Philosophy of Teaching Writing (Alexandra Antipova)
From John Mark's Wiki
My Philosophy of Teaching Writing
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes
The only way to learn to write is to write.
Peggy Teeters
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
Stephen King
First of all, I assume that in Russian school teaching writing plays a “second role” in comparison with speaking and reading. I think that many teachers follow the opinion of well-known Russian methodologist Shatilov S.P. who wrote that writing and teaching writing is mostly a means and partly an end of teaching process (Shatilov S. P. Methods of teaching German language. M., 1986. – C.96). It means that teaching writing mostly aimed at grammar, vocabulary and functional language practicing as well as at checking comprehension and not at developing writing skills as an end. Nevertheless, I am sure that in Russia there are teachers who are aware of importance of using writing tasks as a means of learners’ writing skills developing. Indeed, last year I with my colleagues attended several opened English lessons in different schools of Saint-Petersburg and I could see that some English teachers demonstrated us such kinds of writing tasks as a poem creating by using offered words, designing of written excursion describing one of the architectural monuments in Saint-Petersburg, composition creating for the participation in a city’s competitions and others. I remember how one of the English teachers was proud of her pupils while telling us about their achievements in one of such competitions.
In addition, I would like to highlight the important role of writing instruction and learning in developing creative and critical thinking skills. As we could see during our writing course the creation of such types of academic writing as an essay, summary and paragraph requires learners to analyze and compare information from different sources, evaluate it and give their own opinion. On the one hand, while reading my colleagues’ posts from our writing course in it’s very beginning I realized that many of them were aware of these advantages of using writing instructions in their classrooms. On the other hand, they felt some lack of professional knowledge and skills in this area of teaching and they were eager to improve their own writing skills and enrich their experience of teaching writing. Therefore, I hope that in Russia writing instruction and learning will move toward the point “Writing as an end” on the scale “Writing as a means – Writing as an end” (according to Ur’s theory of teaching writing)
I assume that many things which were described above are true for my institution. On the one hand, the main strategy of it is learners’ speaking skills improving and writing in this case is used as a means of this strategy implementing. The learners note down new vocabulary, copy out grammar rules, write out answers to reading or listening comprehension questions, do written tests. On the other hand, the students learn to create such types of written text as Internet pen pal advertisements, e-mails (arranging to meet, describing food, travel plans and other), job applications, congratulatory cards, etc. I believe that “Innovations” coursebook which is used in my institution provides my colleagues with a great opportunity to apply such important strategy as integrated primary skills. By following this strategy they can build writing tasks in their lessons logically and naturally.
Reflecting on the role of English writing instructions in my students learning process I can say that it depends on their motivation and proficiency level. Most of my students are adults at the age between 30 and 50 years old who learned German or French at school and began to learn the second foreign language. Moreover, now I teach students who studied English at school and continue learning after a long break. I believe that the main question here is the students’ motivation. I think using writing tasks in my teaching situation can help me to keep my students’ interest in English learning on high level. I hope to raise my learner’s motivation by implementing such writing activities as peer review session, combination of composing and scaffolding activities and devising a student rubric and an analytical scoring rubric as I like it very much and find them effective. One of my students is graduating from her university this year and is going to write her graduation essay in English. So I think that developing of the academic writing skills will be very useful for her.
Having read plenty of academic materials during our 12 weeks I have seen some new aspects of a notion of writing. So now for me writing is:
- both a means and an end;
- a value;
- a well-organized process with its own logic and structure;
- a way of developing creative abilities of learners;
- the way of self-improvement and adaptation in the modern word.
Now I see that teaching writing can be creative and pleasant process as it connected with designing various types of activities depending of the purpose. During our course I enjoyed much devising my own writing tasks which were a combination of scaffolding and composing activities. I think it is a productive way of organizing a teacher-student interaction in the lesson.
In addition to that, I appreciate very much such ideas and themes I have known from the course as “writing as a means and as an end”, interrelation of teaching and learning styles, designing a syllabus concerning students’ peculiarities and preferences, task-based instructions, integrating reading and writing. I hope that I will have an opportunity to implement these concepts in my teaching practice in spite of all difficulties and a lack of experience. Now I have successfully conducted several lessons using my favorite integrating reading and writing strategy as well as devised and tried a combination of scaffolding and composing activities with my new group of adults of elementary level.
During our writing course I encountered many questions and themes that were challenging for me. Firstly, I can say that the question how to analyze students’ needs affected me very much. Having read Hyland reading summary about needs’ analysis I realized that dissecting of students’ needs must be the first step of every teaching process. Such kind of methods of students’ needs analysis as interview or questionnaire is a very popular and practical. With my new group of adults I am going to conduct a questionnaire involving such questions as “Do you enjoy writing in Russian? If so, what kind of things do you write? Are there any kinds of texts you would like to be able to write in English? Write them below.” Also students can continue the following sentences: “After three months of my English learning I will be able to …” and “I will be successful learners because …” When reading my colleagues’ posts on our writing course I found many interesting questions they suggested to include in such interview for the students I can use as well.
Secondly, I can say that it was new for me to learn about different ways of grouping learners depending on various pedagogical and real-word tasks. I assume that in teaching practice at least in Russian schools dividing learners into groups according to a principle “weak-middle-strong” is one of the most commonly used ways of grouping learners. But such principle doesn’t reflect the whole variety of students’ peculiarities and expectations. Following after Maribal G. Valders I would like to use much deeper criteria of grouping learners. I think if we know that there are concrete, analytical, communicative and authority-oriented learners in the group it does not mean that we need to group all concrete learners together or even look for a mix. Taking into account students’ differences we can create for them situations of a choice, for example to select or design 3-4 various activities as a home task for the learners’ choice. I would like to devise different types of writing activities depending on students’ learning style and strategies they use in learning process.
Thanks to our writing course, now I use such effective teaching strategy as integrating primary skills, mostly reading and writing. I was impressed by the video “Sample Reading/Writing Lesson” that John Mark provided us with on our writing course and I found the ideas from this video both practical and inspiring. By relying on the strategy of integrated skills I prepare my lesson plan and formulate lesson objectives for me (not for my supervisor, for example) and I try to describe the expected results I would like to have after my lesson. Describing in short way how I accomplish integrated skills principle I can offer a following plan of the lesson: (pre-, in-, post-) reading – speaking – writing (mostly as the homework). Writing homework involves short stories, conversations, descriptions, pen pal advertisements. Now when planning my lessons I try to accomplish the idea of the interrelation between reading and writing activities. By using the Brown’s idea that reading can be both a basis for the writing activity and a stimulus for students’ piece of writing creation I often ask my students to read some materials from their coursebook and either write comparison of different texts or create a summary. Thanks to the course, I understand that writing tasks can be used more often an effectively on every lesson that is why I ask my students to write short descriptions of their own experience related to the topic of units or create their own conversations connected with grammar and vocabulary activities they do during every lesson.
One of the themes on our writing course that makes me change something in my teaching situation was “Responding to Students Writing”. Now I see that words and phrases a teacher say to his/her students as a form of feedback must not be accidental. Heaving analyzed our reading materials and done our forum homework I realized that the question of learner feedback is a question of technology. Indeed, as we have seen from Hyland abstract about feedback in L2 writing there are different strategies of responding to students’ writing and a teacher should think and select the most appropriate words and phrases depending on students’ peculiarities and purpose of a writing task. After I made such conclusion I have applied several times praise, criticism and suggestions, but I cannot say that I have already found the balance between them. I was not satisfied when I gave less praise than criticism and suggestions on my colleague’s post because I could see that she needed much more praise and, probably, she was a bit offended by my feedback. So now I believe that giving feedback is both an art and the technology and it needs more and more practice.
Reflecting on the question about difficulties I expect to have related to teaching writing I would highlight a disproportion between my wish to provide for students various opportunities for writing and a strategy of speaking/listening skills developing which my institution accomplishes. It seems to me that sometimes I have not enough time to do writing activities on my lessons because of a stereotype that speaking is more important than writing. Now I am glad that, thanks to our course, I have already changed my teaching situation and widened the area of using writing activities on my lessons.
Before defining my goals for the next five years as a teacher of writing in the ELS I would like to describe my wishes related to such goals. First of all, I would like to be able to create my own project of distant interaction with students, for example a group in VKontakte. I have already created the theme for my new group of adults in my language center’s group in “VKontakte”. Moreover, I want to select and apply on a regular basis different ways of alternative assessment for monitoring students’ achievements in writing (self-assessment, peer observation, keeping journal, etc.). And I am interested in creating and giving presentations on topics related to teaching writing. Above that, I want to improve my writing skills and to enrich my experience in teaching writing. In addition, I am interested in designing various types of writing activities and describe them using Nunan’s criteria as we did on our teaching writing course.
Now at the end of the course I can see how I have grown and I would to thank John Mark for all his work, help and support. I think he inspired the participants of the course for reflecting and trying many interesting and useful ideas in their teaching practice. And here I remember the words of William Arthur Ward: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” Moreover, I would like to thank all our facilitators especially Elina Chuikova who also stimulate me to think creatively and act rationally.
