Writing is an essential skill in our everyday lives and that makes it a really important aspect of our teaching too! Students need to know how to take notes as well as how to write essays and letters, which makes this basic skill as important as speaking or listening.
Writing skills are important because they are a good way to reinforce what a student has learned as they will benefit from seeing new vocabulary in written form. When we speak, we do not really think about the grammatical correctness or the mechanics of what we are saying.
Everything flows as speech happens rather quickly; we do not repeat our speech to check for mistakes or the appropriateness of what we are saying. Writing, on the other hand, does not flow smoothly. We write a few lines, re-read them, edit what we’ve written if necessary, and then carry on the process – we are constantly checking for correctness.
For these reasons we need to make writing an enjoyable activity that our students will not want to avoid. We need to encourage students, initially at least, to write without worrying about the correctness of everything they put to paper – get them to generate ideas and then edit their written English afterwards. It is also important to be involved every step of the way as leaving your students to produce a written piece of work with little help can be a rather daunting prospect for them. Furthermore, to help our students become self-sufficient writers, rather than marking a student’s work in red pen and handing it back to them it is much better to meet individually with them to discuss the strong and weak points of their work.
For TEFL students to improve their skills in written English, they need to attain correctness and accuracy in:
Grammar
Vocabulary
Spelling
Punctuation
Layout conventions
A range of sentence structures
Linkage of information across sentences and paragraphs to develop a topic
Appropriate register for the type of writing
Awareness of the conventions in different genres of writing, such as letters, poems, essays etc.
