USEFUL STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE: WRITING SKILLS!

 Hi there 😄

 

Thanks for being here and taking a look to my blog, you're very welcome!

 

My name is Daniela Santander and I am a young English teacher who think it is a precious gift from the Lord, because we are the highway (the guiding process) in which cars (they ought to be our students) take long journeys and enjoy adventures that life gives to them.

In this post I will show you some tools and strategies that may be useful for you to teach and encourage to your guys to write in a proper way but especially for developing the writing skills they all need for a perfect communication with other people by using English.

First of all it is pretty important to know that there is no learning without emotion and expectation, so before the tips that you need to know, let me give you some clues that can help you to enhance these two facts needed for learning:

- To meet your students: when you identify their likes and dislikes is easier to know how to organize your daily lesson plan and the webpages that can be useful for creating activities that are interesting for them, so it is also good to know the way they response through certain activities, their age, some favorite activities and also hobbies.

- To broaden in culture: One of the most useful memories people use throughout of their life is the semantic memory and teachers can enhance it by showing them facts related to our culture and facts they need to know in general terms for having a good but powerful knowledge that they can use in English for sharing information to others.

- Readings of their interest: According to the first clue, when we really get to know our students, everything is easier in the classroom, so one of the best ways of improving their skills in the spoken and written English is by reading descriptive, narrative, and many other kinds of texts, news, scientific articles that they like, to make them in classes to read out loud, to figure out their meaning, to participate in warm up activities and to listen each other for working on comprehension.

Being a teacher is such a great experience, so the strategies that I mostly use in my experiences for improving the writing skills in my students are:

1. Warm up activities: All these activities have a writing approach known in the classroom as the EVIDENCE, in which they get use to make notes of Everything they do and in these activities two of the most important things are: that they have to move and think of solutions and what is better when they use both!

2. Thinking routines: These activities are part of the approach that the school in which I work use a lot for enhancing the girl’s understanding process in the different classes they have, but in English is everything more interesting because they use the four communicative skills and let the evidence of it when they write in a organized way what they do, some of these written activities are: see – think – wonder, the octopus, consigna auténtica, word – idea – phrase and so forth.

3. Role plays: What is written needs to be on scene! The best way the students can show what they prepare is through role plays that they prepare according to a given topic and the organization of the lines that each one of them have in the story, it helps them to memorize the order of it and to use expressions they have already learned.

5. Mini projects: These activities are very useful for testing the way they organize, analyze, summarize and show their own arguments by using written English, such as writing an essay, a decalogue and so on, it is useful for the final stage of the terms are done at any school we are part of!

Thanks for your attention!!