Teaching EFL Writing in the Classroom
1. Play the video below to start this lesson.
. . . .Please wait a few seconds for the first video to load.
2. We have created a podcast to complement this lesson.
Teaching EFL Writing Podcast - six minutes
Click on the link to play the podcast: Teaching Writing in the EFL Classroom
3. Basic Concepts
Teaching EFL writing is often about teaching EFL 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 and they will often have an idea that their writing is quite good. Unfortunately, it will often be quite poor.
In fact, they often will have poor writing skills even at the sentence level. Therefore, you will need to take them back to sentence level and begin to teach them very basic structure. Run-on and fragmented sentences will be very common.
The more basic you start 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.
You may find resistance from your students when you take them back to basics. This can be done without demoralizing them or making them feel their skills are poor. Take the approach that We can make the good skills you already have even better by polishing up some good basic skills.
4. Expanded Concepts for Teaching EFL Writing
Read and review this link:
Two EFL writing manuscripts are available to you from TEFL Boot Camp for 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 EFL writing, you will often find that your writing textbooks move far too quickly from point to point and these two resource books were written specifically to slow it down a bit and help students practice and acquire a skill and become competent with it before moving on. Do slow things down and be sure to tie each lesson in with the previous lesson, linking their skills together as you go. That will facilitate long-term retention of the skills rather than the typical use it once and forget it approach many coursebooks take.
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. 1.7MB.
You can also download an "Intermediate" writing Textbook written for university students. The book prepares students for better paragraphs and eventual essay writing.
Intermediate Writing Textbook - draft manuscript that downloads as a PDF file 1.6MB.
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. You don't need to do the exercises in the book, but spend some time looking at the content and thinking a bit about what comes first and what comes next and why.
A skilled writing teacher is a rare find, especially at the language school level. If you are patient and make sure your students pick up these skills, you WILL be in demand.
