3608. A Practical Way to Help Out Your Students Plus a Writing Activity

 The pandemic has brought us something good, well, more than one good thing. It is that since I had to teach online last school year, I also started to send emails to my students. This current school year we have returned to face-to-face lessons… and I keep sending emails to my grownup students, and it works! 

For they feel their lessons and all the English course more of their own, and I can tell you that my students work and learn better. Well their lessons are just that, THEIR lessons. And they participate a great deal on those classes. 

On those frequent emails I also push them upward at their feelings that they are actually learning English. I’ve written things like, You are being great at the lessons. You know, this is positive motivation. As well I let them know that I like to work with them. 

Alike I attain to reinforce things I tell them on the classes themselves, by sending them those emails. 

Something else for today. I think that we language teachers can exploit classroom activities in a superior degree. 

I mean, when you think that a writing activity should be carried out with your students, well I guess it’s not just telling them, Okay people, you have twenty minutes to write about Christmas. 

I have read and learned in language-teaching experts that it may be more convenient to carry on that activity into a series of graded activities in a sequence. 

First you can apply a lead-in activity, like eliciting Christmas lexis from your learners plus giving more words on your own, or just ask them, Okay, do you think you are capable now to write on Christmas? 

Then they can start to freely write on that topic. 

And also a single draft may be not sufficient: after for instance reading out some essays in the class plus correction, they could re-draft at home a better version. 

Finally the best essays could be put up onto a bulletin-board in the classroom, or even those nice final drafts can be photocopied and handed out to them for extra working. 

All that done after the real writing is the follow-up activity. Got it? 

I wish you all a happy Christmas plus a happy plunging into the new year – I could post further on coming days, though.

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