Learning to use the resources of the written language

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The most effective resource when it comes to writing is reading. It is not that a good reader will become good writer, but it will certainly help while developing meaning through writing. Nevertheless, in actual practice, students need to be aware of the purpose of the writing. In other words, teachers ought to set communicative writing activities, and first they have to point out the purpose of writing. Secondly, a purpose comes a reader, so teachers should emphasize the importance of knowing to whom is that text written for, in order to adequate the information, to the reader's level of cognition and schemata. Thrirdly, the text's structure should be taught paying special attention to the linking devices, sentences and paragraph formation.

It is also important to make clear, the difference between oral communication and written communication. Since they often have the same purpose, it is not expressed the same. While writing tends to adopt a formal structure, speaking always carries an unformal way of expression. So, student's need to learn that we do not write sounds.

Reflection:

As hard as it might seem, teachers should not give up on teaching how to write properly. I agree with those who state that student's might not know how to write correctly in their mother tongue, fact that makes our task a lot more difficult. Nonetheless, I strongly believe in the power of formal writing. As in speaking we have a formal way and an informal way to express the same message with the same meaning, but the decision upon using formal or informal expression will lay is to whom we will send the message, and it happens the same thing in writing, we might use informal writing will using IM and it is acceptable, but we will never use this kind of writing in academic writing to give an example. While for some IM writing will be the only way of writing, I have to say is up to us teachers to not let this happen, we need to teach the importance, relevance and communicative purpose of all kinds of formal written texts.

What is writing?

Writing, just as speaking is produced to infer some kind of meaning. In other words, the writen symbols must be arrange in such a way that it means something. The symbols can be arrange in words, sentences, paragraphs, horizontally, vertically, in lists and as long as it infers meaning it is consider writing. Nevertheless, there are ways to comunicate a message, in order for someone to get the right meaning. For this, we have to put our thoughts in paper and make sure that it is completely well written, since someone else is going to get our message, and is up to us if they get it correctly or not. But what do we write? As students we might do some note taking from time to time, but our academic writing is certainly the most recurrent activity of all. With essays, summaries, reflections, research projects, our academic writing takes place. Besides school writing we use it to send an e-mail to a friend, to chat on messenger, make the groceries list, and other spontenous writing. Where I want to go from here is to the reflection of why should we (as teachers) should teach writing, well the answer is simple, due to the different learning styles, some students will feel relieved if they have some visual aide to support their speech, and of course the class can rest from all the communicative learning while doing some writing, and for the teacher this writing will serve as some sort of evidence of student's learning progress.

But, of course, as in learning how to write in a mother tongue, it will take some time and sometimes it will not be the strongest skill of languages students.

Wrap up reading

Lesson Plan

Reflection:

It is so much easier to work and develop a classroom when you have everything planned, so why not do a daily lesson plan. What we learn by doing this excercise is that we do not need a lot of material to make a dynamic class, in other words, we can make tons of activities from just 1 reading, which for us teachers is great news.

Reading lesson sequences

Teachers use 'extensive reading' in classrooms as a tool to develop all sorts of skills in students, but this does not mean that there is only one way to do so. On the contrary, the best way to read in classroom is under certain 'sequences', this is, skimming the readings to get the whole meaning, so students can discuss about it, then give them questions to answer, this will make them scan the reading in order to get specific information, or they can just read the text that's going to be followed up by an activity. These are just examples of what we can accomplish from one reading, we can create are own sequences, in order to fulfill the learning objectives.

Reflection:

This is a great way to obtain so much from just one reading, I think is just wonderful, I hope to be able to be up to date all the time, and see if we can do good use of 'extensive reading' in my own classrooms (that is if I ever become a teacher). I guess I will have to experiment a lot, to get to know what activities, strategies and readings are suitable for our local situation.