Larbi Ben M’Hidi University

Department of English
Module: Teaching English as a Foreign Language
Level: M1 Literature and Civilization
Teaching the Writing Skill
Of all the skills, writing is the one that teachers and learners seem most reluctant to
focus on because it requires them to make special efforts (Harmer, 2015). It has a unique
position in language teaching since its acquisition involves a practice and knowledge of other
three language skills (Klimova, 2014).
1. Definition of Writing
Writing has been defined it in many ways. Here are certain definitions:
 “ … writing is clearly much more than the production of graphic symbols, just as
speech is more than the production of sounds. The symbols have to be arranged,
according to certain conventions, to form words, and words have to be arranged to
form sentences” (Byrnes, 1988, p. 1).
 “Writing is a powerful means of communication because it forms and shapes human
thought. In an open society, everyone is free to write and thereby share information
with others” (Rozakis, 2004, p. 21).
 “writing affords students an opportunity to clarify their thinking” (Daisey, 2009, p.
157).
2. Writing Activities
Teaching writing has a lot of objectives. The main purpose of writing is to express ideas
or thoughts and to convey messages to the reader using correct spelling, punctuation,
grammatical structure and selection of vocabulary, and standard language always demands
writing more than speech (Ur, 2011).
Lázaro (1996) also explained that there are mainly two reasons of learning and teaching
writing, and a written task could contribute to both of them:
1. Writing as a channel of foreign language learning: It reinforces the grammatical structures,
idioms and vocabulary that students have been learning. Thus, some writing exercises might
be introduced to consolidate language already presented and practised orally.
2. Writing as a goal of foreign language learning: Students will have to communicate with
other people in writing. This is why teachers can include some writing tasks to help learners
develop the skills of communicating in writing. This is something students might need in their
future social, educational, personal, or professional lives, when they have to fill out forms,
write letters (formal, informal) and postcards, give written instructions, take down notes, write
telephone messages, etc.
Ur (2012) noted that most of students’ writing in an English course is not done
primarily in order to develop writing skills but because writing is a convenient means of
engaging with aspects of language. For example, students write down new vocabulary; copy
out grammar rules; write out answers to reading or listening comprehension questions; do
written tests. In these examples, writing is used as a means of getting the students to attend to
and/or practise a particular language point, to make a note of new language for later reference,
or as a convenient method of testing it.

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 Fluent writing tasks, in contrast, aim to improve students’ ability to compose written
texts for communicative purposes. Aspects of accuracy (grammar, vocabulary, and spelling)
are, of course, important in formal writing; but the main focus is on meaningful writing
following the conventions of a particular genre.
As far as writing activities, Lázaro (1996) stated that when teachers plan them, they
have to consider the level of their students and the difficulty of the task. They have suggested
these activities:
1. Controlled Writing Activities: These include copying phrases or sentences which have been
mastered orally or which are written in the book is an extreme example of a controlled writing
activity, gap-filling, re-ordering words or sentences, substitution, correct the facts, caption
writing (Look at the picture and write four sentences about what the people in the picture are
doing), substitution table, sentence completion, and dictation.
2. Guided Writing Activities: For example: parallel writing, summarising, and answering
questions.
3. Free Writing Activities: The traditional composition/essay in which the teacher asks the
students to write about their own experiences (e.g. after holidays), narrate stories (e.g. a funny
anecdote), or describe pictures, is a good example of a free writing task. For example:
describe and identify, story construction, etc.
Ur (2012) mentioned the following writing tasks:
A. Creative writing
1) A story based on some kind of given stimulus: A title, a picture or series of pictures, or a
first or last sentence, a personal anecdote describing an occasion when students were
disappointed (or afraid, surprised, relieved, etc.), and a poem based on a given stimulus: topic,
a particular structure, first or last lines.
2. Instructions: An instruction sheet for something students know how to do (for example,
prepare some kind of food) or directions how to get somewhere.
3. Interpersonal communication such as a letter or email applying for a job, a letter of
complaint, a reply to a letter, a comment on a blog: either one that already exists, one set up
for the class, or an email telling a friend what students have been doing recently and
suggesting a meeting.
4. Description: It includes a description of a view, a place or a person, a description of a
process, such as a scientific experiment, the life-cycle of an animal, and a sequence of events
represented by a flowchart.
5. Responses to literature: A synopsis of a book, play, or film, a review evaluating a piece of
literature the class has read.
6. Persuasion: A recommendation for some kind of change in a student’s home community or
place of work/study, addressed to the appropriate authority, an advertisement for a product, a
leaflet promoting an institution, a tourist attraction, etc.
7. Information: A newspaper report on an item of news, genuine or imaginary, a short paper
providing information on a particular person, event or invention, previously researched on the
Internet.

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B. Writing in class
After having explained the task, teachers are likely to send the students to do most of
the writing on their own at home. However, it is useful to be able to vary this routine by
occasionally doing shorter writing assignments in class. For example:
• Collaborative planning. Students plan their texts in pairs or small groups in class, before
going off to do the actual writing alone. They later come together to compare results.
• Five-minute writing. Students have exactly five minutes – no more, no less –to write
something in class. The time limitation is a useful quick way of providing extra writing
experience.
• Multiple contributions. Students are given a topic and are asked to write a phrase, a word or
a sentence on it at the top of a sheet of paper. They then pass the paper to their neighbour,
who adds another line, continuing the idea which the first student has expressed (not just
adding another sentence about the topic). The process continues until there are 5 to 15
contributions. Note that the paper remains open, not folded, so that every new writer can see
all the previous contributions. The results are then read out to the class. The same can be done
with a story: the first line is given, and students continue adding further events to the
narrative.
C. Process writing
When they have mastered the basics, students need to progress and improve their
writing. This can be helped to some extent by focused instruction on spelling and punctuation;
however, the best way to promote students’ writing ability is through the process-writing
cycle: the experience of writing a first draft, getting feedback, and rewriting. The main
problems for teachers are how to help students write their first draft(s); and how to give
effective feedback on these that will help them produce as good a final draft as possible.
 First draft. Students need to be aware that the first draft is not graded and nor are any other
preliminary drafts (if the process-writing cycle is repeated more than once). The assessment is
given only on the final draft. Not giving a grade for preliminary drafts has two important
results. First, it lowers stress: students feel freer to experiment and to use language they are
not quite sure of but want to try out; they know that they will not be penalized if they get it
wrong and will be shown how to get it right. Second, they are highly motivated to implement
feedback and improve in order to achieve a better final draft.
 Support. Having given the assignment, teachers need to provide support in order to ensure
that students write their first draft as well as possible. This support can include:
• providing key vocabulary that teachers think students might need or that they ask for;
• providing a ‘model’ text similar to the one required by the task;
• some discussion of possible content;
• guidance on the organization of texts of the relevant genre, and occasionally conventional
formats (e.g. the placing of the address or date on a paper letter);
• allowing the beginning of the writing in class so that students have the opportunity to
consult teachers as they write. They can then continue writing alone in class or at home.
Hyland (2009, 2016) and Surkamp and Viebrock (2018) indicated that following a
process-approach to writing, teachers would set pre-writing tasks to generate ideas about the
content but also the structure of a piece of writing. They would encourage brainstorming and
subsequent structuring activities. Often teachers require their students to produce several

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drafts based on teacher and peer feedback while asking their learners to postpone surface
corrections until the final editing.
3. Assessing the Writing Skill
Lázaro (1996) stated that as important as planning activities to help students develop
their writing skills is assessing their written work. It is invaluable to both students, who can
learn from their errors, and teachers, who can check the students’ progress and identify
specific problems.
Fairly controlled writing tasks (such as gap-filling, reordering, open dialogues, etc.) can
easily be corrected orally in class - students can correct each other’s work in pairs and then
the whole class goes through the answers together. This type of correction involves students
in the revision and editing of their own pieces of writing so that they can learn from their
errors. However, there are times when students have to write more freely in English, and it is
necessary to correct their work individually. It is therefore necessary to plan a clear
assessment programme of writing at the beginning of the academic year.
Ur (2012) noted, assessing free writing is very difficult. Teachers do not have the
problem of the fleeting nature of the input, as in speaking, but they do need to assess various
aspects: accuracy, coherent organization, content and so on. How much weight should be
given to each? Some rubrics can adapted from a variety of assessment scales from different
sources and are appropriate for writing at an intermediate or advanced level.
 Compositions/Essays are probably the most common form of tests of writing skills at
intermediate or advanced levels. The student is given a topic, or sometimes a genre,
communicative purpose and target audience, and asked to write a composition/essay of a set
length.
 Brief Descriptions and Dialogues can be used to test writing at elementary levels. The
student is given a picture to describe, or the beginning of a dialogue to continue with a set
number of exchanges. Care has to be taken when selecting the picture or writing the
beginning of the dialogue to limit the lexical and grammatical knowledge required to do the
test.
Importantly, Brown and Abeywickrama (2018) gave some examples of writing tests
including the following:
 Copying. There is nothing innovative or modern about directing a test-taker to copy letters
or words.
 Listening Cloze Selection Tasks. These tasks combine dictation with a written script that has
a relatively frequent deletion ratio (every fourth or fifth word perhaps). The test sheet
provides a list of missing words from which the test-taker must select. The purpose at this
stage is not to test spelling but to give practice writing. To increase the difficulty, the list of
words can be deleted, but then spelling might become an obstacle.
 Picture-Cued Tasks. Familiar pictures are displayed, and test-takers are told to write the
word that the picture represents. Assuming no ambiguity in identifying the picture (cat, hat,
chair, table, etc.), successful completion of the task requires no reliance on aural
comprehension.
 Form Completion Tasks. A variation on pictures is the use of a simple form (registration,
application, etc.) that asks for name, address, phone number, and other data. Assuming, of

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course, that prior classroom instruction has focused on filling out such forms, this task
becomes an appropriate assessment of simple tasks such as writing one’s name and address.
 Converting Numbers and Abbreviations to Words. Some tests have a section in which
numbers—for example, hours of the day, dates, or schedules—are shown and test-takers are
directed to write out the numbers. This task can serve as a reasonably reliable method to
stimulate handwritten English.
 Spelling Tests. The teacher dictates a simple list of words, one word at a time; then uses the
word in a sentence and repeats the sentence; then pauses for test-takers to write the word.
 Multiple-Choice Techniques. Presenting words and phrases in the form of a multiple-choice
task risks crossing over into the domain of assessing reading, but if the items have a follow-up
writing component, they can serve as formative reinforcement of spelling conventions.
 Matching Phonetic Symbols. If students have become familiar with the phonetic alphabet,
they could be shown phonetic symbols and asked to write the correctly spelled word
alphabetically.
 Dictation and Dicto-Comp. Dictation is simply the rendition in writing of what one hears
aurally, so it could be classified as an imitative type of writing, especially because a portion of
the test-taker’s performance centers on correct spelling. In a dicto-comp, a paragraph is read
at normal speed, usually two or three times, then the teacher asks students to rewrite the
paragraph from the best of their recollection. In one of several variations of the dicto-comp
technique, the teacher, after reading the passage, distributes a handout with key words from
the paragraph, in sequence, as cues for the students.
 Picture Description. A somewhat more complex picture may be presented, showing, say, a
person reading on a couch, a cat under a table, books and pencils on the table, chairs around
the table, a lamp next to the couch, and a picture on the wall above the couch. Test-takers are
asked to describe the picture using four of the following prepositions: on, over, under, next to,
around. As long as the prepositions are used appropriately, the criterion is considered to be
met.
 Picture Sequence Description. A sequence of three to six pictures depicting a story line can
provide a suitable stimulus for written production. The pictures must be simple and
unambiguous because an open-ended task at the selective level would give test-takers too
many options.
 Paraphrasing. The initial step in teaching paraphrasing is to ensure that learners understand
the importance of paraphrasing—to express something in one’s own words, to devise
alternative wording and phrasing to convey meaning, and to create variety in expression.
 Guided Question and Answer. A guided question-and-answer format in which the test
administrator poses a series of questions that essentially serves as an outline of the emergent
written task.
 Paragraph Construction Tasks.
1. Topic Sentence Writing. Assessment of the effectiveness of a topic sentence consists of:
specifying the writing of a topic sentence, scoring points for its presence or absence, scoring
and/or commenting on its effectiveness in stating the topic.
2. Topic Development within a Paragraph. Because paragraphs are intended to provide a
reader with “clusters” of meaningful, connected thoughts or ideas, another stage of

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assessment is development of an idea within a paragraph. Four criteria are commonly applied
to assess the quality of a paragraph: clarity of expression of ideas, logic of the sequence and
connections, cohesiveness or unity of the paragraph, and overall effectiveness or impact of the
paragraph as a whole
3. Development of Main and Supporting Ideas. Across Paragraphs. When writers string two or
more paragraphs together in a longer text (and as they move up the continuum from
responsive to extensive writing), they attempt to articulate a thesis or main idea with clearly
stated supporting ideas.