4th Week with About.com

About.com is giving an introduction to some of the vital issues related to writing skills for ESL/EFL teachers. A number of examples are included in this week’s introduction demonstrating how to build up writing skills from the sentence level to the paragraph and also a series of examples of teaching essay writing skills.

Teaching Writing Skills

In order to make the learning experience a long lasting and valuable, students are required to be involved personally in writing exercises. The teacher should be certain and clear on what writing skills they are attempting for the students to develop and learn. Next step is for the teacher to decide on which means, type or exercise can facilitate learning of the target area. Upon defining the target skill area and means of implementation, then the teacher can proceed to focus on the topic s which students can participate in. Both enthusiasm and effective learning from students can be expected when the teacher combines these objectives pragmatically.

A number of factors should be taken into consideration when choosing the target area, for example, the students’ level of English; the average age of the students and any specific goals or aims for students to learn how to write in English. Other important factors in this process are: What outcome is expected from the students to produce at the end of the writing exercise? Will it be a well written letter or basic communication of ideas? What is the focus of the writing exercise? Is it the structure of an essay, tense usage or creative writing? The teacher can then start to focus on strategies to involve the students in the writing exercise in order to build a long lasting and valuable learning experience.

Source: http://esl.about.com/cs/teachingtechnique/a/a_twrite.htm