ELTWeekly Issue#20, Article: Making writing interactive

By Tarun Patel

Making writing interactive

By Alex Case

1. Collaborative writing

Getting students to write together automatically means there is interaction between them. Possible problems when doing this include: the stronger or more dominant student having the pen and the others doing nothing, students doing all their speaking in L1 and only writing in English, students and groups who concentrate too much on accuracy, and some groups taking much longer than others. Solutions include giving the pen to any students not taking part, telling them to switch who is physically writing it every paragraph or every 3 to 5 minutes, giving them an English language plan or sentence cues that the writing will be based on, and giving them a strict time limit for each stage of the writing process. Students might also complain that writing together is slower and more difficult than writing on their own. Two possible responses are to tell them that the language they learn from each other will make the extra time and effort worthwhile, or allowing them to split the work up once they have planned what they are going to write, e.g. writing alternate paragraphs.

2. Being read afterwards

Another general tip for making writing interactive is to make sure someone is reading it afterwards -and of course things that we write in real life are usually read by someone else. Telling students that their writing will be read by other students should instantly raise their motivation to write and write well, and getting them used to this will raise their interest in writing and help them to learn from reading other people’s work. Basic techniques include passing the writing to the next person or group (e.g. clockwise around the class), swapping with another person or group, picking randomly from a stack of pieces of writing, reading writing that is pinned up on the walls, or selecting from texts spread across the table. Things people can do as they read include deciding if they agree with the opinions stated, thinking about what their reaction would be if they received that letter etc, or looking for similarities and differences with their own piece of writing.

Read the remaining 13 ways here http://edition.tefl.net/ideas/writing-ideas/making-writing-interactive/

Alex Case has been a teacher, teacher trainer, Director of Studies, ELT writer and editor in Turkey, Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy, Japan, UK and now Korea, and writes TEFLtastic blog (www.tefl.net/alexcase)

*ELTWeekly would like to thankAlex Case for contributing this article.

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ELTWeekly Issue#20 commento

1 Comment

June 6th, 2009

About... Tarun Patel

This author published 569 posts in this site.
Tarun Patel (http://tarunpatel.net/blog/) is an ELT and Communication skills teacher, working with Charotar University of Science & Technology (CHARUSAT - http://charusat.ac.in/). He has been dealing with the Language learning processes for last seven years. 'Technology in Teaching English' is his favorite domain and he has presented several research papers in national and international conferences on the same theme. He is the founder editor of ELTWeekly (http://eltweekly.com/), India's first weekly ELT eNewsletter which reaches in more than forty countries and benefits more than 1600d teachers of English and Communication Skills. Have a look at his personal blog http://tarunpatel.net/blog/.