Writing in task-based lessons
4.5.6.1
Reflection
4.5.6.2 Belief check
4.5.6.3 Reasons for writing
4.5.6.4 Relating writing to students' immediate and future
needs
4.5.6.5 Written task reports
4.5.6.6 Stages in a task-based writing lesson
4.5.6.7 Outcomes and purposes in writing tasks
4.5.6.8 Planning and drafting writing
4.5.6.9 Teacher input during writing
4.5.6.10 Writing tasks as part of an integrated skills approach
4.5.6.11 Optional reading
4.5.6.1
Reflection
Think of a language lesson that you have recently taught where the students
wrote a text of some kind.
- What did they have to do?
- Who read the text after they had finished?
- How successful were the writing activities?
- Why were they (un)successful?
- What do you think the students gained from doing the activities?
- Do you think that second language learners should always learn to write in the target language?
- What do you think are the most useful ways to help learners develop their writing skills in a second language?
- Are there any approaches to writing in the language classroom that you believe are not helpful?
- Are there any techniques that you especially (dis)like?
- Why do you feel this?
- What do you think writing in a second language can contribute to a learner's overall language development?
4.5.6.3
Reasons for writing
There are two main reasons why you might ask students to write in the
target language during class time or for homework:
- to help them to acquire a skill they will need to use in their jobs, studies or examinations, etc (assuming they will need to write for these purposes at all);
- to help the learning process, since for many people, writing something down can aid memorization and understanding.
An alternative way of looking at classroom writing is to consider to what extent activities are mainly for controlled writing practice (with the focus mainly on form and accuracy) or writing for real communication (meaning-focused, but with a degree of form focus depending on audience and purpose).
4.5.6.4
Relating writing to students' immediate and future needs
If your students have indicated that they like to write things down to
help them make a record of what of was covered in class, to help them
memorize words and phrases, to practise constructing examples of particular
language forms, or to provide samples of their work for you, the teacher,
to mark and correct, then traditional written exercises may well be appropriate.
These are likely to form part of the language focus stage in a task-based
lesson. In the remainder of this section, the emphasis is on communicative
writing tasks.
If students' future needs include the ability to write in the target language then devising writing tasks that reflect the nature of these future needs is obviously a good idea. Writing out sentences to demonstrate mastery of particular structures and writing 'compositions' of the type often set in a traditional grammar translation approach are unlikely to provide this targeted practice.
4.5.6.5
Written task reports
Within a task-based lesson framework, writing follows on very naturally
from speaking and / or text-based tasks, if the report is to be delivered
in written format. If you are planning lessons to include a specific type
of written output, you can plan your lessons 'backwards', thinking about
the writing task, and then planning the speaking / listening / reading
tasks that will precede this.
4.5.6.6
Stages in a task-based writing lesson
The following diagram (based on one in Willis 1996: 62) shows the stages
in a task-based lesson which has writing as its main focus. See Commentary
4.5.7 for an example lesson outline based on writing a mini-saga.
Figure 4.5.1 Framework for task-based writing lesson
4.5.6.7
Outcomes and purposes in writing tasks
Writing tasks, like tasks involving the other three language skills, should
have a clear purpose and outcome. This means that students need to know
who they are writing for (their 'audience', often their fellow classmates);
the form that the finished product should take (paper document to be copied
and distributed, entry on a website, email to a discussion group, wallposter,
ephemeral handwritten report on the board, etc), and what the piece of
writing should achieve.
4.5.6.8
Planning and drafting writing
In addition, students should have sufficient planning time and drafting
opportunities to produce a well-written piece, for example by following
the stages suggested for a 'process writing' approach (see White and Arndt
(1991) and DELPHI Module
9 ). This involves making successive drafts, improving each one on
the basis of feedback from peers and / or the teacher. White and Arndt
(1991) suggest that this feedback should
preferably be a response to the content of the text, perhaps with suggested
reformulation, rather than traditional structural error correction.
4.5.6.9
Teacher input during writing
It is during this drafting and redrafting process that students are likely
to request lots of ad hoc input from the teacher on how to say
what they what to express, and for this reason, the planning stage in
a writing-based lesson is the most important in terms of pushed output.
Neat writing up of a final draft (or typing and posting to a website,
etc) could be done as a homework task if lesson time is short, with the
report and language focus taking place in a subsequent lesson. This will
clearly be necessary if larger-scale project work (ie a macro-task, consisting
of a series of several smaller micro-task cycles) is undertaken.
4.5.6.10
Writing tasks as part of an integrated skills approach
You will see from this section that writing within a task-based framework
is not radically different from current approaches described in the 'language
skills' literature. The main difference is in incorporating writing activities
into a task-based lesson framework so that this skill is not treated in
isolation from the other language skills, and the resulting integration
of the four skills occurs in a natural and logical sequence of inter-related
activities.
4.5.6.11
Optional reading
This would be a good point to complete recommeded readings 3 and 4 for
this activity cycle (see 4.5.8).
