to journals, we·should always focus on the content of what the
students write before correcting mistakes. We can ask the students if they want us to
correct their mistakes or not.

• \.Ve can give class time for our students to write their journals. This will encourage
them to continue writing.

• We cannot respond to all our students' journals all the time. There are not enough hours
in the day (or week) for that! We can look at different students' work over a period of
time, making sure that we read and respond to every student's work during that period.

Biogs, wikis and contacts

• We can get our students to write SLOGS '87. They can do this either on an INTRANET
(which is only viewable by the class or the school) or online (where everyone can see it).

• We can tell them how often they should post a message on their blog (perhaps once a
week). We can set a time limit of, say, a month or two months for them to keep
blogging. If we don't do this, they may well lose interest.

• We will encourage our students to comment on each other's SLOG POSTS.

• vVe can get the students to build up a WIKI with their writings, pictures, audio or video
clips. We discuss blogs, vtikis and other ways of sharing information in '87.

• Students can exchange information with students in other countries. They can do this
via EMAIL or on blog sites using WEB 2.0 tools such as Eduglogster and Wal/wisher '87.

We discuss writing for HOMEWORK in '76.

133