Week 12 Reading reflection - Teaching Writing

In this week's reading, there are a few points in Chapter 21 - HDB book that capture my attention when it comes to teaching and learning the skill of writing.

First, the book distinguishes two types of writing that has been used in academic context: real writing, in which the purpose is to express oneself, and display writing, where writing is a primary for the display of a student's knowledge. Personally i have never thought of writing in this way before, and that's probably one of the reasons why i am really delighted by this. It seems like in school the a large amount of writing falls under the second category, where students are "forced" to show teachers how well they grasp the knowledge in form of writing. And i wonder if that, in any case, may cause the lack of love for writing in some language learners, since they are not writing in their own will. Still, i think one of the things that language teachers can do here is to turn display writing into real writing, or in other words, create an authentic need for students to write about what they have learned. In my opinion, this can be done by a number of ways, one of which being to change the way a writing prompt is worded. For instance, if the prompt which asks students to write about how to make a birthday cake is categorized as display writing, creating a context for the prompt such as "The birthday of your friends' mom is approaching and she wants to make a birthday cake as a surprise to her mom. However, she doesn't know how to make a good strawberry birthday cake and writes to you for help. Write back and show your friend how to make a birthday cake." Here the issue of keeping a specific audience in mind while writing is also brought into play.

Second, the matter of timed writing is also worth mentioning. As stated in the book, for the purpose of evaluation, many in class activities require students to finish their writing in a certain amount of time and after handing the writing students rarely have the chance to get back to it and see what improvements they can made. Although timed writing is necessary in assessing students' writing skills, especially when they prepare for English tests such as TOEFL or IELTS, this does put them under a lot of pressure and make writing a painful rather than delighting experience. Also, this can also cause the bad habit of not planning or proofreading the writing, since often times students give an excuse that they run out of time to do these steps . Language teachers, therefore, need to be really sensitive when it comes to writing within time constraint, and makes sure that we give our students enough practice to familiarize themselves with speed writing when they need to.