Teaching writing

 Hi there! Welcome back to a new entry on a new topic. This time, we´ll be talking about: writing! 🤩

Our last two classes have been more theoretical, we have had some nice exercises too though. 

In our first class, we rehearsed our muscles, drew some tracings, and practiced cursive and print handwriting. It felt weird, to be honest. 😅 I don't remember when I last wrote a complete sentence in cursive style I assume it’s been in years! I remember that coming back from virtuality, my hand even felt stiff!

This is my handwriting in cursive and printing styles. 🤭 I am not good with cursive and kind of mix both. 😅

Then, we went a little deeper into what we actually mean by writing skills. Writing involves aspects like handwriting, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, paragraphing, text cohesion, and register or style. We discussed that maybe for us, as Spanish speakers, we don´t have to struggle that much with handwriting, or at least not as much as learners whose writing systems are completely different from ours do. For instance in Chinese, characters are so different from the ones used in English, and teachers need to model handwriting too.

In writing classes, the role of the teacher is to monitor,  be a resource, and feedback provider. Teacher Orlando also pointed out that students can develop their writing skills in two main senses: academically, which includes compositions, grammar, and vocabulary; and in a creative way, like when writing poetry or tales.

There are some  approaches to student writing, sometimes the objective is to focus on the process. For example when we are following the so-called "writing process" pre-writing, drafting, revising proofreading, and editing until students get to the final draft and teachers provide feedback on the final writing, but they mainly focus on the process students followed. In class, we wrote a short composition. We brainstormed and made a small organizer as a prewriting aid, then made an outline, a peer revised our work and finally we got a beautiful short composition on: "The best day of our lives." Here is my piece of composition.

Then we also did an exercise to practice creativity and cohesion. We started writing a story in groups, a member started it and when the teacher told us to do so, we pass the story to the next member to continue with it, trying to get a final result. Here is ours: 

Dani and Mirian writing down their part of the story.

The final composition. 👀

On the other hand, we sometimes see writing as a product, like bread and butter notes. We do not pay too much attention to the process and whether it was well-structured or not, but to the final product and the intention. 

Writing can be taught as a cooperative activity, journaling, for learning or writing-for-writing, and last but not least, creatively writing. We also wrote a bread and butter note. 🤩 This name and custom we new for me and I think it is a nice detail and use for our writing skills. ✨ 📝  When I went to the chair distribution of Joni & Friends, they wrote one for us. 🥹

This is the bread and butter note I wrote in class. 📝 ✨

On Thursday, we continued talking about teaching, but this time, we focused on grammar and vocabulary. Teacher Orlando mentioned a really important aspect: when we are teaching grammar and vocabulary it is key to make students be exposed to the language, make them notice words and structures, and make learners understand the form and use of the language in context. The rest is a matter of practice, trying things out, having opportunities to practice and use the new language whenever they speak and write.

That leads me to another point, and it is that teachers might often forget that students need time to produce, it is not just about taking a bunch of information and pouring it into the classroom, but allowing them to process that info and most importantly, promote the use of that knowledge. Besides balancing time, it is necessary to balance between restricted and authentic output. the first one means material that has been specially designed for teaching purposes and the second one is material that was not meant for teaching, like songs, articles, books, podcasts, movies, among others.

We gathered in groups and talked about topics in grammar and vocabulary that are more likely to be taught inductively or deductively and reflected on the importance of exposing students because in the end, teachers have to help guiding  discovery.

Finally, teacher Orlando showed us different ways of presenting lexis. We can do it by using a charts of words in which students have to match chunks to form sentences. Teachers can present diagrams with family words, pictures to label items, lists and glossaries, and topic webs. The labeling reminded me of a teacher who once said that back in her days as a student, she used to label everything in her house, she would stick Post-its all around her furniture, and that worked pretty well for her. 

That was it for today´s entry, I have to admit that this was a lot of new information but teacher Orlando also allowed time for ✨production✨ in the classroom. We had restricted material (PPTs that were pedagogical) but also relied on some YouTube videos, and teamwork, (collaborative learning) which made the class even more interesting.

Thanks for reading this far, hope to see you around, and stay tuned for my next entry! ✌🏼 

Bye bye! 👋🏻