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Writing and the Young EFL Learner
Facilitator: Sarah Coutts
Objectives: This workshop aims to:
1. provide an overview of essential points to consider when teaching
writing to elementary EFL students, and
2. provide a toolbox of activities for teachers to use from beginner to
low-intermediate students.
Why Write?
Writing helps students to solidify the grammar and vocabulary that
they are studying.
Writing lets students create their own meaning, which has longer
benefits in memory and application.
Both the students’ culture and classroom environment have a
significant impact on students’ development as writers.
Writing develops essential linguistic and critical thinking skills that
can be transferred between languages to some extent.
Where to Start?
Obviously, knowing the alphabet and basic words is an essential first step
towards being able to write longer tasks. However, this does not mean
that it’s necessary to spend several weeks on teaching the alphabet only.
It is, however, essential to ensure that students make important
distinctions in the language such as capital letters and punctuation, which
are extremely important in English.
Also, remember that the four core skills in language (reading, writing,
listening and speaking) are interdependent and should be taught as such.
After you’ve chosen a phonics system (e.g. Letterland, Jolly Phonics, Zoo
Phonics, etc.), group the sounds according to their frequency of use.
The following is one example of how to group sounds when teaching them
to new students. This does not mean that you will teach all of these letters
in one lesson, but rather that you will sequence your letters in this order1.
1 http://jollylearning.co.uk Date Accessed: 14 December 2013
Consider the following lesson to introduce new sounds/letters to students:
SAMPLE LESSON STRUCTURE
Introduction
Warm up with an alphabet song or chant that the students know well. As students learn more letters and sounds, have them make random letters with their hands or bodies. Call out letters in non-alphabetical order to test their knowledge of the alphabet and sounds.
Presentation
Introduce the sound with a short story and place a slight emphasis on the sound to be taught. For example: Sammy the snake likes to explore. His friends that
he is silly to explore by himself because it is dangerous but Sammy doesn’t listen to them. Sammy knows what to do when he is scared. He says, “Sssss.”
Ask the students what sound they heard the most in the story. Prompt them if necessary. Have the students imitate the sound. Ask the students what Sammy says when he’s scared. Let them move like a snake while practicing the sound.
Practice
Introduce the students to other words beginning with /s/. Start by saying the words so that they learn to recognize the sound by listening before reading. For example: Teacher: Listen to these words. Do they start with
Sammy Snake? sun star sat step Teacher: Can you tell me other words that start
with Sammy Snake? Now that the students can hear the /s/ sound, it’s time to show it to them and to trace the letter. Once they have practiced tracing the sound, they need to practice writing the sound by themselves.
The
Production
After practicing writing the sound, give the students 8 – 10 pictures (of objects for which they have already learned the vocabulary) and ask them which words start with /s/ - at least half of the words should start with the letter being practiced. Also, remember that the words must start with /s/ - words that end in /s/ or have /s/ in the middle should be done as a separate exercise. Give students a worksheet with pictures of items and tell them to write the letter /s/ under each picture that starts with that sound. You can then move on to worksheets where the /s/ is left out of words like “sun.” Next, students will practice tracing then writing whole words that start with the target sound. Then progress to three word choices with a picture in which students have to identify the correct word for a particular picture. Ex. Give them a picture of the sun with the words “run,” “fun” and “sun.” Students must then identify the correct word for the picture. Move on to pattern sentences such as “I like….” and ultimately writing their own sentences.
Conclusion
As a homework task, ask students to find pictures of things that start with /s/ or have an /s/ in them. You can also assign short sentences or words. This can then be extended to them finding words based on a theme and ultimately writing sentences using their vocabulary as it increases.
Notes
Once all of the individual sounds, including vowels, have been taught and students can write short sentences like “The sun is hot.” And “The dog sits in the sun.”, move on to blends, diagraphs and diphthongs before moving on to rhyming words.
The
Alphabet Review
Write the letter in the circle that comes next. The first
one has been done for you.
d a y m
h r b v
c u w r
s j t x
q e g p
i f k
Young Writers
Asking students to write may seem more intimidating for teachers than
children. It’s true that some students will really struggle to complete
writing tasks, but it’s equally true that every child can complete these
tasks in some way if they’re given the right encouragement. How they
complete the task is less important than that they try and are encouraged
to write regardless of their ability. It’s also important that they not be
taught to fear writing.
As students progress from specific structural patterns to create sentences,
organize descriptions, and layouts of specific types of writing, it becomes
increasingly important for teachers to provide opportunities for students
to have a specific context and audience to write for. Developing a sense of
audience is an essential part of communicating in writing and it is possible
even at an early stage of writing.
In the initial stages of writing, a sense of audience can be created by
encouraging students to write sentences that other student have to
decide are true/false or guess the answers to. Older or more confident
students can be encouraged to experiment with different text types, such
as:
A Day in a Caveman’s Life Letters
Advertisements Menus
Autobiographies My New Jellybean
Birthday Cards Opinions
Cartoons and Comics Personal Ads
Crosswords Picture Prompts
Daily Routines Poems
Descriptions Postcards
Dialogues Potions and Spells
Directions Puzzles
Emails Ransom Notes
Extraordinary Jobs SMSes
Finish the Story Stories from the Past
Fortune Telling Story Frames
Gap Fills (Mad Libs) Thank You Notes
Instructions Tongue Twisters
Invitations Wanted Posters
Modelling Writing Examples for Students
Regardless of the style of writing you plan to do with your students, it’s
essential to provide them with several examples of the structure of the
target writing. Provide them with an outline of the structural components
and practice, as a class, identifying the structural components of each text.
Once you’ve done this, consider writing a text together as a class – or in
groups – for the students to practice further – especially if the students
have basic to intermediate language skills. Even advanced or more
proficient students may need more modelling than anticipated.
Writing Activities
Writing activities can be divided into those which are guided and tend to
encourage some form of copying, and those that are a little freer and
encourage more creativity. Guided copying is often used to practice
handwriting, spelling and new grammatical constructions. The support
frameworks you choose give learners guidance on producing written work
within clearly defined constraints. The use of a substitution chart, for
example, can provide a simple sentence pattern such as Jack likes hot
dogs, but Jane likes hamburgers. Students then adapt this sentence using
information on the chart provided.
To keep students motivated, make sure you adjust the practice level of the
writing tasks. Freer tasks not only encourage creativity, but help students
to develop independence while practicing planning, organizing ideas and
understanding text types. Guided writing activities are a necessary
foundation for more creative writing and help students to develop
confidence in their skills. Examples of writing activities at word-, sentence-
and text-level are provided in the following table.
Purpose
Wo
rd-l
eve
l
Labels for Pictures/Diagrams
Crosswords
Anagrams (words with scrambled
letters)
Word Puzzles
Picture/word Dictionaries
Charts for Surveys/Questionnaires
Classifying Words into Word
Families
Concept/Word Webs
Menus/Shopping Lists
Learning new
vocabulary,
handwriting and
spelling
Sen
ten
ce-l
eve
l Captions for Pictures
Speech Bubbles for Characters
Writing Information from Charts
Writing Simple Questions
Unscrambling Sentences
All of the above and
practicing new
structures and
functions
The
Purpose Te
xt-l
eve
l
Diaries
Descriptions
Advertisements
Instructions
Invitations
Letters
Posters
Poems
Stories/Simple Books
All of the above and
planning, drafting,
editing and
understanding layout
Examples of Short Writing Activities
Dear Diary
The easiest of these to implement, at almost any level, is diary writing. It is a good
idea to provide students at all levels with some prompts. At a basic level, such
prompts would include gap fills that require students to fill in just a word or two.
Students could also be asked to write two to three words that describe a given
topic. For example: friends, weekend, holidays, weather, etc.
Depending on the proficiency of the students, you can build up to daily entries of
two to five short sentences. Encourage students to write about their daily lives as
these are usually things about which they would actually want to talk with native
speakers.
Weather: Hot, Sunny Friends: Play, Laugh Food: Delicious, Hungry
Today, the weather was hot
and sunny.
I played with my friends.
We laughed a lot.
Tomorrow, we’ll go to a movie.
Consider giving students a set journal format with space to draw a picture and
write beneath it. This provides the opportunity for students who are already
confident in their language skills to write as much as they want even if they do not
draw a picture, while less confident students can draw a picture and simply label
the items in the picture.
Examples of Diary Prompts
Basic
Give students a word/theme and ask
them to write three to five (3-5) words
related to the given word.
Intermediate
Intermediate students can be given a word or
theme on which to write three to five (3-5)
sentences. The sentences can be simple and
short. As their writing improves, or for more
proficient students, you can increase the
difficulty of the topics given.
Name: ________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
This activity can also be expanded by telling students to choose a celebrity and
pretend that they are the celebrity. They then need to write their diary entries
from the point of view of the celebrity.
Gap-Fills
Rhyming Pairs
Comics/Cartoons
Comics are easy to do with low level and high level students because they require
very little writing. www.makebeliefcomix.com is a good site on which students can
make their own comic strips. It provides numerous templates for students to
choose or teachers can create a template and print it for students to do in class.
Either way, this is a fun activity that allows students to be creative while practicing
English writing. Here’s an example of an activity for students.
My New Jellybean
You are asked to create a new jellybean for your local candy store. What flavor is
your new jellybean? What does it look like? How does it taste?
What kind of ingredients do you add to the recipe to
make it?
Write about your jellybean. Remember to
include adjectives and pay attention to your
spelling and your grammar.
Picture Prompts
There are several ways in which pictures can be used to prompt both creative and
more serious writing in the language classroom. For example:
① Print out about 30 pieces of clip art or gather a number of images together.
The number will vary depending on the number of students.
② The students select three images each.
③ The students write a story that connects the images together.
④ You can modify this recipe by adding rules – the story must be about you or
the story must be circular (the last picture must be connected back to the
first picture), etc.
⑤ To mix things up you can set a time limit of perhaps 10 minutes. After 10
minutes, the students trade pictures to the left and write a new story with
a new set of pictures.
You can also tell students to bring in a photograph or pictures of their own from
which to write a short descriptive paragraph or story. Alternatively, place pictures
around the classroom and tell students to choose their favorite picture on which
to base their writing. Here are some possibilities:
Poetry
There are many different types of poems. While some of these are more formal
and rigid in their structure, others are fun and good for EFL students. Of course,
these are just a few examples of the options available. For example:
Acrostic Limerick
Haiku 20-20 Poem
Couplet Persona Poem
Diamante Free Form
Acrostic
An acrostic poem is a type of poetry where the first, last or other letters in a line
spell out a particular word or phrase. The most common and simple form of an
acrostic poem is where the first letters of each line spell out the word or phrase.
However, this type of poem can also use the end of the lines or even the middle as
illustrated below.
The great thing about this type of poem is that the writer can choose any word.
The length of the word is irrelevant because the writer is still challenged to create
images and poetry using the letters in the word. Therefore, the poem can be
based on a simple word like sun or mom, or longer single words like baseball or
amusement park. The options are endless.
Using the beginning of lines2
2 http://mrswarnerarlington.weebly.com/poetry.html Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
Haiku
A haiku is a Japanese poem of 17 syllables that are divided into three lines of five,
seven, and five. Traditionally, they evoke images of the natural world, but anything
can be used as the topic of a haiku. They’re more challenging to write than they
may seem (because of the syllable count), but they can produce some interesting
work from students.
The 5-7-5 rule is no longer strictly as strictly followed in haiku writing as it
previously was although this is still commonly the rule taught in English lesson.
Here are some examples3 of student haikus4:
3 www.poemhunter.com Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
4 www.mrswarnerarlington.weebly.com/poetry.html Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
Couplets
Couplets are among the easiest type of poetry to write since they consist of only
two lines as the name suggests. However, the end words of each line of the
couplet have to rhyme. For this reason, couplets are good for lower level students
and practicing rhyming words5.
The rabbits danced away the night,
Then disappeared at morning’s light.
Diamante
Although Diamante poems use very simple language, they can be a bit misleading
in their simplicity. This type of poem has very strict rules for each line, but it’s an
excellent way to practice descriptions, reinforce parts of speech, practice
opposites and contrasting, use gerunds, or encourage writing with simple
vocabulary.
5 www.mrswarnerarlington.weebly.com/poetry.html Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
As its name suggests, Diamante is a diamond-shaped poem made up of seven
lines as follows6:
Line 1: noun or subject (one word)
Line 2: two adjectives to describe the subject in line 1
Line 3: three words ending in –ing relating to the subject
Line 4: two words describing the subject and two words describing the opposite
Line 5: three words ending in –ing relating to the opposite
Line 6: two words describing the opposite of the subject
Line 7: opposite subject (one word)
Limerick
A limerick is a humorous poem with five lines that always have the same rhyme
and meter patterns. Lines one, two, and five share the same rhyme, and lines
three and four share a rhyme. Here are some examples7 of limericks8.
6 www.mrswarnerarlington.weebly.com/poetry.html Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
7 Ibid.
8 http://missalike.weebly.com/1/category/poetry/1.html Date Accessed: 23 November 2014
Postcards Postcards can be done with any level of students. The amount writing is entirely up to the teacher, which makes this a very versatile writing activity in the EFL classroom. You can present the task in a couple of different ways, such as the ideas below or the addendum at the end of this chapter.
Text Messages (SMSes)
The language in this exercise can be very informal because text language uses
emoticons, abbreviations, and follows very basic grammar rules. Essentially, as
long as students are communicating – in other words, another person can read
and understand the message – it is acceptable.
Re-write the above text message using correct grammar and spelling.
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Wanted Posters
Editing and Proofreading
Editing and proofreading are as much a part of learning to write as
grammar and sentence structure. It’s a good habit for students to get
used to proofreading and editing their work from their first writing task.
At an elementary level, students can check simple things like:
Spelling
Sentence Structure (i.e. Every sentence has a subject and a verb)
Capital Letters (Names and at the beginning of sentences)
Punctuation (Full Stops and Commas)
These are basic but essential points in writing that should be reinforced
in every writing task so that students can develop this crucial habit in
writing.
Editing can also be practiced as a separate task. Scholastic’s Funny Fairy
Tale Proofreading by Justin McCory Martin is a fun book of editing
samples at a variety of levels. Some examples of this book have been
provided on the following pages.
Spelling: Signs, Signs, Signs
Grammar: The Queen’s County Fair
Mixed Review: Wanted by the FBI