Teaching Writing

(Oct 12th 16th 2014)

The writing skill is one of the significant skills that helps learners
complete their reports in an academic way and writing the assigned
tasks. For that reason, I wanted to improve myself in teaching writing
to help learners gain the fundamental skills.
I observed two different classes with two different teachers teaching
writing for foundation level four students. In fact, it was a good way to
observe and compare different strategies used to teach writing. The
first observation was about writing a report about pie and bar charts.
The teacher went through different activities to qualify learners to write
the report. Firstly, he spotted the difference between both types of
charts and it was effective, so learners were aware of reading the
information in different charts. What I really liked about the lesson
when the teacher asked learners to answer questions about the
chapters. I found it beneficial since learners were introduced to writing
a report through answering the questions. Another effective activity
was using the information in a pie chart to complete the report and this
helped learners to identify the different parts of writing a report.
The other observation was another interesting experience because it
introduced new activities for teaching writing. Practice writing an essay
was the focus of the writing lesson and the teacher started the lesson
by revising the different paragraphs of writing an essay as learners
wrote them on the board. It is important to revise the content of the
different paragraphs, so learners focus more on how to write a
cohesive composition. One of the effective tasks that I observed was
identifying and correcting the mistakes in an essay. Actually, it was a
fundamental activity because learners had the chance to discover the
mistakes by themselves to be more aware about their own mistakes
while writing. To support this activity, the teacher provided the

students with a worksheet to identify the grading criteria as they

graded the example given by the teacher.
Overall, observing these two classes raised my awareness towards
creating different activities used to assist teaching writing. In addition,
I have learnt that learners need more practice and a chance to identify
their mistakes and the grading criteria, so they will be more careful
while writing.