Are
we in a regression time?
Brown
(2000) started chapter number 9 stating that “Not many centuries ago, writing
was a skill that was the exclusive domain of scribes and scholars in
educational or religious institutions”, and after that he also wrote: “today,
the ability to write has become an indispensable skill in our global literate
community” (p.218), which indicates, according to him, that things have changed
and the writing practice is now performed by more people. However, I think that although things have
changed, there is not much difference from then to now and people still do not
write and leave that practice only for people who publish books, teachers or
linguists.
I do
not want to blame somebody for people’s lack of writing, but I could dare to
say that that lack of interest in writing comes in most of the cases from
teachers that do not encourage and motivate their students to write. I know and
I really think that instructing writing is hard work and I have experienced
that. Besides, I think that it is harder to teach and guide responsive and
extensive writing which require more time, more knowledge and more tools from
both, the teacher and the writer. Nevertheless, I believe that we as teachers
have to find the way to make students like writing, motivate them and show them
the benefits that the writing practice has, benefits such as: learning more
about the language, sharing ideas and points of view and improving more their
writing skills.
Writing
is necessary if we want to succeed in the learning of a foreign language. For
that reason, it is important to instill writing practices into students since
the first stages of the learning process.
I totally agree with you Juli; our goal is to really motivate our students with tasks that they find meaningful, otheriwise it´ll be pointless to expect them to care about this important skill.I guess that if we encourage students to write they will be able to enhance their cognitive and critical skills.
ResponderEliminarNice post July. I agree with you because motivation is definitely a key factor, but we shoudn´t think that it is the only one. One of the causes why students don´t wrtite much is the lack of good feedback from their teachers. We as teachers need to read more about assessment criteria for writing skills, but we also need to develop the writing habit ourselves. Our reality is that many teachers do not write but still think they do a good assesment of their students' writing skills.
ResponderEliminarJuly, I completely agree when you said "we have to encourage students", so the first thing that we need to do is change ourselves, our teaching and our perspective towardas writing; if we do that our students will change too. First of all, we have to motivate them in the organization part, they must know that organize their ideas help them express themselves easily.
ResponderEliminarHere I choose an organization pattern that could be useful.
Organization
__ Chooses organizational structure based on structure of own
ideas.
__ Uses authentic organizational structures, avoids inauthentic "recipe" and "fill-in" approaches.
__ Creates effective beginnings that catch the audience's attention
and make them want to read more.
__ Creates effective endings that feel finished and give the audience
something to think about.
__ Determines sequencing based on the logical progression of ideas
and the needs of the audience.
__ Paces writing effectively, spends the right amount of time on each
part.
__ Produces writing that is easy to follow from section to section.
After that we could assess and encourage them to continue writing what they enjoy the most and find more interesting and useful for their lives.
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ResponderEliminarOf course, writing is of paramount importance in any area of life. It's through it how we can learn and SHARE knowledge. For me, writing is speaking but in a formal way, so when we talk about teaching writing, we are talking about how to express ideas more than structures or the formal part of language.
ResponderEliminar