Productive and Receptive Skills in the EFL Classroom - Writing Skills
The second of the productive skills is writing and here again we'll have a look at the background needed to create a typical lesson for writing skills.
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One of the things to be aware of in a writing skills lesson is that writing tends to be more formal than spoken English, so there will be some differences between the two. An example is that writing very often uses less contracted forms.
On the other hand, there are also many similarities between the two skills. This means many of the considerations that we had for a speaking skills lesson will also apply here to a writing skills lesson. Within writing skills itself there are some sub skills that we may want to teach and those sub skills could include but are not limited to; hand writing, spelling and punctuation.
Hand writing tends to be a personal thing but it is very important for our students to get hand writing practice to make sure that they are following the letters correctly and so on and so forth.
Spelling, with the English language not being phonetic can often be a problem for all levels of student. We can take a simple example, bow to the Queen, while sitting on the bough of a tree. Obviously there are spelling differences between those two even though they actually sound the same bow and bough. The spelling is completely different so this can often create problems for our students.
Finally punctuation, we should be aware that many languages have very different punctuation systems to that of the English language and some languages have no punctuation whatsoever. If you're teaching students with a different punctuation system or no punctuation, in their first language, then the English language system can be quite difficult.
There are different types of writing that we can do within each of these particular skills and they would be categorized by the situational or creative.
A situational piece of writing refers to a different type of writing that might take place for different situations. For example the way in which we write a postcard would probably not be the same as the way we would write a formal letter and the way in which you write a formal letter would probably not be exactly the same as we would write an email.
In a creative writing situation what we're actually doing are things like writing stories, the creation of dialogues and quite possibly even the creation of poetry.
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