Institut Pendidikan Guru Kampus Batu Lintang

Teaching Writing Skills

in the Primary ESL Classroom
(TSL 3073)

In Using All
Language Skills
Prepared by:
Chai Kim Choo
Christina Mamora
Jenny Kong Kai Ning
Shirly Nirau

Introduction
The techniques to practice language
skills are:
- Brainstorming
- Guided discussion
- Interviews
- Skits
- Dictation
- Note-taking
- Story-telling

 These techniques can be used at prewriting stage. They give students the
opportunity to use all their linguistic
skills to help them explore and get
started with their ideas on a given
topic or to allow the topic for a piece
of writing to emerge out of
communicative classroom activities.

Brainstorming
Lets students work together in the
classroom in small groups to say as
much as they can about a topic.
The teacher does not have to
monitor grammar or pronunciation
except when
the speaker cannot
be understood.

 The writing tasks can be based on

a)Reading
b)Pictures
c)Map
d)Textbook topic
e)Personal experience
f) Essay question

 Students can:
a)Producing relevant vocabulary
b)Making comments
c)Asking questions
d)Making associations
) After brainstorming, students can write
down as many ideas as they can without
worrying about:
a)Grammar
b)Spelling
c)Organization
d)Quality of the ideas.

Guided Discussion

Another way to get the students to

talk about a topic and especially to
get them to focus on specific
aspects of a topic is to provide
guidelines for group or whole class
discussion.

If a teacher provides guidelines for

discussion, that control he imposes has
the advantage of letting him help the
students beforehand with the
vocabulary and sentence forms that
they might need in their discussion.

The teacher can give specific directions

that will guide the group in preparation
for writing, for example:
a)Discuss and write down the conversation
between the old man and the little girl (Page
70). Include:
)Greetings
)A request to play checkers
)Acceptance with pleasure
)An invitation to begin the game
A review of the forms of greetings, requests,
invitations and questions would be useful here before
discussion begins or during whole-class discussion.

b) Ask students to look at the picture

and ask as many questions as they can
about it, using the words who, what,
when, where, why and how. Then they
discuss possible answers to the
questions they invent and write a story
about the picture.
Members of the group can be assigned roles
during and after discussion:
Discussion leader: initiates and guides
discussion
Recorder: takes notes

Students also can work on a

controlled composition, sentence
combining, punctuating a
paragraph, finding links between
sentences, or sorting words into
groups.

When students doing a sentence

combining exercise, they will argue
about whether a sentence sounds
better with words such as although or
whatever , that probably teaches
them more about sentence structure
and sentence variety than any
number of mechanical exercises or
explanations from the teacher.

Skits
The students act not as themselves
but in an assigned roles
Can be either as a whole class or a
small group activity
Writing can then follow as an outside
report or summary of what was said
and done

Dictation
Refers to a person reading some text aloud so that the
listener(s) can write down what is being said.
When used in the language classroom, the aim has
traditionally been for students to write down what is
said by the teacher, word for word, later checking their
own text against the original and correcting the errors
made.

How to use
dictation in a
classroom

Pupils dictate the text

ask a pupil to dictate the text to the rest of the
class.
get students to work in small groups with
each person in the group dictating a section
of the text to the rest of the group.

Running dictation' technique

Take a short text and make two or three copies of the text and stick them to the
notice-board or on the classroom wall.

Divide the students into groups and ask each group to nominate a messenger.

The messenger has go up to the text, read it and memorize a chunk of the text.
He or she then returns to his or her group and dictates the chunk. The others
write it down.

The messenger then repeats this process until the whole text has been written
down.

The jumbled story technique

each person in the group gets a sentence
from the text in random order.
they have to dictate their sentence to the rest
of the group and the group then has to decide
on the correct order for the sentences.

Promote the skill of inferring

from context
dictating a text without punctuation and then
asking the students to work in groups to
punctuate the text appropriately.

Dictogloss

requires the students to only take notes of the key words used as they listen
and then later reconstruct the text so that it has the same meaning as the
original text although perhaps not exactly the same form.

the main aim is that the students understand and then re-convey the
meaning of the passage, concentrating on the communicative aspect of the
activity rather than producing a grammatically perfect text.

Note- taking
Write down a summary of what the
speaker says
Picking out the important information
The radio or the tape recorder is
valuable here for providing additional
materials for the students

 Weak/ Averaged students:

A skeleton outline can be given to the
students t work with and expand, so
that their listening is more directed.

Advanced students:
They can listen to long passages and
make notes as they listen.

Both groups need to be alerted to the signals that

speakers use:
1.Pauses
To make an important
2.Raising the head
point
3.Voice
Or using words like:
4.First
To signal separation and priority of the
5.Finally
point made.
6.Most important

Storytelling
Storytelling is the interactive art of
using words and actions to reveal
the elements and images of a
story while encouraging the listeners
imagination.

Characteristics
Storytelling is interactive.
Storytelling uses words.
Storytelling uses actions such as physical
movement and/or gesture.
Storytelling presents a story.
Storytelling encourages the active
imagination of the listeners.

How it works in writing?

Read aloud a story- and this can also be
used as a dictation- but stop at the point
where the reader is likely to want to
know how it continues.
The students continue the story- writing.
The students read each others
continuation and some read theirs aloud
to the class