Scenarios for Teaching Writing

In the following situations people are learning how to write. However, in each case the situation is very different.

For each scenario 1 – 4, note:

What are learners doing?
What is the teacher doing?
What resources are being used?

How do these scenarios relate to the approaches to writing outlined above?

1. Four ten-year-old children are sitting round a table. They are writing a story called ‘The Incident’. Their teacher has read them a story with that name and asked them to write their own story using some event from their own lives. There was a classroom discussion after the story reading in which children shared their own ideas for stories and some useful words were put on the board by the teacher. The four children are talking while they write individually. The teacher moves round from one table to another, making suggestions and responding to what children have written so far. The teacher tells the children many times, ‘This is your first draft, so just get your ideas down on paper’.

2. A seventeen-year-old student is reading a paper to a class on the theme of ‘Greed’ in the plays of Arthur Miller. The paper is based on the kind of question the student is likely to get in her examination. It asks for her ‘critical opinions’ but also asks her to give ‘evidence’ from the text she is studying. At the end of the paper students comment on the ideas in the paper and ask questions. The teacher gives her response to the paper, suggesting that the student should re-arrange the sections to improve the structure of her argument and also give more textual evidence. When all students in the class have given papers, the teacher issues a handout giving some tips on how to write essays. One of the ‘outstanding’ student essays is published on the class website with the teacher’s commentary. The students continue to discuss the play on an internet discussion board moderated by the teacher.

3. A class of thirteen-year-old children in a chemistry classroom are studying three texts. The texts are all examples of laboratory reports. The class has just finished an experiment and now the students have to write a report on what they did and observed. Very few students have done a lab report before. The teacher reads the three texts with the class and then asks them to look for similarities in how the three texts have been organized. Working in groups, the children underline words and phrases and make notes. After this, the teacher shows on an electronic white board some of the key phrases and structures of a typical lab report. Then the students and the teacher together write a lab report of the experiment they have done. The students call out suggested ways of writing which the teacher writes down on the board, making changes and editing wherever necessary. At the end all the students receive a copy of the report. They are asked to keep it and use it to help them write future lab reports.

4. A group of people working for an international organization are in a classroom. They all have a laptop which is connected to a central computer used by the workshop leader. They are all learning how to use a new memo format which has been introduced by the organization in order to standardize and formalize its inter-office communication. The class study a single example to see how the new memo format is organized. They are given a checklist of ‘things to remember’ by the trainer and then are led through an exercise where they have to write their own memo using the structure given. Each student is given an electronic template by the trainer to write his/her memo. After the exercise there is an evaluation in which students’ own texts are compared.

Reflect on your education so far. How did you learn to write? What practical activities can you remember doing which were designed to help you write better in school and university? Were they effective?