Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Writing

Spring 2007

Techniques in Using All Language Skills

1. What is the most important common theme in all these various types of exercises she discuses?

The basic idea is that we can use these types of integrated activities using a variety of language skills as a means of scaffolding writing. Simply put we want to use other skills to make writing easier. In response to this we, as EFL as opposed to ESL practitioners, might ask why writing needs to be scaffolded. For us the common belief is that our students are actually better writers than speakers. This of course, runs contrary to what is assumed to be the situation in the ESL context where spoken language prevails. We, therefore, can see the logic behind Raimes` thinking when considering her teaching context but again, we need to question the validity of her suggestions for us here in Korea. Our students are, in general, less used to speaking than hers and trying the get them to listen and speak as a way of generating and organizing ideas may not work very well. We may then face the added challenge of having our students try to produce spoken language (which they may be reluctant to do) to help guide them in producing written language. Although asking questions like this is necessary we still need to embrace the basic concept that Raimes (1983) is trying to get across in this small chapter.

          Although it may sometimes be hard to get our students to speak as it may be to get them to write, we need to think of why collectively. The collective reason is that we expect them to do too much at the same time. Taking this into account the introduction of activities using all language skills may very well work to counter this problem with processing. If anything trying the get your students to use all language skills will wind up with a more staged approach to writing. You will, out of necessity, be chaining tasks as you try to move from one skill area to another. In trying to design tasks that use all four skills you may as well be creating larger, goal-oriented tasks which are more interesting and possibly even more authentic.

          Take heed though that you do grasp the general ideas underlying this, namely that we do need to scaffold writing tasks and particularly the longer more holistic ones.

2. Which ones do you think are the most useful to use in your own classroom? Why?

This type of question is purely opinion-based but like everything else in this program and really in teaching it is extremely important that you know where your opinions are coming from. As a Master`s student you need to track down and confront the sources of your opinions. This involves being able to show concrete support for your beliefs.

          The answer to this question really depends on the types of students you are teaching or would like to teach under which set of conditions. The questions of efficacy (usefulness) can only be arrived at under consideration of goals. If you have not considered your goals carefully and realistically then you really cannot come up with a suitable answer to this question. The same applies to all the questions that follow.

3. Which are the simplest?

4. Which ones are the least effective? Why?

5. Which ones do you think would be impossible to do in your classroom? Why?

Below are the different exercises for using all language skills that Raimes (1983) included in Chapter 5

-Brainstorming

          We have already talked a great deal about brainstorming in this class as a part of the Process Writing Approach. It is an important part of writing and cannot be overestimated as an important part of writing , but it is often believed to be hard to do with younger or lower level learners. This, however, does not have to be the case if you plan well and break the brain storming up into different meaning-focussed sessions. For these lower level students, the teacher is going to have to give a lot of clues. Any kind of discussion that you are going to try your low level students engage in about a topic will have to be more limited, familiar and through these more close-ended. There should be more controlled brainstorming exercises in which topics and some of the vocabulary are already given to them. Just giving your students a topic and having them talk about it sounds great for students who are fluent and high risk takers, but it could be a complete dud in the wrong class.

          The whole idea behind this is that brainstorming is hard. This is particularly true for Korean students (the older the worse off they are) who are used to planning for writing in a very different way. Raimes thinks that we can circumvent some of the difficulties people have in brainstorming, by introducing a speaking element to the process. That is essentially what this is about. It is quite unnatural to brainstorm the way we did it in class and which is often expected in the writing process for English. You are expected to move through all these steps without really trying to think about the next step or thinking about the text as a whole. For example, the first step in the writing process is brainstorming for a topic. A writer is supposed to do this thinking only about potential topics and not entire text scenarios. This means that as you think about topics, and this would be done by thinking about very general ideas, you are not supposed to think about how the topic might be turned into a piece of writing (an essay, for example). The steps in the processes of the process approach to writing are all modular, even and especially the individual fits of brainstorming. Each one necessarily focusses on one level or module in the process. This allows us to specialize our focus and be more efficient in what we are doing at the moment. We can be more expansive when we need to, after which we are viciously restrictive. The basic idea is that we cannot be restrictive until we have exhausted all possibilities. Thus, in the writing process, we never got to a point where we have a view of the whole until we emerge into the outlining stage. Now, this is hard and frustrating for novice writers, regardless of their speaking prowess.

          By speaking we can make this easier. It allows us to explore an idea more easily and possibly by sharing our ideas with others. In order to use speaking well in this vein, certain parameters must be set. A topic should at least be chosen, otherwise the speaking the students engage in will be vague and unfocussed. The whole purpose of the speaking is to gain ideas and exchange (practice) vocabulary and associated ideas (concepts) that might be used in the writing.

          This is a good way of integrating a feeling of student-centeredness into a classroom. In this type of task, the students are the center of what is going on in the class. Writing has to be student-centered because it all about being creative above and beyond just the creation of language. Wring should be about ideas. In short, the teacher ultimately cannot, and at some point should not, write for the students. The students have to learn how to do things for themselves. In this way, writing practice and speaking practice can be interwoven in a way that helps the students be more self-reliant. Integrating speaking into the essential process of brainstorming can help do this.

          Speaking, however, cannot replace the pencil and paper type of controlled brainstorming that I have been advocating in our class practice. Yes, it can make it more pleasant, but the speaking practice will most probably not have the modular nature that we saw seems to be necessary for effective brainstorming. Speaking can help solidify our brainstorming and make it more pleasant, but it cannot replace the painstaking process of repeatedly expanding as much as possible and then cutting back to the bone.

          The speaking part can be introduced in one of two ways. First a more general talk about a topic or a thesis can be done effectively for higher level speakers. Second, for lower level speakers a more controlled/guided approach is necessary. We could, for example, have our students look at the lists their partners brainstormed and have them identify the idea or ideas they like the most. That is very simple.

-Guided Discussion

          This is similar to what was mentioned above about controlled brainstorming. The main difference being is that the teacher gives the students a framework which guides or maybe even controls their discussion. Particularly helpful is having them answer a pre-determined set of wh-questions. The main difference between this and the brainstorming is that this can be focussed on any part of the writing, not just the gathering and exclusion of ideas. In that respect, this is a kind of dumping ground for tasks as almost all tasks related to speaking can fall into this category. The dumping ground nature of this bespeaks its great usefulness as a way of making writing practice more interesting.

          As mentioned above, a guided discussion task can be integrated into any step in the writing process and at virtually any level of difficulty. A peer review of a rough draft would be a good exercise to do with higher level students. For lower level students simply naming the things they see in a picture would be just fine. Another simple kind of guided discussion would be ordering the things that you see.

          One thing that teachers need to be aware in relation to this is the difference between speaking-based tasks and writing-based tasks. Simply put, speaking-based tasks are tasks that revolve around writing down things that people would or do actually say. These are certainly useful as a way of solidifying vocabulary and structures and even speaking functions, but such tasks might not help at all in getting your students to write well. We have discussed all along that speaking and writing are different types of skills and different mechanisms and cognitive structures and strategies are employed in them. At the same time, it must be stated that good control of speaking is a necessary prerequisite for good writing. Remember, from a historical viewpoint, writing is an adaption of speaking

-Interviews

          One good thing about interviews is that they can be used a bridge between speaking and writing. Having the students convert the spoken responses into exact words and structures words and then into a well-organized piece of writing exposes them in a natural way to some of the major differences between speaking and writing. As a follow-up we can also integrate reading and have the students guess who was interviewed. Interviews are good because you can introduce as much control as necessary into the process. For example, you can provide the students with the questions and even provide sample answers, which would make this more of a reading exercise than anything else. You could do ordering of the questions and answers and a matching between questions and answers. Interviews are also good because they provide a great context for the students to role play.

-Skits

          For the most part these are time consuming and hard to organize for large classes or for skits that go beyond a short, two person exchange. If, however, you have a small class that you see often you can make a fun few days project out of this. There are, however, some interesting spinoffs of skits can be commercial making. You can have the students review authentic commercial advertisements either in video, audio, or print form and have them create their own. These can be quite short and even done with a big class since you can put them into smaller groups.

-Dictation

          You can do this like a cloze exercise, a C-test or a straight up dictation. The most important step, as far as we are concerned with integrating all skills, is that the students can check their work together to make sure that it is correct. Dictation is a holistic kind of exercise in that, in its raw form, the students have to do everything. They need to know the grammar and vocabulary as well as listen well to what is being read out by the teacher. This makes it very difficult for the students and also quite time consuming in the class.

          It is also possible and more challenging to do a loose dictation in which the students need to summarize or reconstruct what was said. This kind of dictation is often called grammar dictation, from the book of the same name by Ruth Wajnryb. The basic idea here is that you read off a good model of a text, but at a speed where the students can not possibly get all the words. The students then, have to reconstruct the text focussing not only on the vocabulary and grammar, but also the meaning as a central component. This turns what is often seen asa mechanical exercise, dictation and turns it into something more meaningful and challenging. For this reason, it is normal to let the students work in small groups to reconstruct what they heard. In this way, grammar dictation is like a joint problem solving activity that has a language focus.

-Note-Taking

          If they do this collectively this is OK, but otherwise the students really are just trying to get ideas down as quickly as possible. It is a good exercise for academic survival skills and the basic fundamentals of listening, but is not really related to composition except that it kind of mimics outline writing in reverse and that is probably the best way of doing this in relation to composition and not writing or mechanics related activities.

          Again, like so many of the other types of activities that Raimes mentions here, note-taking is closely related to brainstorming and can really be the same the exact thing if done in a certain way. Thankfully there are more dimensions to note-taking than just making lists based on some kind of input. Inherent in the practice of note-taking is the idea that the notes taken must at some point actually get organized. It is this organizational aspect to note-taking that links it very well with outlining. Both contain just a skeleton of the ideas presented or to be presented as the case may be. In the spirit of integrating skills for the purposes of authenticity and meaningfulness, note-taking is a good way of building compositions skills by exposing them to texts and then have them work though them extracting the main ideas (either as a listening or a reading task) and then using those ideas to build their own version of the text. So actual composition is a great follow up task to note-taking.

-Story-Telling

          This is great if your students are interested enough to do predicting. If they are not, this will probably be too difficult for them, at least as a way of trying to get the students to compose. Story-telling is good because it integrates reading, speaking and writing. If your students can do it, go for it. It`s a real crowd pleaser. Again, this is somewhat repetitive because using story-telling is similar to how we would use texts to teach writing, but there is a listening element involved as well as a reading one and there might even be pictural elements as well.

-Task Chains

          Another way outside of what Raimes mentions in this chapter is to go the route of trying to connect a series of activities in a task chain. One simple example of a task chain would be one in which students need to rent an apartment. The different tasks in the chain involve both single and multiple skills and may even contain writing of different types and at different levels. The basic idea is that the students engage in a series of related tasks all of which taken together lead to an outcome. By integrating a wide variety of different activities using different skill areas students will b able to see how writing is used in different ways and for possible real world scenarios.