Teaching Writing in the EFL Classroom

Basic Concepts:

Teaching writing is often about teaching grammar.  If grammar comes up anywhere in EFL, it is in the writing classroom.  Most EFL students will have some writing skills when you get them.  But they will often have an idea that their writing is quite good and generally it will be quite poor. 

Many EFL students will have had some experience with paragraph and essay writing, but, in fact, will have quite poor writing skills at the sentence level.  Therefore, you will need to take them back to sentence level and begin to teach them very basic structure and how to write simply.  Run-on and fragmented sentences will be very common until you correct those errors. 

The more basic you get with your writing students, the better.  Once a good foundation is built, you can move on to basic paragraph writing and on to essays.  These skills take time to develop though and you will find that most textbooks will move your students forward too quickly.

Expanded Concepts:

Read and review these links:

General Writing Concerns

Sentence Writing Skills

Teaching Sentence Fluency

Two EFL writing textbooks are available to you free.  Download them and read them and you will see EXACTLY how to go about teaching basic writing skills to EFL students.

Sentence Writing Text Book - a draft manuscript for a sentence writing book - you can use this with your students too!  Downloads as a PDF file. 1.827kb

You can also download an "Advanced" writing Textbook written for university  students in Korea who were ready for paragraph writing.  The book prepares students for better paragraphs and eventual essay writing:

Advanced Writing Textbook - draft manuscript - downloads a PDF file 8,215 kb