How to Be a Good English-writing Teacher
In our writing classrooms, we are writers, including teachers and students. In other words, in order to teach effective English writing, we must be effective English writers ourselves. We can try starting blogs or vlogs, writing articles, or developing short stories for English writing. We, then, practice and write out the paragraphs by ourselves. Once we figure out the themes and topics of our writing, reading articles and brainstorming with others are essential because they are the sources of our writing. Teachers, in the writing classroom, should encourage students to write well. In a supportive writing environment, teachers participate as writers to demonstrate the importance of writing. By taking part in writing lessons and activities, teachers are also models to teach the writing skills and to create good pieces of English writing for students. Teachers help students to collaborate throughout the writing process by brainstorming ideas in a writing group, and ask students to keep notebooks in which they record topics for English writing. No matter what we write, we are able to share our written works and ask for the feedback. In this way, we can improve upon our English writing over time. Thus, teachers ought to urge students to share their works with each other in the classroom or through online. We might say that others’ opinions are also very important for our writing, especially our peers. Students need to know whether their writing is accurately and appropriately conveying its message or not by way of teachers’ advice and peers’ feedback.
Next, vocabulary and spelling skills affect the words we choose for our writing, for sure, because they can generate strong, interesting sentences that vary in length and complexity in order to convey the intended meanings in our writing. For this purpose, students should be encouraged to learn new words, as well as words they wish to include in their writing. Teachers should also help students acquire the skills to generate and check plausible spellings for words in the writing. Afterwards, students gain good and suitable words correctly, connect these words to form sentences, and, eventually, build a group of sentences to communicate particular ideas.
Furthermore, when teachers focus sentence-level instruction on sentence construction, encouraging students to consider the meanings and syntax of the sentences, teachers, at the same time, explicitly demonstrate how sentence construction and sentence mechanics for students, such as punctuation and capitalization, etc. Students, then, practice to create solid sentences and to use a variety of sentence structures in their writing.
An article is a piece of writing about a particular topic. It might also be flavored by the writer’s style. Depending on the purpose of the article, we might use very direct informative language, or more poetic language to create the subject matter. Normally, we use complete sentences (S + V + O) to convey ideas, and past tense, present tense, present perfect tense and progressive tense to indicate the timeline. Here are some typical subjects covered by article writers:
Travel
Sport
History
Hobbies/Home/Craft
Music
Celebrities/Famous figures (i.e., an article about an actor’s life and career)
The basic structure of an article for a newspaper, magazine or website, is usually in three parts: Opening is engaging the reader, or outlining the main point of the article. The middle part is a series of paragraphs that go into more details and examples. The end is a concluding paragraph that draws the points together. The conclusion should connect back to the opening idea. For example, here’s an article that tries to persuade the reader to eat a more balanced, healthy diet. The title is “Eat Right, Live Longer.” In the first paragraph: It has been scientifically proven that the less junk food a person consumes, the longer they are likely to live. “So why isn’t everyone dumping the junk?” Jordan McIntyre investigates. A staple part of twenty-first century British home-life is the weekly takeaway treat. Finger-licking burgers, sticky ribs and crispy chicken wings are, for many, the normal Friday night feast. The average national calorie in the UK is a whopping 4500 a day, a key factor in the obesity cases that are soaring. Fast food packed with fat and obesity contributes to a range of health issues, such as most significantly heart disease and depression. So why aren’t we changing our lifestyles? In the second paragraph: Families, in these days, are spending less and less time at home during the working week. People always engage a lot of school commitments, work meetings and extracurricular activities. Therefore, fewer people are able to put in the effort to prepare fresh, healthy meals for their daily lives. When time is tight, it seems that we are even more willing to compromise our routines for a little bit of what we fancy i.e., fast fatty food. In the third paragraph: However, Georgia Thomas of the University of Food says, “I am convinced that it is possible to live a busy lifestyle and prepare healthy, satisfying meals at the same time.” Nowadays, people have simply got out of the habit of cooking. That’s not healthy. Even though we are busy people, we still have to treat us well. How do we reward ourselves? Of course, we, certainly, need to eat healthy food. In the final paragraph, the writer uses quotations from an expert to add credibility to the argument. As readers, we really expect this article to go on to explore how we can eat healthily. And in the end, we are clear to see that the writer concludes with an explanation of how easy it is to do this. In the above-mentioned article, we know that taking examples and listing facts are very much necessary to increase the contents and ideas of our writing.
At last, proofreading is, extremely, necessary. Proofreading is the ability to read through a written piece, while editing errors and correcting them in order to let the writing become better. Strong editing and proofreading skills mean that students can identify areas in their works that need correction, such as tense, spelling and punctuation. They can also spot and revise errors in their styles, structures and sentences. The main purpose of proofreading is to improve the quality of the writing, ensuring that there are no lingering mistakes, and sentences’ errors or writing inconsistencies. Proofreading is the last writing process before the writers submit their writing. Thus, it is not only important to check grammar and spelling, it is also highly advised to ensure that the idea of the writer is in agreement with what he or she wants to communicate with the readers. No writer creates an excellent writing without reviewing, reflecting, and revising before the final version of their writing is complete and submitted.