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
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
