How to teach the students to write their compositions in En?

Seagull · Post by **Seagull** » Fri Dec 07, 2007 7:14 am

I am an English teacher in a middle school.I think it is too difficult to teach the students to write their compositions in English. Would you like to give me some advice ?I am looking forward to receiving your reply.Thank you!

Sheila Collins · Post by **Sheila Collins** » Fri Dec 07, 2007 10:42 am

When teaching children to write, start small: a few sentences, or a short paragraph is good. Have them copy text which appeals to them, and which they understand.

Whether you start with non-fiction ("describe the yard outside"), or fiction (limericks), depends on the inclination of your students.

Tanuki · Post by **Tanuki** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 12:52 pm

Heya Seagull

Run a Google search for things like:

* +scaffolding +"language teaching"

* +scaffolding +"language learning"

* +scaffolding +"language"

* +scaffolding +Vygotsky

That should provide ample starting point for you.

Best,
Tanuki

EnglishRaven · Post by **EnglishRaven** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 2:14 pm

This depends a lot on the proficiency level of your students, how far along they are with written composition in their own language, and what exactly you mean by "compose".

The genre and text-type are important as well (for example, a personal letter versus a simple advertisement, or writing a formal essay).

I like to start with interactive letters and emails (whether they are to classmates, the teacher, or real/imaginary pen pals). They can be as short or as long as the students feel comfortable with, but as the teacher you can being to shape the content and detail with specific prompts of challenges. This tends to feel more natural to the students for starters than something like a formal essay, and overlaps nicely with any interactive and communicative objectives you may have.

Based on their production, you can being to teach basics of punctuation and paragraph formation, as well as efficient and expressive content at the sentence level. This is then a useful platform for expanding later into story or essay writing.

Story-writing can be great, but it's not as smooth and easy as a lot of guides will suggest. It can be very taxing for a low-level student to write a complete story and keep it both interesting and intelligible. At least with personal letter/email writing, the students can begin with factual here and now content and familiar language constructions.

Hope the suggestions help!

Senorita Daniels · Post by **Senorita Daniels** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 5:45 pm

A fourth grader of mine had to write a haiku for English class. I first wrote one in Spanish, his native language. We wrote several together on the computer. I also taught him about poetic language being different than standard speaking language, because of the strict number of syllables, we had to use a more poetic form of words. This might not be the best kind of poem for beginning to write becasue of the 5-7-5 syllables, but it also keeps the number of words down, so those with a small vocabulary wouldn't feel so pressured to know tons of words.