Trainer Blog: Giving Clear Classroom Instructions

Building the Writing Habit

Ideas from Jeremy Harmer’s “How to teach writing”

Building confidence and enthusiasm

Students’ disincentives to writing:

• Anxieties about their handwriting, spelling or their ability to construct sentences and paragraphs
• Inability to complete writing tasks successfully
• Students rarely write even in their own language
• Fear that they have ‘nothing to say’
• Unwillingness to invest time and effort

In order to build the writing habit, making students feel comfortable as writers in English and so gaining their willing participation in more creative or extended activities, we should chose the right kinds of activities (both in challenge and level) and provide them with enough language and information to complete the tasks successfully.

Choosing writing tasks and activities 
Characteristics of writing tasks:

• Appealing
• Relevance according to age, interests and level
• Motivating
• Engaging, which involves students not only intellectually but emotionally.

                                                                                                                                                        Different students react differently to different stimuli. To encourage students to write we can provide:  
  Music for auditory learners 
  Pictures for visual learners
  Writing on the board or swapping papers for kinaesthetic students

What students need 
 Information & task information: students need to have the necessary information to complete the task and understand clearly what they have to do. 
 Language: Providing students with the language (phrases, parts of sentences or words)  they need to complete a specific task.
 Ideas: Being able, as a teacher, to offer an idea or two to students for a writing task. The amount of information we provide depends on how much help or stimulation each student needs. 
Patterns & schemes: Giving students a pattern or a scheme to follow may help them when they are running out of ideas, since a pattern can give them the support they need .

There are two areas of habit building: Instant writing & collaborative writing which we will discuss about in future posts.

Question: How do you feel about the writing skill? As a teacher? As a writer? How do you motivate your students to write?