Teaching Writing - Week 7 - Nuts and Bolts

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Teaching Writing for the Bachelor's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IIC 2023. In this class we will talk about the building blocks of writing, mechanical aspects such as handwriting, spelling, and punctuation. We will also review your first lesson planning assignment and preview your sixth creation.

Today's Goals:

• Present your first lesson plan and explain your design choices.
• Explore the importance of mechanics in L2 writing.
• Review a number of strategies for teaching handwriting and spelling.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I provide effective writing instruction for young learners?
• What strategies can I use to teach the mechanical aspects of writing?
• How can I develop students' understanding of handwriting, spelling, and basic punctuation?

Task 1: Lesson Plan Walkthrough - Young Learners Reading and Writing Lesson

This week you were asked to write your first lesson plan. Let's take a moment to review what you created.

• Example: Walk us through your plan.
• Strengths: Tell us what you think are the strengths of combining reading and writing in the lesson plan template you used.
• Challenges: Tell us the challenges you faced while creating the plan or potential challenges you foresee for teacher or students who will follow the plan.

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Project Check-in

Remember, you should already be thinking about your final Learner Needs and Context Analysis project. A few weeks back we talked about some strategies to gather useful information about your students' writing needs and preferences. Have you had the chance to think about the design of your data collection instruments?

• Your Course Project: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Reading Exploration - Nuts and Bolts

Let's discuss the following questions regarding the assigned reading for this week, "Nuts and Bolts".

• The Handwriting Challenge: Click the link below and complete the dictation you teacher says. Now complete the dictation backwards!

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• What was challenging about this?
• What insight does it give us about the handwriting and spelling challenge faced by young learners of English?
• What do you remember about the process of learning to write in Spanish?

• Teaching Handwriting: Hand writing is a challenge for children and for adult English learners whose native language uses a non-Latin script. They need to learn which direction the letters go (left to right in English) and how to form the individual letters. For very early learners, it is helpful to give them tracing activities or to use arrow diagrams to help them see the direction to move their pencils. 

• It's also important to bring their attention to issues of height and depth. Special three-lined writing paper is very useful for this purpose.

• Recognition and Production: The author of the chapter suggests a two stage approach for helping early learners with handwriting. 

• Notice: Work on practice exercises that have students notice the shape of letters and words. For example, a simple word search task where student need to find all the examples of the letter G. You can also show them a list of words using similar letters and have them find all the examples of a particular word. What are some additional recognition tasks you might do?

• Write: There are many writing tasks the go from extremely controlled to less controlled. What are some additional recognition tasks you might do?

• Tracing
• Copying
• Fill in the blanks with the missing letter
• Fill in the blanks with the missing word
• Classify words and copy them into a chart

• The Spelling Challenge: Read the poem below. What is the poem about? What is the author's message? How does it relate to the topic of learning to write?

• Eye have a spelling checker
  
  It came with my pea sea
  It clearly marks four my review
  Miss steaks eye can knot sea
  
  Eye strike a key and type a word
  And weight four it to say
  Weather eye am wrong oar write
  It shows me strait a weigh
  
  As soon as a mist ache is maid
  It nose bee for two long
  And eye can put the error write
  It's rarely ever wrong
  
  Eye have run this poem threw it
  I am shore your pleased two no
  It's letter perfect all the weigh
  My checker told me sew

• Teaching Spelling: Read the quote below. What do you know about the term comprehensible input?
• Quote: "The best way of helping students to learn how to spell is to have them read as much as possible. Extensive reading (reading longer texts, such as simplified readers, for pleasure) helps students to remember English spelling rules and their exceptions, although many students may need some encouragment to do this kind of reading (p. 47)."

• Traditional Practice: You can look for or create your own practice worksheets that review common spelling rules (i before e except after c, double consonsants, etc.) but that is not the only thing you can do to practice spelling. 

• Dictation Variations: There are a lot of dictation exercises that can be fun for learners.
• Standard Dictation and Group Recreation
• Running Dictation
• Back to Back Dictation
• Contextualized Dictation (cocktail party)

• Games: Many games can also be used to elicit correct spelling of words from students.
• Wheel of Fortune
• Crossword Puzzles
• Word Search
• Broken Telephone Spelling Rally
• Bananagrams: CLICK HERE

• Teaching Punctuation: The author gave several strategies to work on punctuation. In your study guide you were asked to complete the exercises yourself. What do you remember about these?

• Noticing Punctuation
• Adding Punctuation
• Noticing and Adding Punctuation

Task 4: Handwriting and Spelling - Building Blocks

Let's finish today's class by previewing your sixth creation task. 

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

References: 

Harmer, J. (2004). How to Teach Writing. Longman.