TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WRITING

Teaching Writing takes time and effort. According to Anne Lamott, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts." "You need to start somewhere." As a teacher who will be teaching writing, awareness of strategies to help young writers become expert writers, is of paramount importance to have as an educator, During this writing course i was introduced to a number of strategies including, grammar instruction, summarizing, publishing writing and writing to start class, just to name a few. We were given a short demonstration of how each strategy should or can be used. I was impressed by the strategy "choosing topics to write about" this strategy allows students to choose their own topics to write about so that they can better relate to it. There were other strategies which i am confused about, and still is confused about, namely teaching writing explicitly. However i think that all the strategies are useful and great. I strongly believe that all of these strategies will have a positive effect on the writing of our future students. Additionally, in class, we looked at some possible challenges students may struggle with including" Writing does not have prosody, body language, facial expression and the writer should not assume that there is shared context with the reader." for instance, de-contextualized tasks, students may be asked to write about something in their past, for example, their Easter Vacation. The challenge for them is to rely on their memory, which students will indicate to the teacher by saying, "teacher i cannot remember or do not remember" which makes the task difficult for them. Usually strategies are developed to address or fix difficulties. So, in class we scanned through the trends in teaching writing and found that this problem arises, teachers can utilize a gallery walk among other things to help students remember.