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Make Writing Communicative!

Suhyeon Lee




    Writing, like all other skills, is communicative in nature. We write e-mails, lists, notes, letters, reports, assignments, essays, all of which have a communicative purpose and a target audience. Writing is one of the richest, most rewarding, and most powerful forms of human communication, but we often forget and neglect its communicative essence in our classes. Here are some ways to encourage your students to focus on content in their writing and make the writing we do with learners more communicative. 


Get students to think about 'why' they write and 'who' they are writing for.

    Each time we write something in our real lives, there is an ‘audience’ in mind and a ‘reason’ for writing. When students learn to write for a specific audience, their writing becomes far more communicative than when they write only to display some grammar or vocabulary they have learned in class. Having an ‘audience’ in mind helps in getting the students to think about the content and style of the writing as well.

Tips   

- Find ways to publish learners’ writing on websites like storybird or in blogs, newspapers, posters, etc.
- Publish a class magazine of a collection of previous writing work.
- Use relevant and realistic tasks such as writing notes, recipes, e-mails, and filling in forms that have a clear function with a specific audience.
- Employ peer correction. Students know that they are going to exchange their compositions so that they become readers of each other’s work.

Give feedback on the content

    Feedback on ‘content’ is as important as feedback on ‘language’. If you comment on students’ writings, students would know that the teacher is interested in the conversation and is actively listening to what they’re trying to say. The teacher's interests in the content would make the student more motivated and enthusiastic to communicate with the teacher rather than just focusing on making some grammatically correct sentences.  

Tips 

- Express your response in the form of written or spoken ‘questions’ to help develop ideas such as:

Who will read this?
What do you want the reader to think?
Tell me more about…
Why did you include ...?
How can you make this more…?
Why/How questions

- Respond to the content by adding your comments to their homework or establishing a dialogue through e-mail and learner diaries.

 Employ peer review

    Make students read their peer’s compositions and ask them to give some feedback on them. This process provides more time to elaborate and develop their ideas.

Tips 

- Help students make comments on the content by providing students with sentence starters such as: 

“My favorite part was _____________________ because ________________________,” or “What I want to know more about is __________________________”.

- Ask students to place their pieces of writing on the walls and make them comment on them by using post-it notes. Having students walk around walls and make comments would draw more students’ attention to what each text is trying to say rather than their peers' linguistic errors. 


References

Nunan, D. (1991). Language teaching methodology: A textbook for teachers. New York: Prentice Hall.

White, R. V., & Arndt, V. (1991). Process writing. London: Longman.

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