Make Them Write Right
Mubarak Abdessalami
Most of us, educators, believe that there is no proper
way to teach writing. Therefore many elaborate methods have been
adopted to alleviate the toughness of writing. It is true that despite
all endeavours, writing is still the most frightening task for both
teachers and students, but this doesn’t mean we needn’t seek more
other means to ameliorate our techniques and approaches. EFL teachers
are still trying innovative approaches to overcome this apprehension
so as to tame writing for the learners to get well with. Boosting
motivation could be the pivot around which all the approaches must
revolve. What is absolutely important, thus, is how to motivate the
students to like writing because for a student, to write is the most
challenging task of all. The majority of learners generally hate
writing because it requires a lot of hard work and agility besides a
lot of reading, practice, drafts and much more. Teachers don't like to
teach writing either. It is generally because of its need for
permanent pursue and follow to evaluate throughout the phases the
writing process goes through. Yet, teachers are not the only
protagonists in this battle to win the challenge of getting the
students to like and start on writing willingly. Parents' role is not
to be taken too lightly. They can do a lot about this tough mission
especially if they are literate and are involved themselves. The
family is the corner stone in the whole issue. If they keep
encouraging their children to continuously write, writing as a school
assignment will gradually become an ordinary chore.
In a purely classroom context, now, the "best" way to
incite the students to write is either by making the tasks very easy
or by making them look huge and colossal. I have tried both. Yet the
easiest method worked for a while only but step by step students and I
lost control. Writing is complicated due to many factors related to it
as a creative work like,
- Genre (prose or poetry)
- Essays
- Articles
- Letters (personal and application)
- E-mails (personal and official)
- Narrative (story)
- Descriptive (places, people, etc)
- Argumentative
- Declarative
- Persuasive
- Opinion
- Expository
- For and Against
- Cause and Effect
- Report
- Definition
- Process Analysis
- etc
In addition to these style types, there are other factors related to
writing as a product like
- the audience
- the mood
- the tendency
- imagination
- craft
- etc
This multiplicity of components makes writing tough as
each of the above types of writing requires a number of other tools
like, conjunctions for instance:
- chronology (One day, first, then, after that, finally etc)
- concession (however, nevertheless, although, despite, on the other
hand, etc)
- addition (also, moreover, besides, furthermore, as well, etc)
- cause (because, as, since, etc)
- consequence ( thus, therefore, etc)
- conclusion, (all in all, to sum up, in brief, etc)
- etc
Although the students enjoy studying grammar, they
cannot practise it normally in their production. The syntactic
structure of their sentences is generally distorted. They often misuse
adverbial and relative clauses for instance. In addition to this,
tense use constitutes another difficulty. How to stick to the
appropriate tense like the past tense in narrative, or the eternal
present in argumentative essays.
Vocabulary on the other hand is an enormous
discouraging component of writing. The learners’ repertoire is mostly
poor. They should know what diction for which genre. Vocabulary is
usually scarce when it comes to writing even in the mother tongue let
alone when writing in a foreign language like English. They cannot
stop thinking in their mother tongues while writing in the foreign
language. Looking for equivalents is actually an ordeal. Most learners
of English rely too much on the inner translation while speaking or
writing. Synonyms and antonyms which could enrich their writing lexis
are almost inexistent. They are not used to reading, unfortunately.
Another nightmare for learners is spelling. They make a
lot of spelling mistakes because they don’t write so often. Worse than
that is the fact that this generation of learners prefer to
communicate using emoticons, acronyms, dingbats and smileys. Spelling
accuracy regression among the students is apparent even in their own
mother tongues.
The toughest of all is how to keep coherent and respect
cohesion. They sometimes completely err in their writings. No logical
connections between the parts of their pieces of writing. They have a
false concept of writing: they think that the longer the piece of
writing is, the better it conveys ideas. That's why most of the
students endeavour to be long in their writing on the expense of the
unity. While the longer the writing is, the greater the risk to make
mistakes and errors will be.
Now what if the teachers ask the students to respect
punctuation? The use of punctuation is the least worried about. The
learners who can get through all the above mentioned obstacles, they
will surely apply the appropriate punctuation automatically and
without difficulty.
The learners today cannot go beyond simple sentences.
Their essays are void of adjectives, comparatives, simile, allegory or
metaphor. Is their artistry contaminated as well?
Aren’t these quickly selected problems enough to make
the learners emigrate to Antarctica just not to sit for a writing
assignment?
For my part, to encourage students to write is by
making writing alluring for them. How can this be put into action?
Well, first the learners should be supported in their writing ordeal
by –at least- reading their writing carefully and praising the effort
supplied to accomplish the task. Verbal reward is mainly one of the
most important motivating factors which make learners write
voluntarily surpassing their phobia a little. Generally the students
think writing is not just a school assignment they should avoid but an
extra load they have to get rid of as quickly as they can. Isn’t there
enough back-up on the part of teachers and parents? I guess, some more
assistance and forbearance from teachers and parents will surely help
the learners –most of them- take risks. They need to exteriorise their
feelings and give their impressions about different issues of life and
about the world round them.
Moreover, the students are not free in writing, they
are always asked to write about a topic, a theme, or a subject they
don’t feel like writing about at all; or they have no idea about. I
think if they are given the opportunity to write about something which
connects to them and their emotions directly, they would write poems.
What they need is a topic which meets their interests and their
personal concerns or affairs; accuracy and mechanicals will be dealt
with in remedial work. The first and foremost concern for now is to
assist the students in conquering their phobia from writing and start
composing.
All things considered, I reckon that some students
never do their writing assignments just because they hate doing it
being complicated and too much demanding. It is not because they are
not used to it only but because they were not taught how to deal with
it the simplest way I should guess. Instead of bringing me the
homework done, they bring me a poem or a short essay about very
personal issues. This basically means that they don’t hate writing as
such but they hate writing about a topic they don’t feel like writing
about whatsoever. And what makes it worse is the fact that they were
not introduced to writing from the beginning.
I have previously published several articles on how to
train the students to get friendly with writing from the early years.
You can find one here. Now I will introduce you to two different ideas
about tricking the students into writing willingly. One is for the
beginners (Common Core) and it is about writing a mini-book; whereas
the other is for intermediate students (2ème Bac.) on how to manage a
writing workshop about essay and report writing.