Teaching EFL Writing
Teaching Writing in the EFL Classroom
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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, they often 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:
Two EFL writing manuscripts are available to you from TEFL Boot Camp – free.
Download them and read them and you will see EXACTLY how to go about teaching basic writing skills to your EFL students.
These two books are very methodical in their approach to helping students improve their writing skills. When you are teaching you will find that EFL writing textbooks move far too quickly from point to point and these books were written specifically to help students practice and acquire a skill and become competent with it, before moving on.
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
Specifically look over the contents of each section and the order of the contents of each book to get a good idea of what needs to come first, followed by what and what next and so on.
