WRITING

READINESS

MATURE
WRITING

EARLY
WRITING

DEVELOPMENT
AL WRITING

Writing Readiness
1. Penmanship
2. Mechanics of
Writing
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Degree of preparedness
for instruction in
handwriting or formal
composition

Development of psychomotor skills

are needed to prepare students to
perform physical act of writing .

The Following Are Needed :

1. Develop knowledge of the
English Language so that pupils
can understand what he/she
copies & knows how to
pronounce & makes sense .
Cont
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2. Develop the interest to write in

English.
3. Recognizing that print is
different than pictures & has
meaning .
4. Able to discriminate between
shapes, can make distinction
between letters .
Cont..
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5. Develop visual memory for

shapes.
6. Develop large muscles of the
arm , hands & fine muscles
of
fore finger & thumb , control
of
writing tools .
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Writing Readiness during Preschool.

Whose Responsibility is it?

ActivitiesTo Create Writing Readiness.

1. Colouring Discriminate Shapes
2. Cutting, pasting, tracing &
Drawing
Help to Develop Fine Motor Skills.
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3. Pick up small objects develop

finger muscle strength & control
4. Sorting activities helps visual
discrimination.
5. Pattern drawing finger-hand
control, visual discrimination, &
perception of shape.
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Provide meaningful contexts for learning

the mechanics of writing.
Use pupils own oral compositions for
giving them insights into writing.
Constantly keep the benefits of learning to
write before them.
Make it a practice to read to your pupils a
variety of things.
Develop your pupils natural curiosity and
thinking skills.

Concentrate on a few difficulties faced by

your pupils
Provide sufficient guidance to ensure
pupils do not make errors
Although the practice is on a single
element, it must evoke the feeling that
something has been written
There must be a sense of purpose in
practice
Ensure provision for the elements of good
handwriting.

To help students master the mechanics of

writing
E.g. 1 preparing a guest list for a
birthday party
E.g. 2 classification and copying
E.g. 3 crossword puzzle clothing
E.g. 4 copying a poem
E.g. 5 completing a dialogue

Focus on teaching the relationship between

the most common phonemes of English (the
sounds) and the graphemes (the letters or
letter combinations) that correspond with
them.
Focus on teaching the most common words.
Focus on developing visual memory for
shapes of words.
Focus on developing relevant dictionary
skills.
Focus on helping pupils devise ways of
helping themselves to remember common
but troublesome words.

Composing vs. writing

Process vs. product
Contrastive rhetoric
Differences between L1 and L2 writing
Authenticity
The role of the teacher

PROCESS VS PRODUCT
APPROACH TO WRITING

Product approach
-

Focus is on obtaining a finished product (e.g. a

letter, story, etc.)
Focus on producing error-free writing of diff.
genres
Involves very little composition skills and
almost every pupil produces same composition
Tasks only req. pupils to write sentences e.g. from
linked substitution tables, fill in the blanks etc. in
which all the decisions about content, organisation
have been made by the teacher

Shortcomings of this approach:

1) Pupils never get the opportunity to learn
various processes that successful writers
use in the production of a written
document .
2) Writing skills are underplayed and writing is
merely used to provide a context for
practising grammar
3) SS are bored because this kind of writing is
demotivating and does not cater to pupils
need for self expression

Focus pupils attn on the process of writingthinking of something to write abt., selecting
what to include, giving shape to these ideas
by organising them into an outline or plan,
writing a draft, revising and editing the draft
and producing a final version.

Tr. gives appropriate guidance at each stage

in the process of evolving a text

Our Eng. Syllabus DOES not spell out in

process terms.
Merely itemised the kinds of written product
that pupils need to learn and the social
contexts within which the written product is to
be set.
Only a global/overall objective is stated and a
list of sub-skills of writing are provide for each
level
So teachers need to work out what
procedures, processes, skills and strategies
the ss would need to accomplish task

Product approach- bottom-up view in which

the building blocks of writing are seen to show
that linguistic items and writing development
is seen as block by block building
Process approach top-down view of writing
is taken as
- ss given a task to do e.g a letter to write
- here, the view is that the letter-writing task
will create the need for the lang. necessary
to write the letter. Once ss are interested to
do the task, they will learn the lang. that will
enable him to say what he wants to say.

Controlled

Product approach

Guided

Free Writing

Process approach

CONTROLLED WRITING
Maximal teacher input and minimal pupil
input.
Using substitution table
- example 1
- example 2
- example 3
Parallel writing
- example 1
- example 2
Question and answer technique
Filling in the blanks
Dictation

Here, context and form of sentences

generated in the class as a pre-wrtg activity
Writing from class-generated guidelines
- brainstorm ideas.
Picture composition with skeleton outline
- use picture series and pp suggest story line
Writing from short notes
Dicto-comp
- combines dictation and composition.

Focus on sentence building

- Imperatives poster competition, e.g. Do not talk
in thelibrary, Silence, Flush the toilet.
- Writing is a permanent record of their thoughts
- captions for pictures.

Focus on paragraph writing

- Unjumbling sentences to write a paragraph
- Filling in linkers in a given paragraph
- Using notes and pictures

Focus on other building blocks

- Examples of specific writing tasks.

Adapted from: Chitravelu, et.al, ELT Methodology, Principles and

Practice.

Is

basically learner-driven
Chooses what he wants to
learn, when and to what
level of perfection
Teacher is redundant and
irrelevant

Producing a written text involves 3 broad

stages :
1) Pre-writing select topic, generate ideas,
organise ideas
2) Writing drafting, getting feedback/
conferencing, revising, editing
3) Publication presentation, display

Vary acc to the phase, approach, specific

aims of the lesson
At earliest levels : lesson may inv providing
multiple and varied contexts for practising
handwrtg and/ or spelling and teaching and
creating occasions for meaningful practice
in punctuation and using what lang they
have for real communication

At later phases, lesson may centre on the

processes inv in producing a written
document e.g. a letter or a story
May also be lessons in which specific writing
skills (e.g. planning, language, organisation,
etc.) may be focused on
A writing lesson is not equated with a class
period cos process-based lessons involve
several periods.

1. Set a task (purpose, audience, genre)

2. Think abt the demands of the task (what ss
need content, lang(content wds, sent
pattens, cohesive devices), org skills,
knowledge of conventions
3. Fine tune the assignment
- length approp to ss age, skills they
need (content, org skills, lang)
- if ss lack those, deal with the problems
doing the following

- take the difficulty away, pre-teach the

skill,organise help, use time mgt strategies,
build in resources, demonstrate how to
behave, provide useful stimuli
4. Plan the structure of the lesson/workshop
- time allocation for the assignment
- time interval between lessons
- time allocation for each phase
- activities to do

We do not write in order to be understood;

we
write in order to understand.
C Day Lewis

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1. Penmanship is
the

technique of writing with the

hand using a writing instrument .
the

art or practice of writing by

hand.
the

quality or style of someone's

handwriting.

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Handwriting requires the motor coordination

of multiple joints in the hand, wrist, elbow,
and shoulder to form letters and to arrange
them on the page.

Holding the pen and guiding it across paper

depends mostly upon sensory information
from skin, joints and muscles of the hand
and this adjusts movement to changes in
the friction between pen and paper.
Lacquaniti F. (1989).
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 With

practice and familiarity,

handwriting becomes highly
automated using motor
programs stored in motor
memory .
Van der Plaats RE, Van Galen GP. (1990)

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Handwriting a person's particular style of

writing by pen or a pencil

Block letters > also called printing is the

use of the simple letters children are taught
to write when first learning

Calligraphy the art of writing itself,

generally more concerned with aesthetics for
decorative effect than normal handwriting.

Cursive any style of handwriting in which

all the letters in a word are connected
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35

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Block Writing

AaBbCcDdEeFfG
gHhIiJjKkLlMm
NnOoPpQqRrSsT
tUuVvWwXxYyZz

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The application of standard rules of

grammar, spelling, punctuation and
usage to the act of writing, as distinct
from skills of expression
http://www.time4writing.com

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 Mechanics

are the conventions of print

that do not exist in oral language,
including spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, and paragraphs.

As

they do not exist in oral language,

students have to consciously learn how
mechanics function in written language.

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 For

example, while speakers do not

have to be conscious of the spellings
of words, writers not only have to
use standard spelling for each word
but may even have to use different
spellings for words that sound the
same but have different meanings.

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 The

same holds true for

punctuation: speakers do not
have to think consciously about
intonation and pauses, but
writers have to decide where to
use a period instead of a comma
and how to indicate that they are
quoting someones exact words.
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The End

03/16/15

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