Topic: Developing Writing Skills

1. Topic: Developing Writing Skills • General objectives: • Trainees will be able to give a lesson in developing writing skills. • Trainees will be able to integrate writing with listening, speaking and reading.

2. Lesson OneGiving a Lesson in Developing Reading Skills • Pre-task activities • Step One: elicit kinds and reasons of real-life writing. • Step Two: elicit the difference between spoken and written text. • Step Three: discuss the skills of writing. • Step Four: suggested activities in developing writing skills. • Step Five: tips in design a writing task. • While-task activities • Step Six: trainees giving lessons in developing reading skills. • Post-task activities • Step Eight: trainees evaluate the lessons.

3. What do we write? • Why do we write?

4. The differences between spoken and written texts • Written language is complex at the level of clause while spoken language is complex in the way clauses are linked together • Written language is also reinforced by the tendency of create nouns from verbs • Writing is often decontextualised

5. Two Versions of a Texts • The use of this method of control unquestionably leads to safer and faster trains running in the most adverse weather conditions • You can control the trains this way and if you do that you can be quite sure that they’ll be able to run more safely and more quickly than they would otherwise no matter how bad the weather gets

6. Verbs to Nouns • Spoken Good writers reflect on what they write Written Reflection is a characteristic of good writers

7. Skills of writing • Ability to put sounds down on graphic form according to the conventional sound-spelling rules. • Ability to spell English words correctly, including using correct punctuation and capitalization. • Ability to do writing practice, such as dictation, grammar exercises, constructing dialogues according to the model, simple translation exercises. • Ability to write short compositions, including functional writing skills, such as writing simple letters, taking notes, writing outlines and summaries.

8. Major types of writing • 1. Explanation and analysis (a) a process (b) an opinion or point of view (c) event(s) and phenomena (d) instructions and directions 2. Argument (a) persuasion (b) refutation (c) examining both sides of a point 3. Description and summary (a) a thing (b) a person (c) a place (d) an event (e) concepts 4. Narration (a) a series of events; a report (b) biography or autobiography (c) historical events (d) fiction or nonfiction

9. How do we design writing tasks • Product and process • Information gap • Recursive activity involving revision of successive drafts • Three-stage process: pre-writing,writing, revision • Interesting • Co-operative • Purpose • Linking different skills • Various

10. Product-oriented Approach • Focusing on the end result of the learning process • Students producing texts for teachers to evaluate , not to communicate meaningfully with another person • Classroom activities in which the learner is engaged in imitating, copying and transforming models of correct language. • At the level of sentence • Students are passive • Individual work • Quality rather than quantity

11. Process-oriented Approach • Focusing on the various classroom activities which promote the development of skilled language use • At the discourse level • Focusing on quantity rather than quality • Collaborative group work between learners as a way of enhancing motivation and developing positive attitudes towards writing. • Linking with other skills

12. Writing Activities • Written practice • Written communicative activities

13. Written Practice Sentence writing Parallel writing Cohesion and coherence Oral composition

14. Sentence writing (a) Sentence completion:look at a picture and then complete the sentences. The _____is on the shell above the stereo. (b) What are they doing? Write four sentences about what the people in the picture are doing. (c) Time clauses: write four sentences using ‘after’, ‘before’and ‘while’

15. Parallel writing (1) Read the symbols and their meanings Good hotel dinner Simple hotel shower Tel. number City centre bathroom Time of opening Swimming pool bedroom ------- Central heating B breakfast lunch

16. Parallel writing 2. Here is the entry for the hotel Concorde Good hotel dinner 15 Tel. number8866 City centre 25 All year 40 ------- 1 Central heating B 7---9 11---3

17. Parallel writing The Hotel Concorde in Paris is a good hotel. The telephone number is 8866. It is in the city centre. The hotel is open all year, and there are forty bedrooms .There is central heating in the hotel. Breakfast is from seven to nine. Lunch is from eleven to three, and dinner is from eight until eleven.There are twenty-five bathrooms and fifteen showers. There is also a swimming pool in the hotel.

18. 3, Read these symbols and describe the hotels in the same way Parallel writing 7---9 Simple hotel 200 4578 City centre All year Swimming pool 200 ------- B 6---10

19. Cohesion and coherence • Join the following pairs of sentences using ‘and’ or ‘but’ • Concorde is an ideal way to travel. Concorde is expensive. • Concorde is fast. Concorde is comfortable. • Travellers like Concorde. People living near airports don’t like Concorde

20. Written Communicative Activities Relaying instructions Exchanging letters Writing games Fluency writing Story construction Writing reports and advertisements

21. Relaying Instructions • Making models • Giving direction • Writing commands • Writing message

22. Exchanging Letters • Inviting • The complaining customers • The job application

23. Writing Games • Describe people and identify(guess people) • Describe events and identify

24. Fluency Writing(a) The picture story Students are given a series of pictures just as they were for oral composition. They are given a time limit and told to write as much as they can about the pictures. Stage 1 Students are told that they are going to do some free writing, and that the objective is to write as much as they can within a certain time limit. Stage 2 Students are shown a picture sequence and told to write about it. Stage 3 When the time limit expires the teacher stops the students and collects the work.

25. Story construction Stage 1 Students are put into groups of six. Stage 2 Each member of the group is given a letter (A-F). Stage 3 Each group is given one of the pictures from the sequence . All the members of the group should write two sentences about their picture together, using past tenses. Each member of the group now has the same two sentences. Stage 4 The teacher now collects the four pictures, and re-forms groups so that all the A’s are together, all the B’s and so on. The new groups must now put their sentences together to form a coherent story. They should be reminded that they will probably have to make changes from the original sentences, especially in terms of tense and the use of cohesive devices ,etc. Stage 5 The groups now read out their stories and the class compares them. In the event of any confusion the teacher can show the original picture sequence. ..

26. Writing reports and advertisements (a)The news broadcast Stage 1 The teacher asks all the students in the class to write two news items on a piece of paper. Stage 2 The teacher then collects all the pieces of paper and forms the class into small groups. Stage 3 The teacher then distributes the pieces of paper equally between the groups in no special order. The students are asked to combine the items to make up a complete news broadcast. Stage 4 Each group then reads its broadcast to the rest of the class. Ideally, of course, each group could record their broadcast to make it more realistic.

27. Writing reports and advertisements(b)The advertisement Stage 1 The class discusses what makes a successful advertisement. Stage 2 The class is divided into groups. They are told that their task is to select a product and write an advertisement for it which will appear in a magazine. Stage 3 When they have completed their advertisements they can pass them round the class. Alternatively they can be given a period of time to design the artwork for their text. The advertisements can then be pinned to the class notice board.