An Essay about Teaching English Writing

  An Essay about TeachingEnglish Writing

    Zhang Chao   ZiboNormal College Junior High School

English is a language, while we tend to teachit as the same method as politics, which lay more emphasis on infusion ratherthan education. Differences between infusion and education are infusion meansthat students remember without understanding, while education encouragesstudents to learn accompanied by thinking, understanding and using. Well, howto teach a language? In my opinion, students should be educated in a moreauthentic, appropriate and all-English atmosphere. Moreover, it’s essential forthem not only to learn new words and structures, but also to grasp the culturebehind and even think in English.

  When we talk about English writing, most of the Chinese teachers associatewriting lessons with a class that teaches students to write something inEnglish. During their classes, they tend to ask students to write again andagain. However, I believe that teaching English writing is an eco-system. It iscomposed of four steps, which are reading, learning, using and correcting.

  Now let’s elaborate the writing eco-system. First and the foremost,before writing, students should read many passages with the same topic. Forexample, if we ask students to write a composition about environment, we areexpected to prepare two or more passages about it.   

The next step is learning. Ask studentsto read and find the new words, structures associated with environment, anddiscuss their usages and make their own examples, which is better to befollowed by a timely test. Reading and learning should be either arranged as aseparate class, or prepared before the writing class. I suggest that the formerone should be better.

Then, maybe many students could hardlywait to use what they’ve learned through reading. However, during this step,they are supposed to be encouraged to follow three parts: one is making asimple sentence, then a complicated one, finally a curtailed one. Firstly,teachers may ask students to make a sentence like “You’d better play sportswith friends” “You will get popular.” Secondly, expend the sentences. We can combine the two sentences aboveinto one, like “You’d better play sports with friends, so that you will getpopular.” or “You’d better play sports with friends, in order that you will getpopular.” Thirdly, it’s our duty to teach our students to make our sentencesshorter, because English is such a language that “the shorter, the better”.Thus the sentence should be curtailed as “You’d better play sports with friendsto get popular.”

After the three steps above, you willthink that our writing lessons are finished. However, I think it possible toadd a correcting step, which is so essential that not only can students getconfident from demonstrating their compositions, they can also improve theirEnglish through correcting them. If an introverted student speak a sentencelike “You can play game with some people. so that the people can became youfriend” in public, he will become more confident. What’s more, if otherscorrect his mistakes, he will remembered the right sentence for a long period.There are many mistakes in his sentence, like the plurals, the usage ofarticles and modals, and the misuse of pronouns.

Plainly, teaching writing is buildingan eco-system. There is an emerging sign that teachers tend to simplify it to aseparate class, which is absolutely inappropriate. If we follows the foursteps—reading, learning, using and correcting, our students will amelioratetheir composition.

                                                Mar.21^st