I just realized something: Adult ESL students could, and should keep a journal.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it can be to make level/fair time to help students work on AND IMPROVE their writing skills? It’s easy to devout time to speaking, listening and reading activities. But for me, and I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, making room for regular writing practice just doesn’t seem to happen so easily. (And definitely not enough to foster serious improvement.)

I realized this because of a writing activity I did with on of my classes last week. A fake email, where students had to 1. Provide background info on a project they were working on (a real one.) 2. Use examples of the present perfect and present perfect continuous – our class grammar flavor of the month.

The results of the writing activity startled me.  Though students were able to mostly perform well in spoken activities around the same 2 points mentioned before, almost across the board great difficulty was experienced when students needed to express the SAME things on paper. It was like a block happened. Sentences were choppy. Little to no background info was given. And the present perfect and present perfect continuous – if they appeared in writing, often were pretty weak. There were some exceptions. And happily, each student were able to deploy one or two correct examples for me, but in general…not so much.

That’s when the thought hit me: No wonder they are having a hard time with this, I never/rarely practice writing with them. I’d have to honestly say that 90% of my classroom time is based heavily on Speaking, Reading and Listening. A meagre 10% (if that) goes to writing work.

Balance is a must. This is an example of me looking under the hood and finding a problem with my own teaching practice. A problem I need to correct if I’m to serve my students well. (And by the way, you didn’t see any explosions, did you? No smoke. No fires. No shouting or swearing. (Promise…there was none.) I uncovered a weakness in how I was giving class, and I’ve started planning ways to strengthen it. That’s part of what teaching is all about, don’t you think? Thinking about how you do what you do, and planning ways to make yourself better.

My solution: Journals. From now on, I’ll be inviting students to get and keep a notebook especially for writing in. (Journaling.) I’ll be blocking off 10 to 15 minutes of class time each class for them to write. To begin, I’ll try offering prompts and maybe even scaffolding – partially complete sentences for them to continue with etc. I’ll also be including grammar flavors that I’d like to see sprinkled in their work, as well as perhaps important vocabulary. Themes and topics, well, I’ll hope I can leave that up to them but I’ll come prepared with a few to help get the writing process started. And at the end of the day, I’ll collect and comment on their work for the next class.

Why Journal? I almost ended this post without saying why I think journaling could help. 1) Carved out focus. Just mentioned how hard it is to make time for real writing activities in class. A journal space could help solve this. 2) Practice does make perfect. My students are making great improvements on the skills we spend time on. Speaking, Reading and Listening ability has improved greatly since we first began. Writing lags behind because…not enough practice! Regular time on target will help. 3) More focus on grammar/vocabulary/key language from class. There will be times where free writing will be welcome – but at least for now, to help my students improve, I’ll be making sure to have plenty of focus around classroom themes. (My last writing activity showed me that this was needed.)

Wondering: if you’re a writing teacher – would you say it’s ok to have a few different styles of writing/checking? Example: when you’re helping a student improve spoken fluency, you rarely step in to correct when they make a mistake. (Unless you lost understanding.) The goal is fluency. Confidence. (The more you stop students and correct, the easier you make it to undermine their progress and confidence.) If the goal is accuracy, you’ll step in each and every time a specific mistake is made to help students notice their mistake and correct. Could writing be approached in the same way?

Over to you: What have you done to help students devout more time to writing? Do you think this is a necessary ingredient in a balanced class?  You’re comments are so welcome! (Don’t be shy!)

Photo by bingbing