Shared Writing Is Not Just For Early Years And Young Learners
By: Steve Patterson
Submitted: 2010-11-10 00:08:47 | Word Count: 720
Shared writing is often used in early years learning, and then forgotten about. However it is a useful tool in teaching writing skills to ESL/EFL students and can be used at all levels including B2 level (UCLES FCE).
When shared writing is used in the classroom in the early years, it is designed to demonstrate how to begin to write independently. It shows students how to think about their writing processes. In second language classrooms, shared writing can support weaker students and demonstrate how to edit written work. This is an important skill which is all too often ignored. After all, students believe, on the whole, that editing and correcting is the teacher’s job. However there is no teacher to correct written work in an examination, so students must learn how to self-correct and edit their own work.
Using Shared Writing in an FCE Classroom
Explain that you will all write a story together, and take one of the exam style narratives to work on. The best sorts are the ones that give an opening sentence for you to use. Tell students that they will each give a sentence although not in turn, and should raise their hands rather than shout out their ideas. In this way no student will feel under pressure or be thinking about the next sentence because theirs is the next turn. Write the first sentence on a flip chart or board, and write down every sentence students give you. You can do this without comment or decide immediately which do not follow the storyline. Write these non sequiturs on one side of the board so that they can be discussed later.
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When you feel the story is almost complete, ask for different suggestions of how it might end, and write these on one side for later reference. Ask the whole class to vote on which ending is best and ask for explanations of why students think it is the best ending. You can agree with their choice or explain why you prefer another ending. If you do this it will extend the shared writing topic into the realms of literature and you may or may not want to integrate this into your lesson.
When the Story is Complete
Now you can go back to the sentences you rejected initially and ask why they were rejected. Perhaps they were off the subject or simply did not follow the last sentence, but were connected with the previous one, because students were not concentrating fully on what others were saying. Analyze each sentence in this way.
Then go back to the story and ask students to edit any spelling or grammar mistakes. Do this on the board. Finally ask students to write up the edited version in their notebooks for future reference. Remind students that this is how they should always work at an extended writing task. Point out that it is really useful to be able to correct mistakes as when it comes to an exam, they want to get as many marks as possible, so should always check their work for mistakes.
As homework, you can ask students to write a story individually, or you can wait until the next lesson to do this. You might want, in the next period, to split students into small groups of three or four and give them another shared writing task in order to reinforce the writing process of which editing is one of the most important parts.
Doing a writing task in this way is a good way for the teacher to discover what are mistakes and what are errors, i.e. the lexical and grammar items that cannot be corrected. You can then plan a further lesson to deal with these errors which students cannot correct. This task should not be viewed in isolation, but as part of the whole curriculum. Generally students enjoy working collaboratively and all too often don’t get the opportunities to do so.
You can do a shared writing exercise on report writing, and factual recounts, or any type of writing which students have difficulties with. Giving them a model which they have compiled themselves is beneficial as they are learning by doing and should recall what was taught when they look back at the edited model in their books.
