Teaching to Write

The aim of this unit

• To make you think about writing as a skill

• To reflect upon types and mechanisms of writing

• To draw on activities for teaching to write

What do you have to do in this unit

1. Warming-up discussion

2. Input reading

3. Self-assessment questions (SAQ)

4. Micro-teaching

5. Integrated task

SAQ 0

Mark the following statements as “true”, “false” or “debatable” (T F D)

Statements	T F D
Writing is a process of ENCODING ideas on paper. Writing CLARIFIES ideas born in mind The PURPOSE of writing is to store information. Writing can ADEQUATELY convey the message. Writing is the same as speaking but IN LETTERS Writing requires the knowledge of a written text FORMAT Writing is done with the READER in mind

Input reading 1

Warming-up discussion 1.1

What do you write in your own real world and what are the functions of this writing?

Writing	Functions

Writing as a communicative skill

Writing is a communicative skill to send, store and retrieve messages with the help of written symbols. History of writing is very long. Writing originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt, pre-Columbian America, possibly in India. The earliest evidence of writing is cuneiform script from Mesopotamia at 3500 BC. Recent findings prove that "trident-shaped" markings on pottery existed in Pakistan in 5500 BC. There were six early systems of visual graphic language representations that contributed to the development of writing systems: ritualistic markings found in caves, tallying devices to keep count, property markings indicating owners, tokens and totems as symbols of clans, mnemonic devices to keep memory of things, pictographic/ideograph narratives. Modern writing systems are different and they include graphic representations of morphemes and words (Chinese), graphic representations of syllables (Hebrew), alphabetic representations of phonemes (English, Russian etc)

Exploratory task 1.1

Explore the pronunciation of the following words and indicate what phonemes are represented by the graphemes in words. How can you account for the different in graphic rules?

Words	Graphemes and phonemes
damn, dam, waffle, waggle, change, chance, rough,, borough, enough, creed, crèche, reveille, survey, lose, loose, gene, Jeanie, bourgeois, savior, saver, soup, soot, term firm, fur, third, toccata, Jakarta, venom, lever, liver, live, whale, wale, wail.

Types of writing

Writing can be expressive, poetic, informative and persuasive. Depending on the type of writing, the writer concentrates either on the subject matter of the written piece, or on the reader, or on one’s own feelings and thoughts. The triangle of the “subject matter”, “writer” and “reader” is shown below.

Subject matter

Writer Reader

(After J.Kinneavy. Quoted in T.O'Brien. 1996. P. 8).

In expressive writing an emphasis is made on the writer him/herself expressing one's own thoughts as in a diary. In poetic writing the emphasis is made on the language, as the choice of language creates the necessary poetic effect. In informative writing the emphasis is on the subject matter. In persuasive writing emphasis is on the reader who is in the focus of the writers attention and whose train of thought the writer is intending the change.