If you can say it, you can write it. Can you?

By María de la Lama

Almost fifty years ago, Wilga Rivers said that the old saying “If you can say it, you can write it” was simplistic in its concept of the communicative aspect of writing. However, even today we tend to consider writing as a final product, too often for evaluation purposes. Therefore, from our teaching perspective, we are concerned about our students’ written product, but not the process they go through to create, organize and transmit ideas. Paying attention to a final product and not to the process of writing itself, makes us focus only on grammar, vocabulary, and spelling, that is mainly the use of the language.

In the eighties there was an important transformation in the way the development of our students´ writing ability was seen, going from focusing on the product to focusing on the process, a transformation that, unfortunately, is not shown in many of our courses today.

The first step we must take to see writing as a "process" is to pay close attention to how our students develop good quality ideas and how they plan to organize them within a text. Let me emphasize the phrase "good quality". In general, and I have seen this in many university students, there is a misconception that writing in a foreign language prevents us from generating intelligent and solid ideas.

Students believe that when we write in English, the use of the language is what matters, not the content. Therefore, whenever a text is free of language errors, the quality of the content is relegated to a second place. Unfortunately, this lack of quality content will become a source of difficulties when students need to pass international English exams such as the GMAT or GRE, required to pursue graduate studies.

What then are the indicators that we should bear in mind if we want to develop the process of creative writing in our students?

• Students have a lot of practice in the generation of ideas and how they relate to each other.
• Students learn to analyse if the idea they are considering is powerful enough to be a "topic sentence" which in turn can be developed into a paragraph.
• Students are taught how to plan, review, reread and rewrite each time they realize that they are not conveying their ideas clearly.

Becoming a good writer will give our students an invaluable competitive advantage for academic and professional life. So, what can we start doing?

1. Develop in your students the ability to generate "powerful ideas" and then find logical relationships between them.
2. Begin your writing lesson generating ideas by using brainstorming techniques.
3. Consider quality content as a necessity. Content is as important as the use of language.
4. “Think process": teach your students how to review, rewrite, clarify and, why not, write it again!
5. Always start by writing only one paragraph.
6. Incorporate activities in which they can evaluate how coherent a paragraph is. That is, how clear and logical the ideas presented in a paragraph are.
7. Train your students in the use of connectors and always recommend grouping them by meaning. For example: However, nevertheless, but have same communicative function.
8. Provide students with good practice in the use of cohesive devices that allow them to connect words at sentence level.
9. Style is important! Students must learn how to address different audiences by selecting the tone needed to convey their ideas: formal, business, informal, etc.

To develop good writing skills in your students you need to “Think process”. A good start is paying attention to how your students come up with good ideas and how effective they connect them rather than rushing to grade grammar and vocabulary.

BIODATA:

DE LA LAMA, MARIA, Bachelor in Education, has a master's degree in Applied Linguistics and a Bachelor's in Linguistics, both obtained at the University of California, Davis. She also holds an MBA from Universidad del Pacífico. She currently serves as the Director of the Language Center at Universidad del Pacífico.

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Can we Truly say we Teach Writing?

By Enrique Rojas R.

            The idea in this particular series of articles is to deal with those things that are necessary for students to know but, for a variety of reasons (call them school programs, syllabus, time constraints or whatever) teachers neglect to address. The conundrum is that this article deals with teaching writing and the author believes that we language instructors really do not teach our students how to write. That makes it an arduous task to pinpoint what is not being imparted.

            For the wide majority of the textbooks our students use their approach to teaching writing consists on presenting a model of a piece of writing, for instance an email. Then they try to familiarize the students with its parts, strategy, register and wording, perhaps teach some useful vocabulary and then ask the students to produce something similar.

            This helps the learners become familiar with different formats and types of communication but it is a long way away from teaching them how to put the words together to communicate, to transmit, to inform, to instruct, to provoke, to excite, to convince, etc., in a meaningful, pleasing or unpleasing, emphatic, authoritative, suggestive or any other way.

            The classical strategy to give students a topic and tell them to write about it does not do it even if we carefully correct their mistakes. It is necessary to show them the route and not just redirect them when they go astray.

            Fortunately there are some educators who teach writing as a process, and this is much more useful. It involves pre-writing, drafting, revising, rewriting, evaluating or proofreading and publishing. They are going in the right direction.

         

              You have to keep in mind that you are never going to write acceptably without an appropriate knowledge of grammar, so the instruction of it should go in parallel. Then an able handling of collocations is a must together with familiarity and dexterity in the use of discourse markers, transitions, connectors and the like.

            Another point that is absolutely basic but we usually take for granted is punctuation. The result is that a very large number of learners ignore how to use those ‘strange symbols.’

            The Spanish syntax possesses extraordinary flexibility. You can vary the order of the sentence elements in a countless number of ways. When Spanish speakers speak or especially write in English try to exercise the same capacity but the possibilities are much more restricted. We must teach them to widely use the subject / verb /complement structure and leave for later the specific occasions in which we are allowed to subvert that sequence.

            And these things are just the most basic bits of wisdom we should give our students on the matter. From then we should move on to things that are still fundamental but that hardly anybody teaches like topic sentences, thesis statements the three or the five paragraphs compositions, the cyclical structure in which the conclusion reinforces the introduction, paraphrasing and many other important things, that the limitation of space forestalls  further expansion.

Now is your turn:

Ask the question to yourself and respond sincerely: Do I really teach my students how to write?

BIODATA

Graduated in Journalism at the PUCP, Peru, Enrique Rojas R. holds a MA in Journalism and MA in Inter American History from Southern Illinois University, USA; an MA in Literature from University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico, all the coursework for a MA in TEFL at Universidad de Piura, Peru and BA in Education from Universidad Federico Villarreal. He has also obtained Certificates of Proficiency in English both from Cambridge University and the University of Michigan and the Diploma for EFL Teachers from Universidad del Pacifico. He is an Oral Examiner for the Cambridge University exams and has been awarded the title Expert in E-Learning from Asociacion Educativa del Mediterraneo and Universidad Marcelino Champagnat. He has worked as a professor in universities in Peru, Mexico and the United States; as a newscaster and a producer in radio and television stations in the United States and Mexico, and as a writer and editor in daily newspapers of the same countries. He has been in the staff of CIDUP for 19 years teaching English and Spanish specializing in International Exams, English for Business, ESP and Teacher Training. He has been a speaker in every Congress of English for Special Purposes organized by Centro de Idiomas de la U.P. He is also a member of its Research Area.