For the next week I'll be featuring a series of units for teaching writing skills to t(w)eenage learners of English. I call the approach/materials WriteWays (for lack of a more imaginative title at this point) and they are loosely based on the approach used in my Boost! Writing skills strand -- with some fundamental differences:
1. The units will be available as adaptable MS Word or PDF files, giving you freedom to play around with them and hone them in ways that better suit your own learners and classroom needs.
2. The approach caters to using learners' own initial writing efforts to create the core content of each unit.
3. The teacher will need to enter some or all of the input (hopefully drawing on the learners' own writing) -- an accompanying TG explains how you can go about this.
4. The units feature a specific page for something called "classroom connection", designed to integrate writing with speaking/listening and sharing ideas and written work in the classroom.
What the units still have in common with the original Boost! writing approach is a progressive focus on particular writing skills at sentence, paragraph, real-world communicative texts and basic academic/essay tasks, and the use of discovery learning.
I'll be featuring four units over the week, which build on each other, and finish with some suggestions and templates for dealing with that ever-present goblin in the ELL writing classroom: grammar. Generally speaking, these units cater to a highish elementary level, where students can already do a little basic writing at sentence or simple text level, but really need to hone their skills more.
While the material is generally geared to younger teenagers, looking at the templates I realised they could quite easily work with older learners as well (with or without a little tinkering on your part). For example, these would work just as well with many of the migrant and refugee adult ESL learners I've been teaching recently.
The key things are that the approach puts learners' own writing production right at the core of the materials and skills, and it allows you to adapt the material in whatever way you see fit before taking it into the classroom.
Oh, and as a special favour to an important person in my PLN (and in recognition of the point she made about font sizes), I've gone with largish text in the materials. Of course, you can always change that by adjusting fonts and font sizes.
Hope you like it!
=D
