Writing is a skill that is often neglected in English language classes, partly because the current textbooks don’t have any writing activities and also because teachers find writing quite a daunting prospect in their classes.
During the provincial workshops, teachers were able to share their fears, difficulties and experiences about writing.

Difficulties

• There are too many students in a class, so it’s difficult to make sure who is on- task and who is off – task.

• Most classes are mixed ability.

• Teachers feel guilty because they are unable to correct all mistakes for students or to work through all their written work.

• Marking and correcting is time –consuming.

• If a teacher follows the whole writing process it take more time than the 45 minutes allocated for each lesson.

• Some teachers don’t feel confident about their own English and shy away from designing writing tasks or getting students to write more than just grammatical exercises.

• Tests often don’t include writing and there are no writing lessons in the current textbooks, thus making it difficult to motivate students to write in class.

• Sometimes the teacher doesn’t have enough ideas to help students.

Solutions

• Assign group work or pair work when teaching writing. Move around to monitor.

• Let students correct themselves or correct for their peers ( peer correction) by training them to use correction symbols/ codes.

• It’s not necessary to do all stages of process writing in class. Some stages can be done at home or in the next lesson.
E.g Ask students to prepare the topics at home then you can save time for them to think when doing pre-writing in class or you can ask students to do the first draft in class with some editing and self or peer correction, then ask them to finish the task at home and come back tomorrow with the final product.

• Talk to your students and explain that they learn English not only for tests, but also for real life communication and for jobs in the future.

• Students are a good source of information so let them come up with ideas – they don’t all have to come from you! Starting a lesson by asking them to brainstorm around a topic.

• Design and share lesson plans with other colleagues so that you get more ideas, more confidence and different tasks.

• Using a process approach to writing gives students a lot of support and guidance and can help with a lack of vocabulary, ideas and language.

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