WRITING TEACHING

THE WRITING MUSCLE

• Productive skill
• Daily exercise
• Less lecture, more practice

"Language learning, especially, seems not to benefit very much from long explanations...Ability to use a language seems to be more of a skill you learn by trying to do it (akin to playing football or riding a bicycle) than an amount of data that you learn and then try to apply."
-Scrivener, Jim. Learning Teaching. Macmillian. 2005. p. 19

MAJOR PROBLEM AREAS

• Structure
• Ideas
• Grammar
• Vocabulary
• Motivation

SAMPLE ESSAY

STRUCTURE

• BP1-No topic sentence
• BP1-Poor supporting ideas
• BP2-Poor supporting ideas
• Final thought problem

IDEAS

• BP1-unclear SI
• BP1-weak connection to topic
• BP2-Ideas are disconnected
• BP2-unclear SI
• Final comment is on a tangent

GRAMMAR

• Turklish
• Article use
• Preposition use
• Connector use
• Gerund use

GRAMMAR

• "to be" use
• punctuation
• missing subject/verb
• passive/active
• fragment/run-on

VOCABULARY

• spelling
• word usage
• word form
• word choice/academic
• content vocabulary

MOTIVATION

• Lack of focus
• Not careful

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

IN CLOSING...

• Best practices resource
• Writing Center plug
• Bee Writer plug
• Weekly writing teachers' group?