Teaching Writing on CELTA: A Practical Guide

Video transcript - A Practical Guide to Teaching Writing on CELTA

Teaching writing is one of those things that sounds as if it ought to be simple. Give the learners a topic. Ask them to write. Job done. Except, of course, it isn’t like that at all.

Because very often what you get is confusion, very little writing, badly organised writing, or learners who clearly have ideas in their heads but absolutely no idea how to get them onto the page.

So in this video, I want to give you a practical guide to teaching writing, especially if you’re doing CELTA, but also if you’re already teaching and want your writing lessons to work better.

Why teaching writing is different

The first thing to say is that writing is not just speaking written down. It’s a different skill.

When learners are writing, they have to think of ideas, choose which ideas are relevant, organise them, choose suitable language, control grammar and spelling, think about punctuation and obviously think about the reader as well.

That’s quite a lot to be doing all at once.

And unlike speaking, where the language disappears as soon as it’s been said, writing just sits there on the page looking back at you, which can make learners feel rather exposed.

It also means that learners often notice their mistakes more in writing, which is useful, but can also make them less confident.

The most important thing to consider in writing, as with any communication, is the content. Obviously, it does need to get the message across in an appropriate way and this is usually determined by three things: organisation, accuracy and appropriate vocabulary and grammar.

Can the learner organise the writing in a way that makes sense to the reader? Because a piece of writing can have good language in it and still be difficult to follow if it’s badly organised.

And can they write accurately enough to be understood?

Can they use the kind of vocabulary and grammatical structures that sound right in whatever written context that might be- this is obviously different if you’re writing a business email than if you’re writing a text to a friend, for example.

Writing subskills

It’s also worth saying that when we teach writing, we’re not just teaching one giant skill called “writing”.

There are lots of subskills involved.

Learners may need help with generating ideas, selecting relevant content, organising ideas logically, paragraphing, using topic sentences, using linking words, writing suitable openings and closings, using an appropriate tone and of course accuracy at sentence level as well.

And this matters because when a learner thinks they’re “bad at writing” in some huge general sense it’s easier in a lesson to isolate subskills to focus on to help them feel as if they’re making progress.

So as in any lesson on CELTA and afterwards, you want to make your aim specific.

Instead of saying: to improve learners’ writing, think about:
to help learners organise a complaint email more clearly.
to help learners use linking expressions in a review.
to help learners write a more effective opening paragraph in a story.

Those are much clearer aims and they make it much easier to plan the lesson and see whether it worked.

Product, process and genre

Other terms you’ll come across when you start to look at teaching writing are the product approach, the process approach and a genre approach. So let’s have a look at what those are now.

A product approach focuses mainly on the finished piece of writing.

So the learners look at a model text, notice the structure and useful language and then try to produce something similar.

That can be really useful, especially when learners need help with a particular kind of text, like a formal email or a review, especially at lower levels where they haven’t had much exposure to these in English yet.

A process approach, on the other hand, focuses more on the stages of writing.

So you treat it as something that develops through planning, drafting, reviewing and improving, giving learners a writing task without a model at first so that they have more scope to see what they can produce on their own and then polish that with the help of feedback from the teacher.

This can be especially helpful at higher levels when they’ve already got experience of a particular kind of writing and you might still use a model- but perhaps later in the lesson- to compare against what they’ve written.

Then there’s genre.

A genre approach means helping learners understand that different kinds of writing have different conventions.

A formal email sounds different from a message to a friend.

A complaint letter needs different language from a blog post.

So this approach helps learners notice things like layout, structure, level of formality, typical phrases and what the reader expects from that kind of text.

In practice, of course, we often use a mixture of all three.

We may use a model text, which is more product-oriented.

We may then help learners plan and draft, which is more process-oriented.

And while we’re doing that, we may focus on the typical features of a particular text type, which brings in genre.

Common mistakes when teaching writing

So let’s look at some of the things that can go wrong in a writing lesson.

The first one is setting a writing task without enough preparation.

This happens all the time and it’s tempting to do in speaking lessons as well as writing.

If you say something like: Write about your hometown or Write a formal email of complaint, don’t be surprised when the learners don’t produce much or it’s not great.

If you give learners ideas, language, a model, or some sense of what a good answer looks like, you’ll get much better results.

The second problem is only giving writing as homework and not really teaching it.

Now obviously there is nothing wrong with homework. But sometimes writing gets pushed out of the lesson completely and becomes this rather lonely activity learners do at home and then get back covered in red pen.

And that’s not really the same as TEACHING writing. If we want learners to write better, we need to help them with the process, not just comment on the product at the end.

The third problem is focusing only on grammar correction.

Grammar matters, definitely. But if all the feedback learners ever get is grammar and spelling correction, they’re never going to improve at organisation, clarity, style, register, or how to make the writing actually work better for a reader.

So what does a good writing lesson look like?

If you’re on CELTA, this is really important but I hope it’s helpful to other teachers just starting out, too. A good writing lesson is not just: here’s the topic, off you go.

You need to give them support before they write. First of all, get clear about what kind of text they’re writing.
Is it an email? A review? A complaint? A social media post?

Different text types have different conventions and if learners don’t know what those are, they’re working in the dark.

Included in this is being clear about who they’re writing for because that affects the tone and the language they choose.

They often need support with ideas and organisation too. That might mean brainstorming. It might mean looking at a model text. It might mean matching headings to paragraphs, ordering ideas or noticing useful linking expressions.

So very often, some work needs to happen before the actual writing if you want the writing itself to go well.

AI can be useful here as well, not to do it for them but to generate model texts, provide examples at different levels, give them detailed feedback, or even produce a weak piece of writing that learners can improve.

That last one is really useful. Asking learners to critique or improve an AI-generated text can be much less threatening than asking them to write their own first draft immediately.The trick is to use AI as support, not as a replacement for thinking and writing.

As a bit of practical advice here’s a summary of the things I’d really keep in mind.

First: be clear about your aim - and make it a writing subskill aim if you can. What exactly are you trying to help the learners do better?

Secondly: don’t skip the preparation stage. Very often, the success of the writing depends on what happens before the learners start writing.

Thirdly: make the task itself very clear. What are they writing? Who are they writing to? How long should it be? What should it include?

Fourthly: monitor and support while they’re writing. Writing lessons are not the moment for the teacher to sit down and have a little rest. move round, answer questions, remind them of useful language and generally help keep things moving. Collaborative writing where two people work together to produce a text can make the class feel a lot less like an exam, too.

Finally, of course, there’s feedback.  Not just a miserable festival of red pen grammar correction. Respond to the content and organisation and what they did well.

Many learners find writing quite intimidating because writing feels slower and more permanent than speaking. It can feel quite high-stakes. So scaffold the process and be encouraging!

If you can get these things right, writing lessons become much more productive and much less painful for everybody involved.

If you’re thinking about doing CELTA and you’d like more help with lesson planning, grammar terminology and all the other bits that can feel a bit overwhelming at first, have a look at my CELTA preparation materials. They’ve helped take the stress out of CELTA for thousands of trainees and helped them achieve their best.

And if you’re already teaching and want support, fresh ideas and a flexible CPD journey, do have a look at The Next Step, my friendly community for teachers.

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.