View Content #23185

Laura Terrill taught French for 21 years before becoming the Coordinator of Foreign Language and English as a Second Language. She has served on the Board of Directors for Central States and ACTFL. She recently co-authored ACTFL Keys to Planning for Learning: Effective Curriculum, Unit and Lesson Design.  She is currently working as an Independent Consultant. 

Why do we write in world language classes? Traditionally, writing tasks may have focused on having learners prove that they had learned a certain set of vocabulary or had mastered a particular structure. However, the emphasis today is on writing for a real-world purpose.  Presentational writing can’t be easily separated from the other modes of communication. We generally accept that a good writer is a good reader so prior to writing, it’s likely that learners will have been engaged in the interpretive mode. Good readers benefit from discussing what they have read, heard or viewed in the interpersonal mode. Writing then serves as an opportunity for learners to make their thinking visible as they write to persuade, explain or convey personal experience.

Consider the following writing prompt “Write about a vacation you want to take where the target language is spoken. Explain why you want to go there and write to convince others that this is the ideal vacation. Include activities that you are going to do to experience as much of the target culture as possible.” The challenge for teachers is to scaffold the writing process so that learners have the support they need to create a text that others will want to read. Teachers may want to structure a writing cycle that is based on inquiry, drafting, revising and editing.

The writing process begins with inquiry. Learners might look at, read, view and discuss images, videos or texts about a place. As learners acquire information through the interpretive mode and discuss that information in the interpersonal mode, they might be encouraged to develop an ABC list of words and phrases about their location, identifying relevant information that starts with each letter of the alphabet. This organizational strategy ensures that each learner has background information when they begin to write.   

Learners would then begin to draft the text. They might be given a certain number of minutes to write before pairing and reading their text aloud to a peer simply to hear how it sounds and then would return to the writing process. When the initial draft is finished, students begin to revise the text. Learners might be directed to look for short sentences in their own texts. They would be challenged to convey the same ideas in one sentence with more words. “I want to go to Paris. It is a beautiful city. It has lots of museums.”, might become “I want to go Paris because it is a beautiful city with several interesting museums like the Louvre.” Learners then share their revised draft with a partner who would read the text and write 1 or 2 questions that would be answered in the next draft. The peer-reviewer might write, “Why do you want to go to the Louvre? What are you going to see there?” Once the draft has been revised to include the additional information, editing begins.

The process of inquiry, drafting and revising ensures that the writing is interesting and informative. The editing process allows teachers and learners to consider errors in context using texts that learners have created. The teacher selects examples from student texts for analysis before having learners work to edit their individual texts for errors in structure or mechanics that may cause confusion for the reader. 

The process of inquiry, drafting, revising and editing supports the belief that writing can be taught and that teachers can help learners become better writers. Writing is a skill and learners will improve by writing frequently. However, busy teachers need to remember that they do not need to assess all the writing that learners do.

References

Dean, Deborah. Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and beyond in the Secondary English Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. Print.

Gallagher, Kelly. Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts. N.p.: Stenhouse, 2011. Print.