Improve your learners' writing skills
by Bronwyn Wyngaard
The Rainbow College College, Gaberone
In my first few years of teaching, I must confess that, when it came to "Original Writing", I simply copied the methodology of the teachers who had taught me when I was at school. That is, I used these periods as free periods. I would walk into the classroom, chalk up some topics on the board, and instruct the learners to get on with it. This was occasionally augmented with some photocopied pages on the format of business letters, minutes, cv's etc. I could get on with my marking or prepare for my more "serious" lessons while the learners did what they could and finished what they couldn't for homework. The problem was, though, that nobody's writing ever improved. I marked very thoroughly and gave in-depth critiques of their work, but failing students continued to fail and C students continued to get C's and so on.
And so I realized that I would have to be more active in teaching them what was required, and motivate them to be more active in producing the goods.
And these are a few of the methods which I have found useful.
POETRY
I know that learners are not expected to write poems in their exams, but learners who can write poems get excited about their ability and inspired to achieve better in general because they now label themselves "successful writers"...especially if their poems are printed off a computer and bound into a book, or pinned on the notice board with accompanying illustrations.
When learners are simply told to write a poem, they are usually extremely intimidated, and in my experience, either plaguarize or write some awful Mbongeni Ngema look-alike rhetoric. They need to be gently started off with some very firm structures to follow. Haikus; alphabet poems (each new line begins with the next line of the alphabet); descriptive poems ("I am a wild dog:/fierce-fighting, free-running, teeth-baring, red-snarling"; "Love is a rose:/sweet-smelling, bright-blooming, smile-making, early dying!") and any other carefully structured formats are useful here. Even the weaker learners can succeed (after some trial and error) by applying the rules. Let them work (or play) with these until their confidence has been built up, and then, I find that when I give them the assignment of writing a poem on their own topic and without using the structures they've learnt (while still applying techniques such as rhyme, alliteration, simile, metaphor etc), they come up with outstanding material - even, as I say, the weaker ones.
DIALOGUE
One obvious way of making dialogues come alive for students is to have them workshop drama skits in groups. These are then acted out before a classful of critics; amendments are made and the final product written in dialogue form. This is especially useful for teaching how the stage directions in brackets work, because you can make them re-enact their play to see what actions each actor did, before putting these actions into words inbetween the spoken lines of the dialogue. Of benefit to the teacher is that this kind of work is easy to mark as they go along, instead of taking home piles or books to mark; you end up with two sets of marks in your continuous assessment file (oral and written), and it is very easy to incorporate this work into any themes you may be working on in the rest of your syllabus.
Another thing I've done with dialogue, is to use a Literature period when we're studying one of Shakespeare's plays, and get the learners to translate sections into modern English. This not only ensures that they understand what's going on in the play, but forces them to get the structure of a dialogue right. It can also link up with studies of different types of English, as one group can translate into Standard English, another into South African English, another into American, and so on.
NARRATIVE COMPOSITIONS
For some reason, my learners tend to be particularly good at narrative, so I haven't been all that innovative with this area. I think their talent comes from the fact that the school has a good library and they do a lot of reading, so to encourage this trend we often spend a period reading extracts to each other from works of different genres, comparing the different effects and then trying to mimic some of these effects in our own work (I say "we" because I've found that, if you, the teacher, also do this work, the students absolutely love it : they can see that once they've mastered different styles, their work can be as good as, or better than, yours).
Because of my learners' skill in this area, I also encourage them to use this style in their introductory paragraphs to argumentative-style essays. For example, an essay on capital punishmnet could begin with one paragraph of dramatic narrative in which a prisoner is condemned to death, or is actually described in the throes of hanging.
ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS
Here my learners' biggest faults are : ignorance (eg. not knowing that abortion is legal in South Africa, or writing entire essays about how corporal punishment should be "burned" - alas, never banned - when it is already illegal); deviating from the point and repeating the same point over and over in slightly different ways. I've tried all the mind-mapping exercises over and over with them, but they don't seem to actually be of that much help.
Finally I hit upon an idea which the learners are crazy about. I give them a topic; they have to first of all make a point-form summary of all the arguments in favour of or against the motion; I bring in the overhead projector, and they have to make a presentation of their summary, using the OHP, and acting the part of a businesswoman discussing how to avoid stress in the workplace, or an AIDS educator addressing a roomfull of teenagers, or a doctor lecturing to medical students on the effects of smoking, etc.
We criticize the performance (I get another oral mark down in the old mark book), the learner makes necessary corrections, and then expands each point of her presentation into a paragraph. It all finally becomes an argumentative essay, and along the way ignorance has been corrected, many fierce debates have been sparked and the basics of summarising have also been learned.
Even if these techniques don't improve your learners' writing all that much, you'll probably find, as I did, that you become more popular as a teacher, and learners look forward to their Original Writing periods!
