Writing at any level in
our days has become a burden rather than a time of reflection and quiet
introspection.
Technology and its
concomitant distractions prevent young -- and more mature -- learners from concentrating on the task at hand. I dare say the social
media, with their semblance of sociability, cultivate the attitude that being
left on our own and to our own devices points to inflicted isolation, which is
to be avoided by all means.
Motivating learners to
write somehow involves persuading them to rethink the value of spending time
alone with their thoughts, and this is not an easy thing to do but definitely
worth trying.
A word of warning: I am
not advocating a school environment free from technological equipment nor am I in
favour of leaving students to deal with a writing task without support from the
teacher. What I am saying is that independent thinking also occurs when the
students are given time and opportunity to examine a question with the
freshness of their own mind.
Writing at an advanced
level is an extremely demanding activity as it requires performing many
different subtasks. I therefore suggest that the teacher develops a method of
guiding the students through the different stages of drafting and editing a
piece of writing -- perhaps a different one depending on the nature of the task.
I will now focus on a
specific form of writing and suggest an approach which could not only enable
the learners to complete the task but would also teach them skills and ways of
addressing similar writing tasks while at the same time it will activate their
minds.
This is the topic
A sports magazine has
invited its readers to write letters on the topic of dangerous sports. You have
decided to write a letter (280-320 words) expressing your views about dangerous
sports and what you think the responsibilities of the people who do these sports
are.
It is a task set in the
coursebook Masterclass for the Cambridge Proficiency published by Oxford
University.
The first step was to ask
the students for a definition of extreme sports to which the answer is
typically an activity which carries a high risk possibly incongruous with the
pleasure derived from practising it – though the last point is highly
questionable.
Although the task seemed
and indeed was quite straightforward, the students did not have enough ideas to
develop into a 300-word letter, which brings me to the next step.
By focusing on structure
and format, coursebooks tend to overlook the dearth of ideas and arguments,
which is really the raw material for structuring anything at all. Rather than
providing the students with a ready-made model, which is often well beyond their
scope and abilities, I consider it a priority to train them to look for
information on the Internet. It takes some time to learn the ropes since
searching should yield the most relevant results, which requires thinking
carefully of the key words of the search.
On this particular
occasion I did the search for the students and gave them the links so they
could read up. The first text was a New York Times article:
Taking sports to the
extreme
The second one was a post
from a blog:
Should extreme sports be
banned as they put people’s lives at risk
The third one was an
article again from The Conversation:
Adrenaline zen: what “normal
people” can learn from extreme sports
The most important thing
to warn the students about is that the texts they will read are in different formats
and styles from what they have been asked to produce, which means that they
will have to select the points that they will include in their own writing. They
can copy-paste the relevant extracts onto a sheet of paper but the teacher must
point out that they have to read the whole texts and then select relevant bits.
When the students had garnered
all the relevant information, I gave them my notes, which evidently lay no claim
to stylistic uniformity or structural integrity. The important thing is to make
it clear to the students that their notes are a bank from which they can draw but
not necessarily exhaust. The notes may contain ideas about linking devices
which will come in useful later.
Here are the notes I made
and passed on to my students as an example of what I was asking of them:
Once they have done the
above, they are ready to start the laborious task of organising the ideas in
the format required (a letter in this case) and adapting the material collected
to their own personal style if their writing is not going to read like a mosaic
of different styles and loosely connected ideas.
The final stage is the
actual writing. When this is done in class, which it normally is, I make sure
that I keep an eye on what each student writes in order to help with phrasing
and stop them from wandering off. It is a painstaking process for the students
and teacher alike but one that pays off in the long run.
Once they have finished
their writing, I usually give the students the end result of my writing. Here is
the letter about extreme sports:
