When youre teaching kids to write, youre teaching them to think. Writing is the window through which all thinking starts. [306932]

‘When you’[anonimizat]’re teaching them to think. Writing is the window through which all thinking starts.’

(Sheryl Block)

[anonimizat] I had the pleasure to participate at the teachers of English meeting in the second semester at ‘N. Iorga Economical HighSchool’ in Pascani

The topic for our meeting was “Exploring and developing writing techniques and strategies and writing management”. This topic made me think about the need for good techniques and strategies during our guiding in the EFL class. [anonimizat], [anonimizat]. The topic also made me think about what I could do to motivate the pupils to be active and creative in writing as well.

I realized that during my activity as a teacher in the last years I gave my pupils different tasks:

– to make grammar jigsaw tables;

– to solve exercises focusing on vocabulary;

– to unscramble the words or the paragraphs of a story;

– [anonimizat]-[anonimizat], animals, etc;

– to fill in the gaps with words from a box to complete a text;

– error correction in a letter to Santa for example;

– to choose/ circle one of the two suggested words;

– to choose the suitable adjective to complete the description;

– to find the verbal forms of some verbs according to their written or spelling characteristics;

– to make sentences with verbs at different tenses using adverbs and expressions of time;

– to put the verbs in brackets into the correct tense;

– to make questions for the underlined words;

– to turn into plural words or sentences;

– to complete a text by replacing pictures with the corresponding words;

– to listen to a song and to fill in it with the missing words on handouts;

– [anonimizat].

After all this kind of exercises, I discovered that they liked the activities and they were eager to answer. It was dynamic and motivating and they were happy to discover that their work will be appreciated and seen by other students. If at the beginning of the activities they had a [anonimizat], they had a positive attitude towards the activity and thought it was a great challenge. They were all proud of their work and products.

Discovering all these I realized I have to help more my students to develop their abilities in writing. I also want to discover how I can get over their problems during the class. Writing is an integral part of the language and may just be one of the most valuable skills humans ever developed.

Whereas in the early 1990s, [anonimizat]-day, the advent and popularity of e-mail, [anonimizat] a huge increase in written communication.

Writing refers to several sub skills: [anonimizat], [anonimizat], and many others. Some methodologists use the term writing to refer to word and sentence level skills and composition to refer to the skills implied in constructing coherent texts. More often there are teachers that prefer to use the term writing to refer to all the language activities that result in the transfer of thoughts on paper.

However, teaching writing is guiding the pupils in analyzing and developing their thoughts, in shaping and organizing them into central and subordinate ideas, in developing a line of thoughts and carrying them to the reader.

The writing skills are closely related to the product of writing, to the piece of a written text the learner must produce. From this point of view, we can distinguish three main types of writing: functional, academic and creative.

Functional writing refers to writing tasks that have a very specific purpose behind their production. It is the practice of expressing specific information meant to mirror real-life scenarios such as how to make or do something, giving advice, inviting someone to something or telling what happened in a specific situation. Memos, letters of intent, application or complaint, manuals, recipes, adverts, forms and CVs are all pieces of writing that serve a specific function.

Academic Writing like functional writing serves a clear purpose and function. When composing essays, papers, general subject reports, compositions, academically focused journals, technical reports (e.g. lab reports), theses, dissertations, the writer is striving to inform an audience on a specific topic with a certain end or goal in mind. Academic writing has a much more complex structure and is more intellectually rigorous than functional writing. A piece of academic writing needs more information than simply the writer’s personal opinion so that the students must learn how to search the topic.

Creative Writing makes it possible for students to experiment and play with the language. It is engaging and motivating, it helps students see language as a communicative tool, with the focus on meaning, not merely on a linguistic system. Short stories, poems, songs, drama, screenplay are all examples of creative writing tasks that can be used in a foreign language class.

The process of approaching to writing is ideally suited to the second language learners since listening, speaking, and reading can be so naturally integrated with it.

Pre-writing is essential for the writer whose first language is not English. Especially at the lower levels of proficiency, students have a limited lexicon and therefore often have difficulty expressing their ideas. Therefore, teachers or other students may need to assist second language students to generate vocabulary and grammatical structures relevant to the topic. Models and samples are often helpful. Pre-writing is the stage in which students explore possible topics, choose a topic, and then gather details they can include in their writing. Examples of pre-writing activities can be free writing, visualization, brainstorming, image streaming, cubing, free writing, lists or charts.

At the drafting stage students write their ideas down using some of the notes, language, and structures generated during the pre-writing activities. Second language students especially need to be aware that their first draft does not have to be perfect and that the purpose of this activity is to get words on paper. Spelling will often not be accurate and there may be many grammatical errors. Some students may also insert words in their native language

Students will need assistance during the revising/editing stage from teachers and from other students. Changes in writing will need to address word usage and clarification of ideas, as well as grammatical accuracy, punctuation, spelling and capitalization. Second language students may have difficulty in recognizing their own errors or the errors of their peers. A self-assessment checklist may help them monitor their own writing.

It is important to note that language learners often make mistakes in vocabulary and grammar. As they take risks and experiment, their accuracy level may be negatively affected. It is important to realize that this is a normal part of the language development process. If too much attention is placed on accuracy, students will not progress.

Good writing does not simply happen: it is a process that develops and strengthens over time. Teaching and requiring good habits from early on in the students’ writing careers helps to guarantee that they will have the skills necessary to write strong compositions in the future.

It would seem that writing might be easier than speaking or reading because students are sharing their own ideas already in their heads and simply putting them on paper. However, writing requires a lot more processing of language in order to produce a message.

First, the student must have an idea, then think of the appropriate way to say it, then start to write it and spell it correctly, and then create another sentence to continue to communicate the idea. If we add the students' worry that they are making huge, embarrassing errors or that their ideas aren't very good in the first place, then we begin to understand the complexity involved in writing in a second language.

An important step in learning to write and develop it, it is a good feedback in writing. Writing feedback is not just about finding mistakes. It is about providing clear guidance for the student's next step. Unlike editing, feedback should give students a clear idea of how to improve. Feedback needs to be specific and clear. Feedback is essential for both strong and weak students.

Feedback on student’s writing actually begins LONG before you receive a stack of student papers; it begins with how you design writing assignments and how you integrate them into your course. In most cases, students really benefit from a thoughtful comment, something holistic, that conveys overall success and reacts to overall argument and insights and organization and priorities for what to work on (very difficult to convey these in marginal comments).

The goal of feedback is to teach skills that help students improve their writing proficiency to the point where they are cognizant of what is expected of them as writers and are able to produce it with minimal errors and maximum clarity.

Teacher and learner relationship depends on the capacities of the teacher as on the capacities of the learner. They must interact, guide, relate and communicate in a proper dynamic climate- the classroom- during the learning process. This relationship between the teacher and the autonomous learner should be created in a proper learning environment in which learners could be actively engaged in their own process of learning. Positive attitudes and good feelings about a particular activity have a positive influence on learning.

As teachers, we should make students realize they are “fit” to learn if they get to know their own resources and what kind of learners they are. The most important thing is their own development and not competing with others. To learn a language effectively, students need to know how to learn as well as what to learn.

Some of the teachers make the mistake of focusing only on the writing of answers in activities or exercises, and once in a blue moon have them write something longer. Whether it is creative writing, academic writing, or functional writing, teach them by example first, and then let them have free reign in the way they express themselves in writing.

General view

1.1. What is an EFL class?

When speaking about teaching English at class we should first make a difference between an ESL class and an EFL class. This difference is made mainly by the country where English is taught. So when speaking about an ESL (English as a Second Language) class we should refer to the class from the countries where English is the main spoken language. The teacher here is a native English speaker. In an ESL class, the ones that learn English are the ones that emigrated in that country or are visiting the country, they are the non-native speakers. So we can say that in this class we can find a lot of nationalities and the communicative language is English. The students that come to these classes are the ones that have limited skills in English and need them for work or just for visits.

The students that come to an ESL class need to be taught to speak need only the general grammar rules. These students need information about the culture of the country where they emigrated, information that can help them get along with the new society. The teacher that teaches these classes can be the first person their students see, they understand or from whom they ask for help in finding a job or an accommodation.

There are also people that go to an ESL class to prepare for their exams in a university or even in a college. These students need an intensive program in learning English, in learning academic English mostly. But there are students that need English in their travels, so they need general English, conversational English. And there are students that need English for business so they go to such classes for specific vocabulary.

An EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class is the class from the country where English is not the main spoken language. In this class, the pupils are the ones with same spoken language, with the same culture. The teacher can be a native English speaker or a teacher from that country. The learned English is not a necessity; it has not a practical benefit.

"ESL and EFL instructional approaches differ in significant ways. ESL is based on the premise that English is the language of the community and the school and the students have access to English models. EFL is usually learned in environments where the language of the community and the school is not English. EFL teachers have the difficult task of finding access to and providing English models for their students… . As the number of ESL students has increased in schools across North America, more classrooms and school have become more like EFL than ESL environments."

For a teacher, it is difficult to motivate an EFL class. By motivation many teachers understand the strategies that can help students develop the English skills. So if Petri considers that motivation is “the concept we use when we describe the forces acting on or within an organism to initiate and direct behavior" and that "the concept of motivation is also used to explain differences in the intensity of behavior and more intense behaviors are considered to be the result of higher levels of motivation", Dorney considers that motivation "is abstract, hypothetical concept that we use to explain why people think and behave as they do. It is obvious that in this sense the term subsumes a whole range of motives-from financial incentive such as a raise in salary to idealistic beliefs such as the desire for freedom-that have very little in common except that they all influence behavior"

Researchers think that there are two types of motivation: the integrative motivation and the instrumental motivation. The first one refers to the desire of the student to mingle with L2 speakers and almost identical with the intrinsic motivation. The second one can be compared with the extrinsic motivation and is needed when the students use it in searching a job or when they want to pass an examination. The instrumental motivation is found at those who learn a second language. The two types of motivation do not necessarily exclude each other. But not everyone can make a difference between the two types of motivation.

We also mentioned the intrinsic and the extrinsic motivations. This classification was made by Gardner, Deci and Ryan in 1985. They considered that the students that learn for them have an intrinsic motivation, whereas the ones that learn for being rewarded or for not being punished have an extrinsic motivation. The ones with an intrinsic motivation are more likely to be more effective learners and for them, learning can be enjoyable and with satisfactions.

In an EFL class, it is very important that the students are motivated, on this depending on the success or the failure of learning. A motivated student is in most of the cases a receptive learner, is a curious learner, is an interested learner. If a student is motivated depends in most of the cases on the teacher’s attitude, on the teacher’s influence. For this, a teacher needs to find new strategies, new methods, and new exercises every day, every class, all these starting from the students’ level and motivation. A lot of researchers think that learning a foreign language is not like learning other subjects, is more difficult.

1.2. Teaching English in a Romanian EFL class

One of the most important spoken and written languages in the world is English. So it is important for the Romanian students to learn this international language. For the students it can be very useful to study English, it can make them be independent and connected to the world. It can help their lives by upgrading their knowledge, helping them to increase their ways of communication and of course their grammar. Everywhere they go in the world they can create a good connection with the people if they can find a common language.

When we study English, it is more practical to improve the vocabulary and then to practice it in writing skills. Bigger the vocabulary is, more information we gather and more solid the knowledge is. A way of learning English is by reading books, a relaxing way of our minds after a tiring day.

English is also very much used in business. Most of the international business contracts or transactions or emails or reports are of course written in English. When we are looking for a job we are asked about our fluency in speaking or writing English in addition to our native language. If we have a good amount of English knowledge we have a better chance to promote in a higher position. If somebody gets interested in reading, then he is avoiding the addiction of online games or of violent movies which are not good in their individual progress. When we are using the software from a computer it is also written in English.

Many of the songs, movies or games are in English. Most of the internet is also in English. So knowing English it can help you have a bigger access to the needed information and can increase your culture. Learning this language it can help us develop our thinking or feelings, our confidence in ourselves. But learning English can be a challenge and something that consumes your time.

If we think about the origins of this language most of us will start thinking that it has its origins in America. But if we start to investigate we will find out that the Europeans, or better said the English people, were those that brought technology and education in America when Columbus discovered this country. So we can notice that the British English was the leading colonial nation or the leading revolutionary nation in the 17th century and 18th century and then later in the 19th and 20th centuries the American English was the leading economic power or the digital power. During the years, we can notice that this language was a flexible and resistant language, adopting words from other cultures, other languages. Over the years it became stronger, resisting the changes, resisting its extinction. So we can distinguish some kind of English. We have as we mentioned the British English and the American English, but English is also the native mother tongue in Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, in some Caribbean countries, in India, in Pakistan, in Singapore and in some African countries, which were British colonies.

When we refer to teaching English in EFL class, we refer to teaching English as a foreign language, which is more and more taught around the world. These students are the ones that have as a first language a different one from each other. The teachers, that are trying to teach English as a foreign language, teach focusing on grammar or on vocabulary using the four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). All these are done to enrich the language, to enrich the life experience. But English can be taught also in the English speaking countries, there where are immigrants that need to be taught to communicate in English for a good accommodation.

In Romania, English in studied in schools and colleges besides French or German or Spanish or even Italian. English is needed more and more for finding a good job or for economic relationships or for the external political relationships. Using English as the unique way of having a good relationship, a good communication, it means “accepting a single language that works in the field of communication, in which case it should exceed the competitive mentality that implies the idea of linguistic supremacy”. We can find English in computers’ language and also in many security procedures, such as in that one of air control. The use of a language is closely related to the power of the state. English is the language of the two modern hegemonic powers, Great Britain and the U.S.A. Moreover, this power is exercised in all areas of human life: economic, political, military, and not least cultural".

The influence of English in public sectors started from US and Japan after the 2nd war, when Japan wanted to recover quickly from the economical fall. So the Japanese introduced the study of the English language in schools and colleges as a demand for conquering the American market from outside and inside. Also in Romania, the development of the society required the influence of foreign languages. This started in the 19th century, but with the influence of the French language. So, nowadays, we can find in the Romanian language approximately 25% of the words with French origin. The researchers agreed that this was possible due to the similarities between the two languages, which are both considered to be of Latin origin. Slowly, and mostly after the revolution from 1989, English was introduced in Romanian schools and economics. It replaced in some ways the French influence into Romania before the revolution. After the year 2000, we can notice that the options of Romanian pupils increased in asking to study more English and less French or even Russian. The change to studying English was done slowly thanks to the long process of preparing English teachers. Now Romania is the statistics next to the other countries where English is the most studied foreign language in schools. Statistics show that in 35 countries, English is studied by 90 %of the pupils and in other 13 countries, English is the first language. In our country the study of a foreign language starts from the age of 6, and from these 95% study English. Followed by French, German, Spanish or Russian (only 2%).

Let’s analyze the above figure (Figure 1) from the Romanian annual statistics from 2011. Here, we can notice a comparison between the percentages of pupils studying a foreign language in the school year 2005-2006 and 2010-2011. So we can notice an improvement in percentages in secondary and high school education, meanwhile for primary and vocational education it decreased alarmingly.

Figure 1 Romanian Annual National Institute of Statistics, 2011

The same National Institute of Statistics showed in the same year 2011, the situation of the foreign languages studied in pre- university schools. So we noticed that in 2011 the first language studied is English followed by French, German, Russian, etc. and the second foreign language studied is French followed by English, German, Italian and others. These can be observed in the following figure (figure 2).

Figure 2 National Institute of Statistics, 2011

In Romania, there is a slight problem concerning the time accorded for the pupils to learn a foreign language. So in primary classes the number of classes is pretty low, whereas in secondary or even high school the number of classes is higher. According to the European Commission, the number of classes per year for a primary pupil to learn a foreign language is about 116, whereas for a high school pupil is of 695 classes per year. We can also notice that most of the Romanian teachers when teaching a foreign language focus more on listening, speaking or reading and less on writing.

The teacher has a huge role in an EFL class, a role that can be influenced by many facts such as the historical, the social or even the affective one. Teaching a foreign language can be influenced by the people’s attitudes, or by the approaches to the west, or by the international requests. The teacher must know how to mix theoretical information with practical information by finding a balance.

Before the revolution in 1989, English was seen as the connection to freedom, to capitalism. So English was important in learning even then and learning was considered an act of rebellion against the communism. Trying to prevent the spread of learning English in Romania, the authorities forced teachers to teach Russian, mostly after the World War II. All the efforts of the communists to stop the spreading of learning English had no success. After 1989 the wish for learning English increased, and so did the methods of teaching.

After 2007, when Romania started to be a part of the European Union, the European authorities recommended a foreign language to be introduced in school as a first language starting from primary classes and as a second language from secondary classes. So slowly, English began to be the most taught language by Romanian people, mainly for traveling or work or for studying abroad or just for personal interests.

Reichelt considered in 2005 that English is used in scientific and other academic research and to access English language movies and music, especially by young people. Increasingly, English is also used for workplace needs; for interacting and corresponding with both native and non-native English speakers, especially within Europe; for travel, especially throughout Europe; for correspondence with pen pals (often via e-mail); and for exchange programs abroad, especially within Europe

In Romania, English is studied from preparatory class till high school, but it can be studied in kindergarten if parents want this as an optional course. When they finish primary classes, students and their parents can choose to go to intensive classes or even to bilingual classes, where they must give a test in order to be included. Also, when students finish high school, they must give a language test as part of their graduation.

Thanks to the fact that students have to pass several important language tests during their educational period, teachers must try hard to give the proper instructions and information so that they pass the exams.

Approaches to writing skills

2.1 .Defining receptive and productive skills

Speaking or writing a foreign language means interlocutors, receiving messages and sending them. Teaching a foreign language means teaching its vocabulary and, of course, its grammar rules. When using what we learn we mix the two elements in communication, most of the time adapting to the situations. For getting to these, a teacher must know how to use at the same time some skills and maybe same language subjects, must know to teach that language in an integrative way.

This way, we get to the division of the English skills. The specialists are putting them into three groups: the receptive skills (reading and listening), the productive skills (writing and speaking) and the linguistic skills (vocabulary and grammar). But a student won’t be as good as he is in one of them as it is in the other; it will be strong in some and maybe weak in the others. For example, if someone is good in speaking he or she won’t be as good in writing.

When a student starts learning English, first of all, he listens to the message and then reads it, and only afterward he writes it down and speaks about it. So he is first a receiver, and then a producer of English messages. We, the teachers, can notice that a student shows first the receptive skills when starting to teach them mostly thanks to the movies or songs they listen or read. This seems to be the easiest part of in learning English.

A teacher must be very careful in teaching these receptive skills, being careful to their application in real life. But a traditional teaching listening or reading skills means going over a text, for example, and this is not a listening task or a reading task. The purpose of a teacher must be to teach these skills for real world communications, so many classes should be similar to real situations, maybe by using in listening or reading materials with conversations inspired from a real life situation.

In a real conversation we need a purpose for it, we need the information or we just enjoy it, but we don’t just listen or we don’t read. In cases like these, we concentrate on the meanings of conversation and not on words or grammar. We try to understand the message as a whole and not piece by piece. In the class reading a text means reading it word for word and in most of the cases in a loud voice. But in a real life reading, we almost never read it loud and just skim the text, concentrating on the elements we find interesting. In class, when we try to understand a text we extract the individual elements, meaning the vocabulary or the grammar elements, trying to understand them one by one. In real situations we try to understand the overall meanings. There are not many cases when the students are encouraged to say their own ideas and to try to predict meanings. In class students are passive receivers, but in real situations they are active receivers.

Developing listening and reading can get through a long and rough process, so a teacher should know how to find the right strategies to make the process easier. The teacher must find the proper tasks to facilitate this long process, and they must be according to the students’ levels of understanding and executing. The teacher must guide and help the students in order to facilitate the process of learning. At the begging of learning English the teacher guides the students towards the essential information from a text, and slowly while the students advance in the process, they are guided to the interpreting and understand a text without any help, thanks to their independence in learning. So, a teacher is guiding students, in the process of developing listening and reading, from the process of controlling the reception of a text to the process of receipting freely the message of a text.

Some teachers consider the receptive skills as being assessed objectively, this meaning assessing the students’ skills to decode a new material by the help of objective techniques such as matching items or filling grids or continuing sentences, etc. Tasks like these can be useful because they give a purpose to the exercise and they also involve the students in understanding the tasks. These objective tasks also give the advantage of encouraging the students’ participation in solving the tasks and improving these skills. For the teacher these objective tasks help him or her evaluate the students’ skills faster and more efficiently.

These objective tasks should be used in combination with the communicative tasks, helping the students get the connection to the real life situations. The combination of the two tasks develops students’ emotions and intelligence and their knowledge of the language and also relating the information with their experience. The teacher’s role in the process of solving the tasks is to be a mediator between the situations created in the text and the real life situations.

During the process of teaching the skills, we can see that a student is for the teacher the aim and the object of teaching at the same time. He/ She have the personality that must be formed and improved, but this is a process which is difficult to do it thanks to their dynamic personalities that react differently. Their improvement is the main reason why a teacher has this job.

When we, the teachers, choose a text for reading into the class we must take into consideration what language level the students have. For beginner students, we must choose texts that are short, simple to read and to understand. For them, the texts provide specific vocabulary and grammar so that they can form a correct pronunciation and the proper techniques for an active reading. For the students that are advanced in reading, the texts should be longer with more complicated language and information. But, if a student knows the proper reading strategies he or she could understand better the text and can comment on the meanings with the right attitudes and own ideas.

A teacher must always choose for reading an interesting text that can develop students’ imagination and can offer a big and challenging list of activities on it. A teacher can notice that a text that has as a subject a known topic is more interesting for the students than a text that has an unknown topic. These unknown texts can be considered by students boring and are ineffective in teaching reading. But this is not an universal rule because what is interesting for a student is no necessary interesting for the others.

In teaching reading a teacher must always take into consideration the other skills, so the teaching process is integrative. The reception of information is always in connection with the production of it, for example, we listen to speak and we read to write. The activities that a teacher thinks about are using two, three or the four skills, never using just one skill.

Although some consider that the two receptive skills have a lot in common, we can notice that they are very much different. Probably more than reading a student develops better the other receptive skill: listening. Why? Thanks to the many films and programs and songs that are in English on TV or radio. Our students develop listening every moment through these. Thanks to this many teachers have the tendency not to focus on developing listening, considering it sometimes easy or even non-important.

The teacher must consider that not all the students can be good listeners. They must give a better thinking to forgetting to teach listening, because listening has an important role in language learning. If a student is sure on his or her listening abilities, he or she can become confident in himself or herself. If a student do not understand what a teacher is saying he or she will not have the courage to say what he or she is thinking, and will become shy.

When we talk about listening we refer first to what we hear, then to what we understand and finally to what we must respond. So we first recognize the message, entirely or partly, the moment when we recognize words. A big role in understanding correctly the message has the intonation and the stress. After we recognize the message we try to interpret it, to see what the linguistic content could be. Finally, we react to what we hear in the same way.

Before starting to listen, students must receive additional information to which they must be careful during listening or even after. While listening, the students must look for certain information. If we want to have a good understanding of the text it is recommended to associate it with visual support such as pictures or grids. We can notice that a listening activity can’t be done without other skills; it goes hand in hand with writing or even with speaking.

Listening activities can be done in two ways: with the people from the class such as the teacher or the other students, and by tape and video, meaning electric helpers. These electrical materials are very useful because they give authentic pronunciation, the voices being of native British or Americans. Sometimes the native speakers came themselves to EFL classes to speak or to teach. But most of the models in listening activities are the voices of the teachers. It is important when teaching English or any other language for the teacher to speak during the classes the target language as much as possible. So the demands or the explanations should be in English.

When a teacher decides to do a lesson based on listening activities, he or she should think of using electronic materials, and by electronic materials we refer to audio-visual equipment. So, in most of the nowadays cases, they use the cassettes or the DVDs that came with the textbooks. These materials are preferred by teachers thanks to the speakers from them which can be of native speakers. It is useful for a learner to hear a native speaker; it helps them to receive the pronunciation correctly. These native speakers are also like the students, because they bring authentic dialogues or descriptions.

When a teacher does not use the materials from the textbooks, he or she uses materials from the songs or films or from internet tubes such as youtube.com, which gives access to the vocabulary, to the language. A lot of activities can be done with the help these electronic materials. Some teachers think that during a listening activity they can relax, but the truth is that they must stay focus on the activity so that the student does not get bored. For an activity not to become boring, a teacher must find for the listening class activities according to the level and age, activities that are interesting for students, activities that can attract their attention.

Sometimes very useful are the visual materials that came along with the audio materials. So, if someone can watch some images or a text that are connected to the listening activity, a student will understand better or easier what is being spoken. This, of course, will facilitate the learning activity.

We should not forget that listening cannot be taught alone. It must be integrated with the other skills, with speaking or with writing. Why we the teachers use listening activities? Listening is used to understand new words; we listen to find specific information; we listen to check some writings.

The received message by the students is not totally understood without having a reverse, meaning a message that is produced back by the speakers. Only when a learner produces by themselves the learned message, we can say that he really understands and can speak English. During the years the teacher can notice that there are many students that can understand a message, but cannot really have a proper conversation. So a teacher must always have activities that request students to take part in the lessons, activities that involve them and activities that make students express what they really think, to say their own ideas.

In a conversation we cannot use the receptive skills without the productive one. So we cannoet just listen, we must also speak, or cannot just read we must first write. Answers follow questions; solving tasks follow reading or writing. In general the linguistic skills are taught together in activities that include at least two skills. The skills that need more concentration and time are the productive skills, meaning speaking and writing. These two skills need a lot of practice and a lot of motivation in order to be later used in conversations.

For a good conversation, students need to have the desire to participate, a desire which comes after a good confidence in them, in their capacity of speaking and understanding. In class the production of a conversation depends very much on the teacher’s ability to induce the right topic, and the right communicative exercises.

In the first lessons a student must be helped to produce the right and correct message, but then in time the student must produce it alone, without any help. They slowly pass from the controlled and guided activities to the independent activities. At the beginning, students have the tendency to imitate what the teacher says or does, but in time the students get the independence and the freedom to produce a message. At this stage the teacher has the role just to encourage and sometimes to guide the students to participate in the conversation.

For a teacher it is easier to evaluate at the beginning of learning when he or she is objective, but later when the students become free the evaluation becomes difficult making the teacher to evaluate in a subjective way.

During the English classes, a teacher always encourages students to speak, repeating, giving answers or saying opinions. Not all the time their speaking is grammar or linguistic correct. Why students do not speak correctly? Because they have a poor vocabulary, because they are shy or too anxious to talk, because they do not have the necessary practice in communication or just because the words are “on top of the tongue students sometimes do not speak correctly. So a teacher must work to help and make students get over these obstacles and to build their confidence.

If a teacher wants to have good producers, he or she should offer opportunities for the students to participate in conversations, to offer interesting activities that could challenge their imagination and give free motivation to participate in conversations, to guide them to free opinions, to offer the right atmosphere. A speaking activity can be used before reading or listening to a text, during reading or listening or even after reading or listening. Activities like these should be different, depending on the stage of the lesson, on the age of the students or even on the level of learning.

When speaking, we can have a conversation between two or more people or we can have a monologue. The conversation can be considered to be an exchange of opinions between people, exchange that can be sometimes faster. Here we have a listener and a speaker. During the lesson an example of conversation is an activity based on questions and answers. But in a monologue we have just one speaker and no listener. An example of monologue during a lesson can be considered the summarizing of a text. We can notice that the speaking activities can be different depending on the mode.

In a conversational mode we also face the unexpected where the change of ideas can be fast and without any preparation. We can never imagine what the speaker will say so we can’t prepare the answer. During this mode the teacher must stimulate all the students in the class to participate. The students use the information from real life and can exchange roles. The conversational mode is working very well in group or pair activities.

The pair or group activities have advantages but also disadvantages. A big disadvantage can be the shyness of students or the lack of proper vocabulary. In these cases the students will not communicate, will be afraid to say what they think in order not to say something incorrectly. But this is an interactive way of communicating. Example of activities during the conversational mood can be question-answer activities, role play, debates, brainstorming, improvisations, etc. These activities offer the transfer of information between the speaker and the listener, which must be using students’ imagination and attention.

In the other mode, the monologue or the expositional mode, the speaker must prepare the information about a given topic and then present it in front of others. This mode is very important. It helps students develop their speaking skill and their confidence in them. Examples of activities in this mode can be: describing people, summarizing a story, a text, telling the opinions. The speaker replies on their own ideas, because no one can interfere and redirect the ideas. So the speaker must have a big pack of vocabulary, of language because his or her speech must be long. The information the speaker gives must be interesting, coherent and well organized so that the listener understands easy the message. Grammar must also be correct and the message must be according to the topic. Fluency must not be forgotten.

The techniques used more widely during monologues are describing people or objects or places, storytelling, commenting on a fragment or book or text, summarizing or the speech. The students are given time to prepare the monologue or they are asked spontaneously to speak. If they have time to prepare the monologue they develop the way they organize the speech, the linguistic materials, and they have time to prepare themselves to speak in front of an audience. During a monologue, a student must learn to get over the shyness, learn to control the emotions or even to find a way to catch the attention of the audience. Most students think it is hard to speak spontaneously if you do not have an imagination or a good vocabulary.

Sometimes a monologue transforms into a discourse. When? When the speaker addresses questions that can start with What is a…? or Have you….? or What do you think of…? In these cases the speaker is waiting sometimes for answers from the listeners. Sometimes the dialogues transform into monologues. The teacher must try to avoid these situations in the class. A teacher must not let a listening activity captivate the entire lesson. There must be also activities based on other skills.

If listening or reading skills are easier to learn thanks to the materials they can rely on, for speaking or writing skills this is more difficult because the learner must rely on his or her own materials. This is sometimes difficult if the student does not have the proper pack of vocabulary knowledge. In this situation the students must get help and guidance from the teacher.

The other productive skill, writing, is used in teaching grammar or vocabulary. There are teachers that consider writing not very important, thinking that in learning a foreign language is more important to know to communicate, so speaking and listening are more important. But there are teachers that consider that it is important not only to know to communicate orally but also is important to know how to manage in writing communication.

At the beginning of learning a foreign language process students must learn step by step to develop this productive skill. And only later they should know to write a dictation, a composition or a summary. To develop writing skills, just like for the speaking skills, students need time and a lot of work. They will learn to write from simple invitations or descriptions to essays.

There are some differences between the two productive skills, differences that can be seen in the aims of these skills, in the complex vocabulary, in the formality, in the time to develop, or in the structure. We can notice that if writing can be permanent, speaking is transitory. If in writing communication there is time to form the message, in an orally communication the speaker has a little time to develop the conversation. In writing we have the chance to re-think or to improve the message, whereas in speaking we cannot change what we have just said. In writing the evaluation or the feedback comes later, in speaking the evaluation and the feedback comes immediately. The details from a writing message have a little effect than the details in a spoken message.

When teaching writing or speaking, a teacher must be very careful to the activities they provide, activities that should be different. Teaching writing encounters some difficulties such as the small proficiency of language, the unknowing how to express correctly, the time is not enough, the little feedback and others.

Teaching writing means not only to focus on the writing product itself, but also on the writing process. When we say the writing product we refer to the tasks given by the teacher, and we refer to the writing process as the developing of writing and the capacity to reproduce the message. In class the teacher must focus on the way that students develop writing. This can be done by giving good writing examples or by controlling students’ activities or by assuring the proper time to solve the tasks or by offering the positive feedback students need to be motivated.

2.2. Writing in real life

Teaching writing is teaching the students to prepare for the everyday life writing and for the different types of writings: stories, articles, songs, poetry, comics, blogs, internet pages, books, web pages and others. If a student realizes how many types of writing exist, he or she will understand that people write for different reasons and at different ages. Teaching writing is also useful to motivate students to write in new genres and to motivate them to be more flexible in thinking.

If someone wants to write in daily life, he or she will do this for a special purpose in a special way, but in the class writing will be done for developing skills. The teacher must show to the students the difference between writing in class and writing in everyday life.

The reason we write in everyday life has changed very much in the last years. If at the beginning of the twenty-century people did not use to write very much, in our days the progress of the internet influenced the quantity of writing materials. But this progress is not sure in the future because it can be replaced by the evolution of video and voice materials. The new technology has new rules and more often abbreviations and a new lexis mostly thanks to the desire to write quirkier and on a short space.

The why someone expresses also has changed in the last years. We can now communicate to people from the other side of the world, and now we use instead of words to express our feeling and reactions we use emoticons. Even if we can notice different ways of writing, of communicating, people started writing very little. Now they write short messages to friends or family. We don’t have the feeling or the need of writing long messages. This change of need started to influence the way writing is taught in class, now it’s a need for teaching more other skills.

The writing in everyday life is done with a specific importance or with a personal importance. We are motivated to write if we write for a specific audience. We could write to a favorite singer or author. How? On their blogs or other social networks they can be better contacted. Also another example of writing in daily life can be the writing of a review of a film or a book. In this way we can say what we liked or not about the product. There are people that write as a represent of different victims, victims of different abuses on human rights. These kinds of writings are more and more often found in our lives. But there are also people that like to write stories on the internet, stories for children or even science fiction. And then these stories are published in books. Who does not like to comment on the news or on the articles? And, if we do this, why not commenting on writing? There are newspapers that have on the internet section that allow reader to comment or to add information to the articles.

We should also mention that having good skills in writing can help us in getting a good job, or the wished job. If someone wants a job, he or she must write curriculum vitae or a resume or a cover letter. Writing these correctly will him/ her show the abilities they have in writing. A lot of employers are checking the writing skills, the punctuation or grammar mistakes. The writing skills are checked also when the employer wants to promote the person, because in higher position the writing skills and their qualities must increase. So if an email is send to a business partner or client it is essential to be written correctly. A correct writing shows the professionalism and the attention given to details and also shows a good image of the firm.

The academic writing skills learnt at school are very well shown in everyday life activities. In transmitting a message, the listening skills are important together with the writing skills that can transmit the correct message. For example, if a firm must transmit the insurance policy, the message must be coherent and well written, so that the insured person understands correctly the right and obligations.

But not all the time the writing skills learned at school help us in everyday life. Everyday writing can be more than just an academic writing. For example, if at school students receive a long paragraph to compose, this won’t help them very much in everyday life. About the difference between the writing in class and writing in everyday life, Kelly Gallagher said “If we want our students to understand the value that writing can play in their lives, maybe we should consider shifting instruction away from strict adherence to traditional discourses and begin having our students explore the reasons real writers write. When students understand the real-world purposes for writing (instead of simply writing to meet the next school requirement) they begin to internalize the relevance of writing, and more important, they develop an understanding that writing is an important skill to carry into adulthood. When students begin to understand this relevance, their writing improves.”

So if we have to analyze Gallagher point of view we could say that if we write in real life we do it because we have a purpose. We write to inform or to explain, we write to evaluate, we also write to express our feelings or thoughts, we write to explore, we write to analyze or we write to find solution. And it’s easy to find a topic, but it’s difficult to decide how to explore it.

When someone decides to write or has to write, he or she decides on the style he writes and how much influence from school learning he or she applies. The kind of writing depends in real life by the need, by obligation and very much by the purpose of writing.

2.3. Writing in the classroom

Even if there are a lot of reasons why writing should not be taught in class, there are also a lot of reasons why it should be taught. For a lot of students writing has a big role: it is useful for the exams, for future business or for the academic study.

Writing is used in class even from the first lessons, when students have to write down the new vocabulary and the basic information. Almost in each lesson students have to write because they need to take down notes. So, it is essential for a teacher to focus on writing from the beginning. When students write they have to concentrate, to use their mental powers. During the writing process in class students should have time to think or to reflect, and, for sure, they need time to correct the mistakes and to improve the written message.

Using activities for a writing stage in class is useful for the teacher too. It cools down the class, giving a quiet class and a break for the teacher from speaking. Writing in class differs from copying from the textbooks to guiding writing activities. When copying, student makes use of their mental function that will remember the letter, the words, and the structure of the text. Students can copy tables or examples or different fragments of texts from the textbook or from the board.

Another kind of writing activity is doing an exercise. During this stage students have to write sentences or just words to fulfill exercises and they do not have too many options, their creativity could not be used. During the guided writing activities, the teacher guides the students to write controlled tasks after he or she will give examples or advice or just a framework from what they have to do. But students will be able to write whatever they want during the process of writing. Now it’s the moment to choose a topic they like, to organize the ideas the way they like and composing a text, a message with little help from the teacher or from the other colleagues. But they can write without any help guiding during the under guided writing process. Now it’s the moment to write freely without even a feedback starting maybe from a title.

Whatever stage of writing students are, they must write with accuracy and fluency. And all the time they are not sure of what they are writing and need help they must ask the teacher with confidence for the help. Writing activities are used in class to develop the other skills too and to learn and develop vocabulary, grammar or communication. Many teachers tend to set a writing task and then to leave the students the opportunity to do it by themselves, maybe as a homework and then to collect the solved task and to mark it. These teachers think of the importance of an individual work.

How can a student learn to be a very good writer? There are many choices, but one of them is to be active during the class while he or she is constantly encouraged and of course helped to follow the stages of a writing process. Another way is to try to be independent.

Teachers could do a lot of activities to stimulate the writing process. They should start by choosing the topic or the genre; they should also bring ideas and discuss them; they should help by using diagrams or notes; they could plan the organized text; they could get the feedback on the text; they could give alternative choices or write the final version; and of course they could give the text to an appropriate reader. All these activities can be considered to be guided activities that follow the process of writing.

The tasks that are given today are different from the tasks that were given in the past in teaching writing. Nowadays it is not enough to say ’write a story about…’ and then to expect for the writing skills to be developed. A more creative writing is desired because it will make the connection to the real life writing. Students need now tasks that are relevant for their daily life. Here are some examples of creative writing during the class: writing real mails or letters, publishing articles in newspapers and magazines, commenting or replying to different reviews or webs, writing questionnaires for the people on the street, writing different topic projects.

We can continue by giving examples of specific tasks:

Write a short paragraph about yourself or about your friend.

Fill in a form such as a form for a car rental.

Write a postcard.

Write presentation slides on the computer.

Write your point of view on a named subject.

Write a poem.

Describe your childhood.

Write a letter of application for a job.

And many others.

Let’s talk now about the way we can generate ideas in order to learn the writing process. Brainstorming is a way of generating ideas. At this stage we can make the ideas flow. Now the easiest or the simplest idea is taken into consideration. This is a way brainstorming can go in a class:

Decide on the topic and then write it in the middle of the page/ board.

Ask students to say everything that comes to their mind, connected to the topic of course.

Every single idea is written on the page/ board.

Just the ideas are written.

The start will probably be slow, but then the ideas will flow easily. Students will have the opportunity to choose the liked ideas from the board and the ones that can be used in the class. Discussions can come from the written ideas. The ideas must come from every student, even from the shy ones or from the ones with a low level of knowledge.

Ideas can be generated from text-starts, too. These text starts are a simple way of offering a useful work. Text-starts can come from summarizing a text, or from selecting ideas from it, or from commenting on it. The writing skills can very well developed after using a text-start.

Starting to write can be, for many students, a difficult thing when they see the blank page in front of them. If the first words do not come immediately, then the writing becomes difficult. The first sentence will come harder. Fast writing means the opposite, means writing whatever comes to your mind without thinking too much if it is correct. Then, at a second look on the written material, you may consider good only a sentence, or even only a few words. But the fast-writing has achieved its purpose. Maybe after reading a fast-written text students may find ideas that are not written correct, but ideas that are good and need to be worked on. For all these students need time, a lot of time.

2.4. Approaches to teaching writing through individual or group work

The intention of a writer is to influence the audience in a positive way with an effective message. The purpose must be very concise, so that it could show information that can delight the reader and of course convince them about their point of view. The reader must understand or even better imagine the writer’s intentions and feelings. But this feeling must be and otherwise, meaning that the writer must foresee the reader’s reactions.

In teaching writing, the teacher must also teach the grammar or the vocabulary, the handwriting, the spelling, the punctuation, the italics, the coherence, the layout or the paragraphing formulae.

In 1983, A. Raimes described several ways to a good approaching of the teaching writing. Among these we could mention the controlled-to-free approach or the paragraph pattern approach or the communicative approach or the free-writing process or the syntax-grammar organization approach or the process approach. For the first approach, where students receive different sentences that they must change grammatically or syntactically or to combine them, we could say that accuracy is more important than originality or even fluency. The approach to the paragraph pattern considers more important the organization than the fluency and the grammar. Now scrambled paragraphs or sentences must be put in the correct order. The communicative approach thinks is good for students to consider themselves real writers and imagine how a real audience will react to their writings. Quantity is considered to be more important than quality during the free-writing approach. Now the ideas are taken into consideration and not the grammar or the spelling. So the content and the audience are the most important during this approach. But there is an approach that makes a connection between the purpose of writing and the correct forms of writing. This is the syntax-grammar organization approach where grammar is also taken into consideration. The last approach, the process approach, offers the students responsibility, independence on the writing process. Now is the moment when students work on their own ideas, which they must develop and then present to the class, to the audience.

If the approach of teaching writing is done individually, in individual work, the devising of tasks should be done in a group work. For a group a teacher should give students different activities such as asking them to describe some images or to make a description starting from some questions. Another group activity is to give students some sentences and to ask them to write a narrative paragraph. Interviewing the colleague on this topic and writing down the answers is another group or pair work activity. Or, they could discuss about the advantages or disadvantages of a certain topic in writing.

All about the writing process and English language learners

3.1.Types of writing

Syrene Forsman has an interesting idea about the process of teaching and learning writing: “As teachers we can choose between (a) sentencing students to thoughtless mechanical operations and (b) facilitating their ability to think. If students’ readiness foe more involved thought processes is bypassed in favor of jamming more facts and figures into their heads, they will stagnate at the lower levels of thinking. But if students are encouraged to try a variety of thought processes in classes, they can, regardless of their ages, develop considerable mental power. Writing is one of the most effective ways to develop thinking.”

No matter if we write an article, a letter, an essay or just a journal it is very important to concentrate on the purpose of its content. And when we need to learn an activity we use different writing tasks that can last from a few classes to an entire semester. In this point of view we can also add that there are also different types of writing. Knowing the different types will help us identify and understand better what we are reading. There are four main types of writing: descriptive, narrative, persuasive and expository. But there are critics that distinguish another three types of writing: functional, academic and creative. This classification was made according to the connection between the product of writing and the skills. Each type of writing has different aims.

3.1.1. Descriptive writing

The aim of this kind of writing is helping the student who reads to visualize the text, starting from the character and place to the event. During this type of writing the writer has an artistic freedom. For the descriptive writing the writer is using visual aids. The descriptions are detailed very much; they use a lot of metaphors and symbols. Reading a descriptive writing offers the reader the feeling that he or she is there, in the message, in the picture they imagine.

A descriptive writing offers the image of a place, event, person or maybe feelings. We can say that it offers a sensory presentation. It presents something or someone the reader could not see for live. A descriptive writing must have four main characteristics: a precise language, a figurative language, sensory details and a special order. The sensory details found in a descriptive writing are refereeing to the sight, smell, emotion or touch, sound and sound. The figurative language used must be simile or analogies. The followed order usually is tropical, climatic and spatial.

Task 1

How would you describe your ideal teacher? In what way did he/she influence your life? Give arguments and examples to support your ideas.

Task 2

Describe an ideal day in your life, including a type of physical exercise that you consider most appropriate to your personality. Give arguments and examples to support your ideas.

Task 3

Write about one famous person that you consider to have contributed to the progress of mankind. Give arguments and examples to support your ideas.

Task 4

Write about your favorite subjects at school. Give arguments and examples to support your ideas.

Task 5

Write about your favorite town/ village. Give arguments and examples to support your ideas.

If a student has to describe a story with vampires he or she will not just say “The lover was killed by her vampire”. The student will use details, descriptions to make a full sentence and will say “The desperate red eyes vampire sunk his white teeth into the yellow skin girl ending with her beautiful life.”

Another example of descriptive writing made by a student when describing a phone “My phone is very light. The phone I had before had a big screen, but it was thinner. This phone is made from glass, steel and aluminum. Its color is golden, but there are people that have the same model but silver, or space gray like the company uses to call it. “So we can find here details connected with the material, the weight and the size.

There are cases when we can find paragraphs with a lot of adjectives and not considered a descriptive paragraph. Why? In those paragraphs you won’t find a description, but an advertisement of something that should be done. We could use as an example the same phone but not describing it: “After you buy a beautiful small new phone with a glass screen, you will have to but a case. Why you don’t want to crack its new screen. It’s good to have a protection.“

After all the descriptions made by the students I can conclude that this descriptive writing is useful for developing writing techniques. Students can use different vocabulary connections; they can use a lot of adjectives, details; use in their descriptions the senses; they use metaphors or comparisons to compare different things; and they use synonyms and antonyms. When reading their works to the class they must be fast and accurate, if not, the other students will get bored and will lose the subject of their message.

They like this kind of workings. They like to express their feeling and to use a lot adjectives in describing what they’ve seen or lived. It I important to let the students express their feelings and not influence by telling them what you, the teacher, would have written. But for them it is useful to tell what mistakes they have done in expressing, or punctuation or grammar.

3.1.2. Narrative writing

The aim of the narrative writing type is to tell a story. The writer will put into the story characters, places, and will count what they do or what is done there. The story can be written from the point of view of the writer or from one’s character’s story. Here at this type of writing we can include not just stories but also novellas, biographies or poetries. This type of writing does not have only descriptions, but also dialogues, conflicts, actions, solutions.

The told story can be real or fictional, an imagination. The reader is usually captivated by the story and is reading it willing to find what happens next or what the end is. Here is an example of narrative type of writing. “While I was going off the train, children were laughing and jumping near the bend. I went over a small hill down the narrow path till I saw them. There were two girls and a boy under a tree. They started looking at me in surprise so I smiled and asked ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing much’ answered them all in the same voice”. This is a story told by the writer at the first person. We can find here both a dialogue and a description.

After reading a narrative writing we can easily answer the five ‘wh-‘: why, who, when, where and how. And here we must be able to imagine the senses: see, feel, hear, smell and touch. Through these senses a writer is better introduced to the plot of the story. Besides metaphors we can find here hyperbole, personifications, onomatopoeia or alliteration.

When a teacher asks the students to write something in a narrative type he or she may give some clues or points of starting. For examples he or she can give a beginning or an end for the story, or an image to start from or just some words to fill in the text.

Task 6

Write a story with ghosts from the Halloween night using the following words: hunted, blood, vampire, ghost, scary.

Task 7

Write about the happiest day in your life. Write approximately 200 words.

Task 8

Write about an experience that can start from the saying: You should be careful what you wish for”

Task 9

Write about the dearest memory with your family.

Looking at their narrative writings I concluded that a good story should have a beginning, content and an ending. All these must be written with a lot of details focusing on the topic and with a relevant description of the topic. Most of the stories have good transistors from one paragraph to the others. The ones with not logical transitions made the stories look poor organized. The structure of the sentences is not well organized in most of the cases. We also find a few grammatical errors. Still the choice of words is good, adequate to the topic. From story to story and from level to level I could notice a good progression in composing narrative writings. The best and well written stories were marked according to the contents.

3.1.3. Persuasive writing

It is for a student to know to write in various ways, various types. A good type of writing good to know is persuasive writing, which is good to express their feeling and reasons of a choice. Understanding why we write, students will understand better the persuasive writing. Persuasive writing is the way we try to persuade someone to do or not something. Using the persuasive writing the student must bring arguments for a decision being it for or against something already spoken.

But persuasive writing is often found in advertising products and it is used to convince the customer to buy the product. For this, the writer must use a lot of examples and opinions. Persuasive writing uses firm arguments which are very well sustained.

A teacher should use persuasive writing in teaching writing skills. This should be done first by giving examples which will then be read and discussed. Persuasive writing can also be done by using brainstorming useful information for the student. After a topic is chosen by the student, the teacher should ask the student to give reasons for choosing it. The teacher is not accepting short answers like “because” or “just because I like it.” Students are allowed to work together and research in finding the right or the acceptable answers. A goo d writer should predict what the others, the teacher will ask about their writings, about their reasons.

In writing a persuasive message students must also include feelings in order to convince the reader with their arguments. The feelings that are transmitted are those of security, of love, of health, of convenience. Emotional persuasive writings are very effective when we want to convince the reader to buy the product or that we are right about what we said.

A good persuasive writing must start with a sentence about the topic. Then we must continue with the arguments on the chosen topic, pro or contra. Then the arguments must be developed with reasons and examples. The persuasive writing usually ends with a conclusion of the topic.

A persuasive writing should be written in the present tense simple, using connectors of contrast, logical, effect and of cause. During the persuasive writing we could find rhetorical questions which have the purpose of daring the reader to come with contra-arguments on what is being said. The verbs and the adjectives used are strong, used to convince the reader of the message. Also the tone of the writing is important, which results from the words we choose. The person that writes in a persuasive way can be compared to a lawyer who pleads for his or her case.

Task 1

Write your opinion about legalizing or not the marijuana.

Task 2

Develop the idea: to drill or not to drill?

Task 3

Write a letter to your head teacher arguing either for or against a school uniform for our school.

Task 4

Which advertise would you prefer: the one for a cola milkshake or the one for French frites? Why? Which is healthier?

Task 5

If you could go anywhere in the world where would you go and why?

After writing and then reading persuasive writings, the students came to the conclusion that that they should have a convincing purpose when writing this type of writing and their writing must be concise and well organized to convince the reader. They should use subjective verbs to have a special effect and they also use specific words for a clear image. If necessary, repetitive words can be used. A persuasive technique is allowed to be used against the other technique. A good persuasive writing will be successful if the writing will connect with the reader.

A persuasive writer will have a good message if the text has a good information and persuasion. The writer must know who the text is addressing. The message usually had situations, a good motivation, and good circumstances. Students like writing in this type of writing, because they like to convince the others about their opinions.

The students said that a good writer of a persuasive writing is the one that can anticipate the contra-arguments and has the responses for this. The writer must also know how to get sympathy from the reader or listener and to try to involve in the article without the reader realize this.

3.1.4. Expository writing

An expository writing is a writing which is used for exposing information, for explaining it. A newspaper or an essay or an article can be examples of expository writing nest to textbooks or instruction manuals or encyclopedia. In this category are not included the poems or the fictions. We can consider this work, this thesis an expository writing.

An expository writing is used at school in essays, in the academic world. The parts of an expository writing are the introduction where we can find the objective of the writing; then we have the main part where we find explanations of the objective in the introduction; and the last is the conclusion where we find the summarizing of what was already been said.

When a student, a writer start an expository paper, he or she thinks that the reader will not understand what the message is about, does not know the topic of the writing. The student then must bring a lot of information in order to make the reader understand the topic. After reading an expository writing, the reader must have a lot of new information, new knowledge.

At school, an expository writing is trying to make the student learn researching sentences or facts or opinions. Writing in an expository way is trying also to explain the chosen topic. Expository writings are analyzing the facts, the bases no taking into account the reader’s feelings. In such a writing type the writer shouldn’t write as referring to the first or second person, he or she should not personalize it. It is better just to explain the topic in general.

It is important to use the imagination in expressing the feelings and the perspective of the topic. Its purpose is to instruct the reader and not to enjoy the reader. For a reader to understand the expository is important to read a clear text, with clear observations and explanations. We can include in this category term papers, essays, reposts, business letters, cuisines, wills, stories, textbooks. Here are some examples of teacher’s requests for editing an expository writing.

Task 1

Explain why parents are sometimes strict.

Task 2

What are the major impacts of different music genres on society?

Task 3

Where do you prefer living- in a house or an apartment? Explain.

Task 4

What are the effects of using drugs? Why some students use drugs? Explain the consequences.

Task 5

Explain how the life of a teenage changes.

If we want to drop a conclusion after describing these four types of writing we can say that now each student can find his or her best type of writing that suits and can help to write more effectively and more efficient.

Expository writing is the writing that will give the facts. Examples of such writing we can find in articles, essays, textbooks or technical writings. Talking about descriptive writing we will be able to see detailed images in poems, advertisings, journals. The persuasive writing will try to convince the reader to agree with the writer’s opinion. Such writing can be found in reviews or job offers or editorials. And the last type of writing is the narrative writing which helps us write a story, a fictional one maybe or a biographical one or an anecdote or in a poem.

3.1.5. Functional Writing

The writings that are made with a specific purpose are considered to be functional. In this type of writing information is given and passed. With this occasion the writer expresses the interest for a job, and maybe his or her qualifications or the writer wants to express the dissatisfaction. Not knowing to write this type of writing can affect the writer’s life, future.

Teachers should try to help students develop the functional writing skills. This is sometimes considered dull. Teachers often confronts with the students’ lack of preoccupations for learning this. This lack is noticed at older students; younger students just do it without making questions about its necessity. So the teacher teaches this type of writing to the adults or the high school students. So teaching functional writing can be associated with the needs the students have.

Learning to write in a functional type is learning to write a letter of complaint or intent; a proposal; a memo; a CV; an advertisement; a report or a review. So we can notice from the kinds of functional writings that this type can’t be considered personal because it has no freedom in writing, he or she must respect the rules. But sometimes the writer can be a little creative, but not too much. Not being an essay the writer must also give a high attention to the length of writing.

The writer must also pay attention to the person to whom the writing is addressing. For example, if the writing is addressing to an employer looking for a job, the writing must be formal, but if the writing is addressed to a friend then it can be written in an informal way.

Writing in a functional way does not absolve you from writing clearly and well organized. The writer always must plan the message and must think well at the answers. The reader must understand easy the message. To be understood usually the message should be short and concise. Of course the message should be relevant with useful information.

Task 1

Write to a celebrity telling why you admire their work.

Task 2

You strongly feel about an article in SpyNews Magazine. Write a letter to the Editor of the newspaper in which you outline your views in response to the article.

Task 3

Imagine the girl in the picture is your pen pal. Write a letter telling her about a good book you have enjoyed recently

Task 4

Choose one of your favorite games and, for the benefit of a person who does not know how to play it, explain the purpose and general rules of the game.

Task 5

Write a review for your school magazine of any film that you have enjoyed. Your review should encourage other students to go and see it.

Task 6

Your community has been offered €100,000 euro for use on any local project. Write the speech you would make to a meeting of your local Community Association in which you outline the project that you think the money should be spent on.

After writing such functional writings the students came to some useful conclusions. For example when writing in class a functional writing, to a celebrity in our case, students should use fictional names and addresses. The title, the date and the address are noticed/ written at the top of the letter. The first paragraph contains information about the reason why they would write a letter to a star. In the second paragraph students developed the reasons with logical and clear ideas. In the next paragraph or paragraphs students tried to develop their thoughts with relevant arguments. But there should not be too many points of view. Students noticed that here is no need to exaggerate or to give too many personal details. The last paragraph is the one where the writer must thank for the time and is the shortest one.

The letters for a magazine or for an editor are almost the same as the usual letter; the thing that differs is the layout. Writing the address or the name of the editor is optional. The students learned that right from the beginning that they should write the article they are referring to and its date. Then the students right their opinion about the special article they want to refer or to the magazine in general. They expressed clearly their opinions pro and against the topic they referred to. At the end of the letter the students wrote their name and under their signature. The tone of letters like this is formal, but a little humor is allowed.

These are examples of formal letters. There are also informal letters, like that to a friend. There are still few people nowadays that write informal letter, they prefer writing e-mails. The tone used in informal letters is usually relaxed. In informal letter the students were allowed to give personal details. The reader should be interested in reading an informal letter. Interesting things should be written in an informal letter. Recent event should also be told in informal letters. Sometimes an informal letter looks like an essay.

When it comes to giving instructions, even it looks simple this kind of writing requires well organization and planning. The instructions must be easy and basic. This writing must also be well planned. The instructions could be numbered or bullets or just lines. To be understood easily it is preferable for the instructions to be short and concise. Technical terms are not allowed.

When students were asked to write a speech they were reticent at the beginning. But then they like this task. They noticed that their speech had to take a personal note and a calm tone. They had to organize very well the speech in order to be understood by everyone. If they have to talk is easily than a speech, because the speech has a more formal tone and language. The audience to whom the speech or talk is addressing is also important. When starting to write a speech the students found that they must address to the most important person in the audience. Some students used rhetorical questions in writing a speech in order to involve the audience in the speech. The tone in this writing must also be definite to convince the audience. The ending of a speech should be positive and conclusive. Students should not include new ideas, new points of view in the ending. The ending of a speech is for consolidating the ideas mentioned before in the speech.

Reviews were also another type of writing that brought some problems for the students. Why? Because they considered difficult to express their feelings and emotions about the book, the programe or the film they had to review. The quality of the report and reviews are essential to be qualitative. In the introduction must be mentioned the topic, the title of what was being reviewed. Then they must give details in a descriptive way. An objective opinion is helpful for the reader or the listener. There must be arguments pro and against in the review. The review must end with a recommendation favorable or not. The review might be more helpful if it is about something the writer likes.

3.1.6. Academic Writing

Another kind of writing that has a definite function or purpose is the academic writing. This type refers to the intellectual writing. The tone of this writing is formal, usually referring as the third person narration. The topic of this writing id precise and very well analyzed before. During this writing are developed some ideas that are considered complex by some experts. The information introduced in such writing is organized and rigorous. The ideas must flow and be coherent.

Usually the first paragraph of such writing includes information about the rest of the writing. The arguments brought into the academic writing should be fair, speaking from a personal point of view. The language should be basically, coherent. The arguments also should have an investigative research based on confidentiality. Even if the tone should be personal, the research should have an authoritative tone.

The writer should choose carefully the words. This is because words can have different connotations and terminology. So, the used words should be concrete and have a specific meaning, and not a general one. The writer should try not to confuse the reader with the words he or she uses. If there cannot be used simple words then more explanations are needed.

The paragraphs of academic writing should be well structured. The sentences should be clear and easy. The expressions that are vague should be avoided. Abbreviations are not recommended, nor the contractions.

The sources should be cited and at the end of the writing there should be some references. Footnotes should not be forgotten. All these are necessary in order not to be accused of plagiarism. The ideas used always must be sustained by good arguments and coherent. Academic writing has many functions; one of them is describing the complex ideas and making them easy.

"The sentences in academic writing are often longer and more intricate than the sentences in popular magazines. Academics strive to go beyond what is quick, obvious, and general. They ask questions based on studying a subject from multiple points of view, to make surprising connections that would not occur to someone who has not studied the subject carefully.”
In this type of writing, the academic writing we can include a book, or a chapter in a book, a dissertation, a report, a thesis like the one I’m writing, an essay, an others.

Task 1

You will be asked to describe some visual information (graph/table/chart/diagram), and to present the description in your own words. You may be asked to describe and explain data, describe the stages of a process, how something works, or write about an object or event. You need to write 150 words in about 20 minutes.

Task 2

Analyze the two pie charts bellow and the table about the global warming. Give details and a full interpretation of them.

Task 3

After gathering information during their classes of History and Language, students had to reflect on their year in History and English Language. They had to summarize on what they had learned till that moment; include examples of learning or problems they encountered. Their feeling during the year at these subjects had to be included.

Task 4

Students are presented a graph, table, map or flowchart or diagram and they need to summarize the information, show contrasts or compare data, identify trends that can describe better the process. They should write approximately 200 words. The report should be finished in 20 minutes. Students are advised to give factual data starting from the diagram presented, and to write so that the reader can understand the trends or the factual information for the graph.

After solving tasks like this I, as a teacher, came to some conclusions. Some students were carefully and understood their tasks, but as usual there were students that did not understood. Not all the information, they gave, were important or connected to the tasks. The information and the paragraphs and good connections were used. Most of their ideas supported their opinions. The tasks were solved with coherence, having good structures and well prepared conclusions.

3.1.7. Creative Writing

Speaking about creative, our minds go to fiction, poems, or letter to pen-pals. This type is different from the functional or academic writing. Creative writing is not so restrictive as the others and is more open. It is used in expressing feelings or opinions. It expresses the artistic side of the writer. Personal ideas are described in this type of writing. There is usually a high connection between the writer and its creation.

Writing in a creative way means writing diaries, articles, journals or letters for friends, short stories, poems, scripts, songs or even blogs. Usually the teacher shows models to students, for a better result. Students are shown this way characteristic like the format or structure, styles of writings. It has no strict rules of writing. Creative writing could be associated by students with stimulant and amusing ways of developing writing skills into class.

Creative writing is not the type that gives information, is a type that tries to entertain or to educate both the reader and the writer. We could classify creative writing in efficient or inefficient, good or bad. The inefficient, bad type is the writing that does not impress the reader; it has no influence on his/ her feelings. For the authors of stories or poems, it is easier, they can’t be contradicted, and their works become usually bestsellers.

Task 1

Create a character that has a secret to confess but is too afraid to talk about. Write the page pages from a diary where the character would confess, write about it.

Task 2

Where would you like to go when you want to escape from the pressure from school or work or family? Describe this place.

Task 3

Choose one dwarf from the seven dwarfs from the fairy tale Snow White. Now re-write the fairy tale from his point of view.

Task 4

You are walking around the city. Describe this walk: the streets, the people, the weather, the sky, the trash, and other elements you find on your walk.

Task 5

Describe your winter holiday. What have you done? Where have you been? With who have you been? How was the weather?

This is the most relaxing writing for the students. They enjoyed preparing and then reading it for their colleagues. But even if it seemed easy, it gave them a lot of difficulties. There were texts that lost their coherence during the process. The students started writing using a time and then changed it without having any connection or being correct. There were texts that could be seen that were done in a hurry, so they were short with no connection to the topic. But there were texts that were good; respected the topic, the organization. They were good examples for the others. The details were where to choose and well used. The students were attracted to the text and eager to see what was going on next. Some students were convinced to visit some of the described places or to try new things.

3.2. Reasons and principles for teaching writing

Why is important to teach writing during teaching a foreign language, in this case English? Nowadays it is important to communicate through writing thanks to the blogs or other internet ways. Writing is important from writing the shopping list to the essays students must do for school. It is helpful to stimulate students write in a foreign language and to let them free their thoughts. Knowing to write correctly is important because it makes students aware of the lexical items in a foreign language. Motivating students can develop imagination.

Harmer considered “the reasons for teaching writing to students of English as a foreign language include reinforcement, language development, learning style and, most important, writing as a skill in its own right.”

Now we should take each part of Harmer’s opinion and develop. If we refer to reinforcement, then we should refer maybe to the reinforcement of grammar and vocabulary that the students have learned. At this stage we the teachers can notice that there are students that can learn just in an oral way and students that need to see the written message to remember it. Of course, writing will help the students develop the language. It helps them think about what words or sentences they choose in expressing their written ides. The style of learning is developed by listening or by thinking about what they, the students, have just learned. Writing is one of the most important skills learned along with speaking, reading or listening. Students need to know how to express themselves in writing, to write a letter or an email. They need to know the punctuation and the structure of ideas, of sentences, of paragraphs.

What are reasons for which a student can be motivated to write? Here are some examples from the many that we can think about. A student needs to write for developing linguistic competences in tasks like copying samples of writings or writing language knowledge tests or just writing short texts. Writing is used to encourage students speak/ think fluent. Students will practice the writing skills in exercises that ask them to choose special features from a text, or will evaluate their attitudes and knowledge.

Before starting a writing activity, the teacher should follow find ways for motivating students to write with enthusiasm and of course confidence. The teacher should also think how the writing task that thought about will be influenced by real life experiences.

According to D. Bryne, the following principles should be followed when teaching writing: a teacher should teach a student to write, a teacher should bring adequate experience in writing, a teacher should show how writing is integrated in the communication system, a teacher should teach how a text is written, a teacher should teach different kinds of written texts, a teacher should transform the writing tasks into realistic tasks, a teacher should integrate the writing tasks with the other skills, a teacher should always use different techniques and of course an appropriate support must be brought into class.

A good and useful way to teach students to write is to encourage them to write respecting the steps: planning, organizing, composing and revising. It is important for a successful writing activity the chosen material/text to be appropriate to the level of knowledge and to the age. If a student understands the text his or her writing will be more effective. If at the beginning of the teaching writing process students receive tasks to write short text, later they will have to write longer texts, whole texts. Students must have the chance to try different forms of writings together with the development of different skills acquisition. It is important in an activity writing to be integrates with other skills like listening or reading. If a teacher wants a good writing learning, he or she must vary the techniques and the activities. During a class there must be free writing activities together with controlled or guided writing activities. The discussion during a class goes to a collaborative writing. A writing process is advisable to be ended with a revision of the written material.

A teacher is treating the entire writing activities as being creative, this need a lot of time and feedback. With the passing of classes, a teacher goes from the person that gives tasks from a topic to the person that does not interfere in the process of writing. A student must be aware of the fact that what he or she has written can be changed at the end of the process by adding new information or by deleting the old ones.

A writing task will be successful if it will follow the three steps: pre-writing activities, during-writing activities and post-writing activities. During the pre-writing step it is important that the student will let the flow of ideas come. Now, from a title or from some pictures, the student must express free about what he or she thinks the task is about. It is an active step that prepares the students for the main writing step. Now are important the content, the vocabulary or the audience. Teacher has the role just to stimulate imagination and creativity.

During a pre-writing step the teacher could use the following tasks to prepare the students for the writing activity itself: brainstorming, planning, generating ideas, questioning, answering questions, focusing on ideas. If during the brainstorming the students think of ideas about the topic in the middle of the board or paper, during the planning activity students will think about a plan from which they can start the writing class. If we, the teachers, use the generating ideas task we will have to group the student into six groups of discussion: the group that must describe the topic, the group that must compare the topic, the group that will associate the topic, the group that must analyze the topic, the group that will apply the topic and the group that will come with arguments pro and against the topic. For a good pre-writing activity the students could be divided into two groups: one makes questions on the topic and the others will find the proper answers. A pre-writing activity can be based on a picture or on a song, from which discussion can star by describing them.

Writing process will continue with guided activities of writing and re-writing during the writing step itself. Now student are encouraged to write recursively or a revision. Writing correctly from the point of view of grammar or syntax is important. For this step in writing the students need clear instructions and resources from which they can start their work. Examples of activities during the writing activity itself are the self-editing or the writing drafts, or the revision, or the description of events, or fill in exercises/ grids or expanding. During this step students may use the information they have found during the pre-writing activities.

The post writing activities are the activities that will help students reflect on what they have written. The post writing activities help the teacher the proper feedback of the entire writing class. Post writing activities can be considered the reading of the written material, adding or deleting information to it, checking the spelling or punctuation, answering to questions on the written material or filling in with information from the text.

A collaborative writing activity is important in developing the writing skills. It will help the organization of the message. Students could learn information from the others. The teachers are using more often the project teams to develop writing skills.

3.3. Parts of the writing program and process

Writing can be seen as an important part of language development and one of the most used and developed skills. Our live goes round it. Writing is the representative system sounds along with the other symbols such as punctuation marks.

Florian Coulmas has defined in 1999 the writing system as “ a set of visible tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units are encoded in the writing system.”

Each writing has visible signs except for the blind one meaning the Braille system. For this system scientists introduced the tactile signs for the blind could read.

Steven Roger Fischer considered there canot be a a writing definition that can cover every kind of writing. He thinks that a writing system must have o certain purpose, it must have graphic marks for electronics and must have signs for both articulated speech and for the electronic programs. “As the most visible items of a language, scripts and orthographies are ’emotionally loaded’, indicating as they do group loyalties and identities. Rather than being mere instruments of a practical nature, they are symbolic systems of great social significance which may moreover, have profound effect on the social structure of a speech community.”

Writing can also be seen as the process of capturing the thoughts and the ideas and giving a permanent format to them. If when we speak we use the hand or other nonverbal helpers, when writing these helpers are missing. Because we can’t have an immediate feedback for the writing, we must be very careful when writing for the message to be clear and accurate.

If in the past teachers during the class concentrated on the final writing product, in the present they concentrate on the message and on the content of a text. Nowadays a teacher try to make students be focused more on the stages of writing. So all the stages of a writing activity, pre-writing- drafting- post writing, is given a special attention with different strategies. During a writing activity students have more time to think on their product and they have even time to improve it. For a good product or even a good feedback it is very important the revision of the writing message. A teacher must always be careful in what a student expresses and how the student’s background interferes.

When teaching writing, a teacher should focus on the six traits writing model. This model is using the six qualities that a good writer need: finding ideas, organizing them, finding the voice, choosing the words, finding a good fluency of the sentences and finding the conventions. The ideas of a text, of a message are very important; they can be considered the heart of the text, of the message. We must find a topic that can be developed, for which we can give details. The organization of ideas must be well done, because this is the base the main structure of the text. A good organization means a better understanding of the text. The words in composing a text are important because they are the ones that help the reader to imagine the story in his mind. Of course that when writing a text it is important a have a good fluency of ideas, so that the reader doesn’t lose himself between ideas. The convention, meaning the spelling or the grammar or the punctuation, is also important for transmitting the correct message.

There are many strategies that can help a student understand and follow the right step. For example a teacher should give many examples that can help the student understand better. The example can be from another student’s work or from the teacher’s example. It is advisable to let the student time to solve the tasks, the steps in class and not at home, because in class the teacher can give another example or can help or correct the mistake. The teacher should all the time encourage the students to do more, to go behind their powers. The progress of the students should be checked constantly by the teacher. Giving marks for their works also can encourage the students and give them a good feeling. Activities that involve the writing process should be done often and not from time to time. If a teacher doesn’t do activities that require the writing process, the student will have the tendency to forget what should do and when.

The writing products are recommendable to be marked at the end of the writing process, so that they don’t stop the students from the creativity.

3.3.1 Pre-writing

Teaching writing means developing imagination and creativity. When we teach writing in the class we need to follow a series of steps that can lead us to a correct teaching and learning. The steps that should be followed in a writing activity are pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing, rewriting and publishing.

The first step, pre-writing, is used by the teacher to prepare the students for the writing itself, to stimulate their creativity. During this step the student tries to find the idea of the topic, might find ideas from their real life, from their daily activities. Starting from these the student must now build the message around the found ideas. The building is often made with the help of brainstorming. This is the step when you also must organize your ideas and choose the best to tell the best way your message.

3.3.2. Drafting

If for the pre-writing step the students could work together, in groups or alone to find the ideas, for the next step, drafting, students should work alone just giving them some suggestions. During the drafting step, students start to put the ideas into paragraphs, start to give explanations for the ideas. Additional ideas may come during this step to fulfill the message. During this step the writer has a big role, he is important, spelling or grammar are not very important now. The purpose of the step is the concentration of students to put ideas on paper without any distraction.

3.3.3. Revising and editing

Let’s go to the next step of the writing process, that of revising and editing. Now it is the moment for the students to look back on what they have written and check it. They must check at this step the correct spelling and the correct grammar or punctuation. They can add information or delete. Student should try to read the message loud for themselves or for the others, reading aloud can help them find mistakes. Students can be critics for them or for the others. Also the teacher can correct the mistakes if any. We can say that this can be considered one of the most important steps in the writing process that takes the longest time.

3.3.4. Rewriting and publishing

The final product of the writing is during the rewriting step. Here must be included the new changes and suggestions. Teacher can offer to the students the last suggestions that can be included in the final draft.

And the final step for a right writing process is publishing the message, the material. They now can read their works to the colleagues and to the teacher. Students should be encouraged to publish their revised works in the school magazines or on the websites or on bulletin boards. A good feedback from the audience outside their desk or even their class can give confidence to the students to write again and makes them feel important. It is time for the students to celebrate their success.

Students will use what they have learnt during the writing process later when they are adults. But for a good and successful writing process it is advisable for the parents to know how it works and what it is about. Parents are the one that also can help at home the students during one of the steps. Reading to the children or letting them to make different lists or letters will help later the students to have a rich imagination. So teachers must always be helped in their work of teaching by parents. Parents’ help is essential for a good development of the brain.

All these steps take a long of time, so students need time to finish a work, a writing process. Usually students tend to hurry up, to finish quickly their tasks. But for teacher teaching writing during a process like this is difficult and needs patience so that each student understands each step. It is difficult and because no teacher can say that the solving of one step is correct or not, because there are no correct answers.

4. Methods and strategies in teaching writing

The teaching methods (from Greek “odos”=way, road and “metha”=towards) represents the ways used in schools by teachers to help the students discover the life, the nature, the world. They are always ways which help forming and developing the principles, the students’ capacity to act on nature, on using the products of knowing to transform the exterior in inner facilities, forming the character and developing his or her personality.

We don’t have to forget that the pedagogical efficiency, the teaching results depend on the chosen methods of the teacher. Some well-known researchers, like Jean Piaget, J. S. Bruner, David P. Ausbel or Ioan Cerghit, have shown the importance of methods in teaching. These put an accent on intelligence of the teacher in choosing the best within the methods for each moment of the lesson, showing that by using different methods in the same moment of the lesson, they can get different results in preparing the students. Ioan Cerghit thought that the teaching methods are referring both to the special conditions when the teacher’s interfere is looking for a change in forming the student, but also to the student’s effort to integrate into the learning process, gathering knowledge and forming practical or intellectual attitudes.

Any pedagogical method is coming from gathering a lot of factors, which takes us to the strong idea that education will always be an art: “the art of adapting, to a precise institution, the general indications presented in the text of specialty.”

The literature can also offer a more explicit opinion about the same notion. In Vaideanu’ s opinion, the method is “the way or the working modality:

Selected by the teacher and applied in lessons and extrascholary activities with the help of the students and for their benefit;

Which supposes cooperation between the teacher and the students and their participation in finding solutions;

Which is used as choices and/ or selected procedures, combined and used depending on the level and needs or students’ interests with the purpose of every day assimilation of knowledge, and living the values, assimilating the creative spirit;

Which allows the teacher to manifest as a competent bearer of the educational content and as organizer of the teaching-learning process, he can play the role of animator, assessor guide, teaching being a hypothesis of learning.”

The didactic procedures are components of the method, which depend on the action’s execution, and are limited techniques which serve as instruments of the method. The method is a correlative assembly of procedures considered to be the best for a given learning situation.

Another term for method is didactic technology. In a new way “educational technology means a systematic way of projecting, fulfillment and assessment of the entire process of teaching- learning, in the terms of specific objectives, based on research of the learning and human communication and using a combination of human and nonhuman media for obtaining an efficient training.

For the didactic technology, an important role has the didactic strategy. This notion, in Nicola’s opinion can be defined as an assembly of procedures through which we can find the cooperation between the teachers and the students for teaching and learning of a big volume of information, of forming some customs and competences, of developing the human personality.”

The educational practice shows that no method can be used as a prescription, but as an assembly of procedures, actions and operations, which are structured depending on some factors, in a group of activities. We must notice that these methods are subjected to a process of reevaluation for assuring the higher degree of effectiveness. All the teaching methods, traditional or modern, must be used so that the didactic activity proposed by the teacher can obtain maximum efficiency and the students assimilate the new knowledge for to apply later in different contexts.

4.1. Traditional versus modern methods used in teaching writing

Traditional methods are hetero-structural methods which have in common the idea that teaching means transmitting a volume of knowledge from a knower, the teacher, to an uncover, the student. These methods can be optimized, rebuilt. We don’t propose to give up completely to these, because they still offer pedagogical authentically virtues: consistent international luggage, structural methods of information and a better control of the time. From these used traditional methods used in everyday lesson we can mention the exercise, the exposition, the conversation, the explication, the work with the textbook, the reading.

Traditional methods can be described as methods where the interaction in the class is dominated by the teacher. The activities in the class are teacher-centered, the teacher being the one that has the information to transmit and the students are the receivers of information. We can say that the information is poured from a recipient to another.

Scrivener said that “being in a class in the presence of a teacher and listening attentively is […] enough to ensure that learning will take place” In conclusion, traditional methods are based on the teacher, for the students is enough if they listen to the teacher and are preset into the class. These are enough for the students to have a good packet of knowledge.

Like other functions in life, let’s say sleeping or eating, education is also a part of it. It is so old and formed so many people till our days. But it has changed during the years just like the technologies around us. Now the digital methods are replacing the traditional ones. We can say that there were fewer the methods used in the past to teach a foreign language. Among these we can mention the lectures instructions, the translation method, the seatwork, the observation.

The Lectures Instruction is the method that bases on the class’s activity under the direct supervision of the teacher. The teacher has the role to guide in every moment the student. Students are asked to read and to fill in exercises very carefully.

The Seatwork is the method that uses the tests as method of evaluating mostly. The test is given to the entire class, so all the students have the same test. Usually texts have exercises from the textbooks or other books relevant to the topic of the test.

The observation is the method used by teachers to notice what students have written and learned.

Teaching is a very old technique, used first many years ago. This is expected to be done when the person is very young, no matter the sex of the person. Usually the education is formal, meaning the students and the teacher. The critics consider that formal education and traditional methods are the ones that help students receive and have the needed amount of knowledge they need to succeed in life. Traditional methods have the tendency to be boring and to lose students’ concentration. Nowadays students and teachers prefer modern methods because they are interactive and of course fun.

But even if there are many teachers and critics that contest these traditional methods old-fashioned, these traditional methods can’t be excluded from every day teaching. If so, teaching will not be so effective anymore. It is advisable to mix the traditional methods with the modern methods. This way the classes will be funnier, more interactive and more effective. Students will enjoy better learning and the acquisition of new knowledge.

If a teacher wants to apply a traditional method he or she will rely on the textbook. But if the teacher wants to use a modern method he or she will rely on hand-on papers. Traditionally a class starts from parts and goes to a whole task, but the modern way suggests the vice versa meaning from the whole to the parts of the tasks. During traditional methods learning and evaluation are done separately, the modern methods combine the learning with the evaluation, which are done through portfolios for example.

For a good learning, teaching it is advisable for a teacher to combine the two: the tradition with the modern. The diversity of methods is helpful for all the students, giving the opportunity for each students, good or bad, to get the information. During a class a teacher should follow the steps: questions, explains, models, checks and if necessary demonstrates. Applying a traditional method a teacher limits the imagination of the students, their creativity. But, applying a modern method will help students develop their imagination, will make them involve in the learning process. Traditional methods focus on individual works, whereas modern methods focus on group and pair work.

Some of the modern methods that can help a student get a good writing are brainstorming, the free writing, the idea webbing, flow Charting, journalistic questions or the double/ triple actions.

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Brainstorming is one of the most popular methods. During this method students have to fill in as many examples as they can remember starting from a topic. I usually apply this method during the group activities or mostly during the activities with the whole class. When a student says one idea, the others come with other similar ideas. Students should be let to use their imagination freely. Anything is accepted during this method, just to have something in common with the topic. It is good for students to be challenged.

Example of Brainstorming:

FAMILY

Together

Father Uncle Home

Brother

Sister Aunt Help

Mother

Love Protection

If brainstorming is a group activity, free writing is an individual work. This method is also known as the stream of conscious. During this methods students have to let their ideas flow on the paper. Also all the ideas are accepted, there are no limits. Applying this methods students cannot stop until they finish the ideas. It can happen that they start from a topic and finish with another idea. It is important for students to know that grammar or spelling are not important during this activity. This activity must have a limit of time. After finishing the activity, students are asked to read it again and correct the evident mistakes.

Example of Free Writing: CHRISTMAS

Flow Charting is the method that help students identify the connection between ideas. A flow chart shows the connection between a cause and an effect of a topic. On the right of the topic are written the causes and on the left the effects can be written. In a flow charting students can use all kind of symbols, but the most used are the rectangles.

Example of a Flow Charting:

Idea webbing also known as cluster mapping is the method that gets out and then connects the ideas. The writing looks like a spider with many legs: a circle in the middle of the page with a lot of arrows around. At the end of each arrow is another circle where the students have to put an idea or question connected to the topic. From the formed circles students can draw other arrows with the answers, which are subtopics.

Example of idea webbing:

The double/ triple entry method is almost similar to the brainstorming method. This method it is usually used to compare two or more topics. This is a method used during the pre-writing stage and asks the students to make two or more columns, according to the number of topics. At the end of the writing activity students should understand the topic better through comparison or contrast with others. The method can be applied as assessment and it requires investigation, research.

Example of Double/Triple entry: When speaking about components of cars and motorbikes:

Another used method in teaching writing is Journalistic Questions. This method is used to structure the topic. It usually starts from the WH- questions: what, who, when, where, how or how. To find more about the topic the teacher asks questions that starts with one of these words. The number of questions is nor restricted. The method can be applied either in an individual task or during a group task. The teacher uses this method in in pre-writing method, preparing the writing activity. After the students answer the questions they read the answers trying to organize them for the writing activity that will start then. This method is very useful when the students prepare a project or when they are making researches on a specific topic or maybe when they evaluate a finished paper. The most used questions are:

Who is or might be involved?

What will happen?

Where will the action take place?

When will the action happen?

How will it happen?

Why will it happen?

What will be the best title?

Other two good methods for getting a good writing are the game and the competition methods. We all noticed that students, no matter the age, like to play. A good game for teaching writing is the word game, which uses the vocabulary that the students have. Games such as scrabble or housie are used just to check the words the young know and to develop the vocabulary. Other word games can be considered the dictation through competition, anagrams or even hangman.

No matter if a teacher choose to use only one or more methods, traditional or modern, he or she should be sure that it is the best one and the writing will be very good, will be successful. It is advisable for teachers to use these methods during the pre-writing stage, preparing the students for a better writing and giving them the confidence they need. Using one of these methods during the pre-writing activities will help the students to get an organized writing, which will be better appreciated.

4.2.Strategies in teaching writing

Writing is a complex process, it is a continuity a listening or reading. If a student can write a few words, a sentence, this doesn’t mean he or she can really write. In fact, it is a writing, but not a good writing. For a good writing students must be taught. In general, students prefer to speak and not to write English, so sometimes they are better in speaking than in writing. But for having a good English students need to know both to speak and to write in English. Having good skills in writing is very important when they want to find a job, it is a great advantage.

Usually a student that learns a new language has problems in writing. For solving these problems the students need the teacher to have good techniques for solving them. A student with a writing problem is the student that doesn’t respect special rules, he or she sees the writing just as a generation of ideas. But in learning a new language, the writing must be very very good so that that the student must be understood from the very first moment. A good teacher is a teacher that can transform a simple student into a strategic writer. ‘Strategic writers are those who are able to use writing strategies in different writing situations or those who are able to change writing strategies from theoretical part into practical one’ Because writing is important in learning a new language the student must see the writing also as a product and as a process.

A good teacher must know how to teach writing together with its rules, its ways of making a conversation and the way of developing the writing skills. Writing was seen by Calhoun and Hale in 2003 as a mental activity which produces and controls the writing. The researchers showed that a student must be strategic in writing, in building paragraphs, texts. According to El-Koumy ‘a strategy is a plan selected deliberately by the writer to accomplish a particular goal or to complete a given task.’ In preparing a good strategy for the writing the teacher is trying to get an independent writing, a good autonomy in the students’ writing.

The teacher must always find the right strategy to change the students’ attitudes, to change their attitude from a passive one into an active, positive one. Sometimes or in most of the cases this is a difficult work from the teacher but it is not impossible. For most of the EFL students learning to write is very difficult. My conclusion is that this process is difficult due to lot of factors, such as the students’ lack of practice, or the limited vocabulary, or not knowing the topic, or their negative attitude towards the skill. Most of the teacher, while checking the writing, tend to check rigorous the grammar or the spelling, and a lot of students are scared of this so they do not concentrate on the topic, on the idea of the writing. The teacher often give the students the chance to check and correct their writing or give them feedback in English. We, the teachers, can notice that the students have a poor writing thanks to their negative attitudes toward writing. Some students have bad opinion on them, on their writing thanks to the teacher’s feedback and sometimes they consider themselves incompetent. So the teachers must find the right, the proper strategy for each student, for each level to develop the writing skills.

When teaching students to write we, the teachers, must find the right strategy to do this. And this must be done taking into consideration some ingredients such as the level or the age of the student. A good strategy is a strategy that can help the student get over his difficulties in writing. The teacher can identify the proper strategy for teaching writing after reading the paper of the students and finding which are the student’s difficulties in writing a good paper.

Another strategy in teaching students to write is by showing them a sample of the writing. I’ve tried to do apply this method in front of my classes on papers or on projectors. So, I started a composition, for example, and while I was speaking I was writing also my thoughts. During this I asked students to interfere and to contribute to my writing. But most of the times I asked them just to copy it in their notebooks or to write their own writings which should be similar to what I have just done. In this way I noticed that most of the students prefer to write a new work starting from my sample or continuing it.

But there are also students that prefer to write their own composition, to express their own ideas in their own way. Sometime these are the best compositions. From my experience I can say that these students need assistance, guidance to have a better writing. This assistance is easily given when the writing is done in pair or group working or better in individual writing. When we have a pair or group working we can give a different theme to each pair or group. The assistance is also given according to the level of the pair or group, more or less help. Even if there is no theme for a writing, the teacher’s assistance can be asked even for the simple tasks such as copying a text or sample, in fill-in exercises or rephrases, and so on. The teacher should give these assistances during all the classes to ensure that the students have a proper and correct writing.

All these assistances and models must be used to lead the students towards an independent writing. But to get to an independent writing a student needs a lot of repetition, a lot of practice and of course a good assistance and guiding. I noticed that the students remember and have a better writing if the teaching was done in a repeatedly way, in an easy way, without the teacher trying to suffocate him or her with a different task, a different writing each time and every time more and more difficult. A student appreciates better a simple task and a thing that was done many times.

From my experience I noticed that a teacher cannot apply the same strategy on the same level or on the same task. The teacher must always look for proper strategy all the time, must identify the right strategy for a good writing process. But in general a teacher if wants to get a good writing must give the good model, then must ask the students to practice on the model and of course asks the students to repeat the writing till they get the best independent writing.

Still, when a student has to focus too much on the punctuation or on the grammar he or she will forget about the idea of the writing, his or her creativity will remain behind or will be forgotten. So a good strategy in the case when creativity is important is to asks students write as fast they can, letting their creativity, their imagination flow. We must accentuate to the students that spelling is not very important in this exercise. These are the writings that have to develop from a given topic, or the writings that have to start from a beginning or an ending. For these tasks students get a limit of time, let’s say 5 or 10 minutes.

Example no 1

Write your opinion about the school you learn at or about the educational system in general.

Example no 2

Write about your relation with your family.

Example no 3

Write about your summer holiday.

In these cases students have to let their imagination come, the ideas to flow to be written as quickly as they can. The purpose of these tasks is to have something done, written. Always it is a good idea to let students think for a minute or two before they start writing. When the time is up the students have a draft and not the final writing. The teacher should let the students another few minutes so that they can check the spelling or the grammar. This is the revision process of the writing. And then the students can present their writings to the teacher or to the other students.

A good strategy that I use sometimes to make the students remind a good writing is making them to underline the model I gave to them. This is useful for the students that have a good visual memory. For them it is a good way to remember how they can write correct a sentence, paragraph, respecting the rule, the sample that I gave them. It is also useful for all the students when they don’t remember a special rule or what they have to do next, and looking back they can see it easily.

Sometimes the students inhibit themselves or get scared to write when they receive an empty paper. This can be their nightmare. So the teacher should give the students templates to facilitate the students writing. So the teacher should write a question from which a student start the work or models can be given. For an EFL student the most used templates are resumes or CVs.

Example no 1

Starting from the text you have just read describe your friend.

Example no 2

In no more than 12 lines tell me what happened to Pilgrim the horse in the text you have just read ‘The horse Whisperer’ by Nicholas Evans.

To have a good writing the student must be taught to be careful at the content of the writing. They must always take into consideration to whom they address, to what kind of reader and that the writing is not for themselves, but for a reader, for someone to read the text. Before starting to write the student must think what a reader expects to find in his or her work, what kind of questions the reader can address to the writer. Like when the student writes an email inviting colleagues to a party or an event, he or she can expect the receiver to ask for more details about the theme or about the place of the event.

Still the teacher should give the students to write about topics they know about, that are not too difficult about, that are according to their level of knowledge. A student doesn’t have to know to write all types of writing, just the ones they need.

For getting a good writing the students don’t use just the strategies that the teacher show them but also their own strategies. For forming their own strategies in writing a student must have behind a background experience in writing or a good instruction. Sometimes the students don’t take into consideration their experience or the instruction they receive in writing, but their own competence to get a good writing. This competence could have been taken from their Romanian writing strategies or from their day by day way of learning a new knowledge.

Asking the students what could be their strategies to get a good, a correct writing I got different answers. Among the most used strategies for getting a good writing I noticed that the students use synonyms, meaning if the students don’t know the exact word they have to use in English they try to find one that is similar in meaning to the one they need. There are students that think about the purpose of their writing or about the person that will read it, so they are more careful to the writing’s content and to what they want to express through it. There are students that want to tell a lot of ideas through their writings, but not knowing how to express them they simplify what they want to write in order to get a better writing. When students want to be sure they have a good writing with connected ideas, paragraphs, they stop after each paragraph to re-read it and to check if they are well expressed and maybe to find new ideas.

If the strategies mentioned above can be indicated by a teacher, For example, there are also strategies that students use without taking into consideration the teacher’s instruction or strategy. There are students that, in their wish to get a correct writing, they use the native language- Romanian- to solve the task and then have it translated literally into English. In fact, we can consider that using Romanian in an EFL writing could start from ‘the idea of abandoning the native tongue is too stressful to many learners, who need a sense of security in the experience of learning a foreign language”

Therefore, students should form their proper writing strategies in order to make them more secure on what they are writing. But in most of the cases they do not. This can be thanks to their lack of certitude on what they know or write. But students should be all the time aware of how useful the use of their native language can be in learning how to write correct. Me, as a teacher, I have tried in many cases to make the students use English instead of their native language. But in many cases I failed. Even if I give the instructions in English in many cases I get answerS in Romanian, and then give it in English. So, many students have developed the strategy to answer or to write first in their native language and then in English.

Some students are applying the strategy to re-read what they have already written and then not to be happy with what they have. So, they start from the beginning, changing their initial ideas and writing new ideas, different ideas this time. Or, there are students that prefer from the beginning to write more than one draft, and just after they are sure or they like what they have written they hand the final paper. But, there are students that prefer not to read what they have written and to give the papers as they are, without checking them. These students are sure on what they have written or they are not very sure but do not want to change the initial ideas. So, they hand the papers as they are.

We can say that the writing strategy is connected with the ‘writers’ purposeful interaction with print, with fellow readers and writers, and with literate communities of practice’ Still the teacher should be the one that can help the students develop their writing skills. The teacher should know what is the best strategy for doing this according to the students’ needs. Also, the students must know how to develop and use their own strategies. By using different strategies the EFL writings become complex and dynamic. There should always be a connection between the teacher’s strategies and the student’s strategies.

CONCLUSIONS

Writing is one of the most important skills students learn in school. But it is also one of the most important characteristics of human being. Everywhere we look, everywhere we go we see writings: on advertisements, on shops, on cars, on paper or not, on the phone or on television, on the internet. When we want to communicate with someone long distance, we use the phone or we write a letter or a message. If in the past people used to write on paper a lot, nowadays this method is used not so often. Now we use modern technology to communicate and to send messages.

In the class, for my students writing has another meaning: it is used to put new words on paper, to put down sentences and latter to link them, to develop the skill of making poems and essays. My students use writing in class to put down or let’s say to transfer the knowledge, the new information, the language activities or the thoughts on paper. I think that teaching writing means the ability of a teacher to guide and to develop the skill of the students to put down nice composition, their thoughts or their opinion.

To get a good writing I tried to make the students and me, why not, respect the stages of a writing activity: the pre-writing, the process of writing and the post-writing activities; or like critics like to divide: pre-writing, drafting, revising or editing. I noticed that pre-writing activities are very useful to prepare the students for what they are going to do next during the class. This is the stage that helps students gather information on a specific topic. Activities that can be done during this stage are free-writing or brainstorming or journalism or investigation or image streaming or lists or clustering. At the drafting stage of the lesson I ask students to develop their ideas starting from the information they have just collected. This stage can be done under my surveillance, the teacher, or alone. But at the revising stage they have been assisted by me or by other students. Grammar problems or punctuation or spelling are watched careful and corrected.

The strategies that I use to teach writing differ from class to class, from student to student, from level to level. Of course every learner will make mistakes; it is useful for some of the students to learn from their mistakes. When a student makes mistakes I try not to accentuate the mistakes because the students might get afraid to write and will not progress.

Good writing does not just happen. It is a process that lasts years and that needs patience. Good strategies are needed for a good learning and confidence in what they are doing. Good strategies will help students develop correct the skills and will help them later in life.

To get a good writing I have to apply the proper strategy, different each time. As I showed a good strategy cannot be taught just after reading a book. To apply a correct strategy means a lot of work to know when to use it. To get a good writing we must trust the students’ capacity in writing. We, the teachers must have patience till the student will be able to write freely without any help. To get a good writing we, the teacher must identify first the proper strategy, them give a good model, sample to the students, then help them write without any guidance and repeat the writing till we get an independent work, writing. The teacher chooses the strategy according to what he or she wants to get from the student’s writing.

Having patience and applying the right strategy we can get a student that gets over his or hers difficulties in writing, over his or her fears, becoming stronger. Giving a sample of writing helps a lot the student to have confidence and try to write a similar task. Repeating writing after a model will get later an independent good writing. We must teach students to write without our help or with a little help from other colleagues. It is useful to teach a student write in different forms, being individual, or pair work or group work. The teacher’s assistance is useful to check if the student understood the task and how to apply it. We see that a student can get a good independent writing we can say that our work as teachers was done.

During my research I tried to describe which are the most important types of writing or which are the steps for teaching writing. I also tried to identify the most used methods, traditional or modern, and which are the most adequate strategies in teaching writing. I also gave some examples of writing.

For a good writing repetition is very important and patience. Organization of ideas is also important. But a writing is not ready if it is not checked and corrected. To get a good writing and to be sure that the strategy was good the teacher should connect the writing to the student’s real life, experience.

We can say that teaching writing is a complex, but simple process. It depends on the teacher’s ability to do it, to involve the students in it and of course the ability to transform teaching into a little game that students cannot notice. But, teaching writing cannot be done without teaching reading or teaching speaking.

We can conclude that there are many ways of writing but also many ways for teaching writing, just like the researchers Perl and Wilson said in 1996.

REFERENCES

Allen, V.F. (1983), Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Balan Rada & co. (2003), In-Service Distance Training Course for Teachers of English, Polirom

Baker Joanna and Westrup Heather, The English Language Teacher’s Handbook, Creative Print, 2000

Bello, T. (1997), Improving ESL Learners' Writing Skills. ERIC Digest. ERIC Identifier: ED409746

Benson, P. (2001). Teaching and Researching Autonomy in Language Learning. Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education

Broughton Geoffrey – Teaching English as Foreign Language, Routledge, 19993

Byrne,D. Teaching Writing Skills

Carter James –Creating Writers, Routledge Press, 2006

Cremin, Teresa, (2009), Teaching English Creatively, New York, Routledge

Cushing Sara- Assessing Writing, Cambridge, 2002

Dean Curry- Kaleidoscope- EFL Activities in speaking and writing, Materials Branch, 1994

Davis Jonson- Effective Academic Writing , Oxford University Press, 2006

Forsman D- Writing to learn means learning to think

Hadfield, Jill and Charles, (2008), Introduction to Teaching English, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Harmer, J., The Practice of English Language Teaching, 1998

Hedge, T. (1988). Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hughes, Glyn S. (2003), A Handbook of Classroom English, Oxford University Press

I.S.P. Nation- Teaching ESL and EFL Reading and writing, 2009

Jozsef, Horvath (2001) Advanced Writing In English as a Foreign Language, Agora Nyomda, Pecs

Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Centre. (2004). Priority: Literacy – Best practices in teaching writing. Accessed March 4, 2008 from

Monagham,Connie ( 2007) The effective Strategies in Teaching Writing

Pogrow Stanley- Teaching Content Outrageously. How to captivate all students and accelerate learning, 2008

Raimes, A. (1983) Techniques in Teaching Writing, OUP

Rao Z. (2007) Training in Brainstorming and Developing Writing Skills, in ELT Journal 2007, Oxford University Press

Vizental, Adriana (2003), Strategies of Teaching and Testing English as a Foreign Language, ed Polirom

Zemach Dorothy – Academic Writing, from paragraph to writing, Macmillan Press, 2010

www.coerll.utexas.edu/methods, Foreign Language Teaching Methods

https://busyteacher.org/

APPENDIX

LESSON PLAN

Date:

Teacher: Lipovanu Roxana

School: Scoala Gimnaziala Valea Seaca- Structura Contesti

Grade: 3rd- L1

Level: beginners

Number of hours per week: 2

Number of pupils: 25

Textbook: Fairyland 3B, Express Publishing

Type of lesson: Vocabulary and grammar

Topic: My new clothes

Function: new vocabulary and present continuous

Methods: conversation, explanation, dialogue, exercise,

Skills: listening, speaking, writing, reading

Class management: individual work, pair work, whole class

Time: 50 minutes

Aims of lesson:

To talk about clothes

To remember verb To Be

To describe actions happening now

Materials:

Textbooks and notebooks

Computer, CD and projector

worksheet

Interaction:

Teacher-whole class, Teacher- Student, Student- Student, Student-Teacher

Vocabulary:

Clothes

Stages of the lesson

Warm-up: Time: 2’

Activity: Greetings, introductory conversation

Setting the right atmosphere

Interaction: T→Ss, frontal

Revision of the previous learned vocabulary Time: 6’

Activity: The T cheeks homework. Then Ss are asked to tell things they can do or can’t.

Interaction: T↔Ss; Ss –T

Introduction of the new topic Time: 8’

Activity: The T writes the title on the board, then asks the Ss to identify the clothes from the book and to write them in their notebooks.

Interaction: T↔Ss

Practice: Time: 10′

Activity: The T asks the Ss to listen to the tape and to follow the text. The T asks Ss to read the lesson and to take the unknown words from text. Then the T asks the Ss to watch the video of the lesson

Interaction: T↔Ps,

New grammar Time: 15′

Activity: The T asks the Ss when the actions from the text are happening. Ss respond. The T writes on the board a sentence or two from the text and explains what tense it is and when it is used, then how it is formed. Ss are asked to remember the verb To Be- affirmative and negative. The T mentions that this tense is happening now, today, at the moment of speaking. The T also explains the short forms of this tense. Ss are asked to read the examples in the grammar box.

Interaction: T↔Ss; Ss –T

Consolidation Time: 7’

Activity: The T gives the Ss a worksheet on Present Continuous. Ss solve the tasks.

Interaction: T↔Ss; Ss –T

Homework assignment and assessment Time: 2′

Activity: The T gives pupils homework exercise 3/pg 21. The T marks the most active students.

Interaction: T→Ss, frontal

LESSON PLAN

Teacher: Lipovanu Roxana

Date:

School: Valea Seaca

Form: 7th

Level: pre- intermediate

Textbook: Snapshot

Lesson topic unit 2- Over three hours late

Vocabulary: words related to informal letters

Grammar: past- revision

Type of lesson: teaching new items

Skills: speaking, reading, writing

Objectives:

A)Cognitive:-to use past simple properly, according to grammatical rules;

– to use adequate linkers in order to join events;

– to distinguish a formal letter from an informal one;

– to write informal letters

B) Affective- to create a warm, friendly atmosphere in order to offer the background for easy conversation between teacher and students;

– to make students confident in themselves when speaking a foreign language;

Interaction:- T-Ss, Ss-T; IW; PW; GW

Teaching techniques: conversation, dialogue, exercises, observation

Methods of teaching: communicative approach

Teaching aids: blackboard, coloured chalk, handouts

Time: 50 minutes

Assumptions:- the students know past tense simple;

-the students remember the linkers first of all, then, etc

Stages of the lesson

LESSON PLAN

Name: Lipovanu Roxana

Date:

School: Contesti

Class: 8th

Level: Upper Intermediate

Textbook: High Flyer, Longman

Unit 14, Lesson : Just the job

Number of Ss: 17

Lesson Aims:

to create interest in the topic of the lesson

to listen and match the conversations with the jobs

to read a text and write notes in the chart

to read a text and write a short paragraph about a person

Materials: coursebook, board, flip chart, notebooks, cassette recorder

Stages of the lesson:

Activity 1, Warm up

Aim: to create interest in the topic of the lesson

Procedure:

T divides the class into two teams: A and B. Ss have two minutes to write down as many occupations as they can think of. Then, T aks a representative of each group to come to the board and write down as many occupations as possible in three minutes. T corrects the lists with the help of the class, ticking each correct occupation. T counts up the number of points for each team and congratulates the winners.

T tells SS to look at page 58 of the unit 3 and asks them which of these jobs they would like to do the most. T aks Ss to number them in order of preference. T tells Ss. to think for a moment about the reasons for their order. Then, T asks a few Ss to tell the class about their preferences.

Interaction: T-C, S-S

Timing: 5 min.

Activity 2

Aim: to listen and match the conversations with the jobs

Procedure: Pre-listening

Before Ss look at the information in the skills box, T asks them what they do when they join a group of friends who are already chatting. They don’t know what their friends are talking about. T asks them if they interrupt and simply ask what the topic of the conversation is. T lets Ss discuss this in pairs for a short while before conducting whole-class feedback. T listens to them, comments on Ss’s suggestions and elicits or leads them to the two suggestions in the box: try to guess the topic from key words; try to deduce what was said before.

While-listening: T tells Ss they are going to put the listening skills into practice. They are going to listen to extracts from six conversations which they have to match with the jobs in exercise 1. T elicits some key words which might suggest which occupation is being talked about in each case.

Post-listening: T plays the tape and takes feedback. T asks Ss to tell him/her the words which gave them the answers. Then, T tells Ss to listen again and asks them how they think the conversation started. For each one, Ss write one or two questions that the people were probably asked first. T plays each conversation and pauses for SS to write down the questions. T takes feedback accepting a variety of answers as long as they match the beginning of the conversation.

Interaction: T-C, S-S

Timing: 10 min.

Activity 3

Aim: to read a text and write notes in the chart

Pre-reading: T asks Ss what the boy in the photograph does. T writes Modelling on the flip chart as well as the three subheadings in the chart. T asks Ss what it is like to be a model. T writes down key words for their suggestions.

While-reading: T tells Ss to read the article and correct and add to the answers on the flip chart according to the text.

Post-reading: T tells Ss to read the summary of the text. T tells them that there are six pieces of information which are wrong. T explains them that correcting the mistakes might not simply be a matter of changing a few words, but rewriting the whole sentences.

Interaction: T-C, S-S, S-T

Timing: 15 min.

Activity 4

Aim: to read a text and write a short paragraph about a person

Pre-reading: T tells Ss that they are detectives. T aks them to look at the picture of the tomb and guess about the person’s life. If Ss don’t appear to have very many ideas, T puts them in pairs.

While-reading: When Ss start to run out of ideas, T tells them to read the text and check their guesses in ex. 9.

Post-reading: T takes feedback. A few Ss give one of their deductions. T asks them which line in the text confirmed or rejected their deduction. For each fact about the person’s life T elicits how Matthew knows this to be true (e.g. rich-jewels). If necessary, T clarifies the new words when she gives feedback. T tells Ss to look at the picture in the text and label the numbered parts with words form the text.

T asks SS to work in pairs and write a short paragraph about the person in the tomb. Meanwhile, T circulates quickly, pointing to any mistakes she finds or congratulating Ss on correct paragraphs. When Ss appear to have finished, T stops the activity and nominates a few pairs to read their paragraphs.

Interaction: T-C, S-S, S-T

Timing: 20 min.

Homework: T tells Ss to write a story which must end with the words: ”They decided to be more careful next time.” Write your story (120-180 words).

WOORKSHEET 1 Grade 7th

Informal letters

Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words in order to complete the letter.

343 Flower Street, London

_______________________

_________ Andi,

Thanks for the presents, I love them!

I think you ________on holiday , too. I hope you had a good ________in .

We _________ there last year, it was fantastic!First, , which impressed me so much!_____________we went to the seaside but the weather was quite bad, so we had to go to a different place. ________ we chose a nice village in , it was so very different from our villages, we really enjoyed it!

We had traditional food which was very tasty! ___________ we visited which was very crowded at that time. But , there were some nice places, too.We ____________dinner in a nice Italian restaurant, I had a delicious pizza there!

Well, that is all for now.

___________________

___________________, Jenny

–

WORKSHEET 2

The sentences in the letter below are all jumbled. Arrange them in the logical order and rewrite the letter.

Write soon, Rebeca

On Friday I’ ll go shopping. It’ll be a short holiday , but I’m sure it’s going to be very nice . The town is great and the people are very friendly. I know that on Thursday I’ll see the best animated film- Pocahontas( I have the tickets). I’ m having a six day holiday in . On Wednesday I’ll see some museums. Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll see the Changing of Guard at . My holiday will finish on Saturday when I’ll kiss my friends good bye and I’ll come to . The day after tomorrow I’ll go to the .

Dear Jane,

Bye!

Dear Jane,

I’m having a six day holiday in .

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The tree with wishes

Writing cards

PROJECTS on a chosen country

Find the message

Other projects

Find the words

Take out from the text the unknown words

Some Phrasal verbs

Begginers’ vocabulary

Poems

Saint Patrick’s Day activities

Students on work

Topic: What is school for you?

Student Alupei Costina

Teacher: Ungureanu Roxana

My opinion about school.

"School" is a simple word with so many meanings. An 8 year old child would say that school is the place where you learn how to read and write, a 10 year old would say that school is the place you learn about everything, and me, a 14 year old girl, say that school is not an actual place, is a second home, with a second family.

For me, school is the basis of our own person, is the way you find ourselves, and the way we become who we really are. And, the most important thing you learn in school is not about numbers and letters, is about how you learn to face your life with the problems you will get it.

In the middle school, I consider that this place is where you learn so many incredible things, I was captured by the lessons in the literature class, about the things nature is capable of, about the numbers and how to play with them.

Now, I am in Eighth Grade, I am a year apart from highschool, which is absolutly terrifying for me; just think about it: new people, new teachers, new school, everything is new for everyone, so I'm trying to enjoy the time I have left with my classmates because, honestly, my classmates are my family. Not my friends, not my second family, but my family. The've been in my life for so long that I could not be more grateful for them, and I don’t really know how I am gonna get through the emotionally pain when I will see that everyone will take a different path from the one I know. The fact that I won't see them around everyday, I won't hear the laughts, I won't hug them with all my love and happiness makes my heart cry with nonexistent tears, but that's okay, I will cry for that.

School taught me about people and how to choose them carefully, because not everyone with a big smile on the face has a big heart full of kindness. Your friends are showing you who you are, and I'm happy to say that my friends are some very smart, kind and beautiful people, who helped me through my hard times. Everyone has bad days, important is to know how to get over them because they won't stay right over your shoulder for the rest of your life, of course, if you don't let them.

When you got the paper with your school program, they show you when you have math, science or sports, but never a heartbreak, a new friendship or a lesson itself. Why? This things I'm pretty sure that I experienced in school, so if they were going to show me in time, I think I could be prepared for them. But they didn't, and I wasn't ready for them, so I felt like I was hit by a truck of emotions when things happened.

However, I never get over a day without a lesson that I learn, in class or in my friends’ group. So, now I see that everyday school has taught another unique thing, so now I know what is school for: to find ourselves and who we really are.

Now, I am just preparing for the future, a mysterious, unknown, scary future, and I'm pretty sure that school prepared me for what is next, and I am ready!

Writing Skills Questionnaire

Taken from Yamika Valley College

Attitudes toward Writing Yes Sometimes No

 Do you enjoy writing? _____ _____ _____

 In general do you trust yourself as a person who

can find good words and ideas and perceptions? _____ _____ _____

 Do you think of yourself as a writer? _____ _____ _____

Generating Ideas

 On a topic of interest to you, can you generate lots

of ideas and words fairly quickly and freely—not be stuck? _____ _____ _____

 On a topic that doesn’t much interest you (perhaps

an assigned topic), can you generate lots of ideas and words

fairly quickly and freely—not be stuck? _____ _____ _____

 Can you come up with ideas or insights you’d not

thought of before? _____ _____ _____

Revising

 Can you revise in the sense of “resee”—to rethink

and change your mind about major things you have said? _____ _____ _____

 Can you find a main point in a mess of your

disorganized writing? _____ _____ _____

 Can you find a new shape in a piece of your writing

which you had previously organized? _____ _____ _____

 Can you find problems in your reasoning or logic and

straighten them out? _____ _____ _____

 Can you write your sentences so they are clear to

readers on first reading? _____ _____ _____

 Can you make your sentences lively?

Can you give them a human voice? _____ _____ _____

 Can you adjust something you’ve written to fit the

needs of particular readers? _____ _____ _____

Editing

 Can you get rid of most mistakes in grammar,

spelling, punctuation, and so on, so readers would not be

put off? _____ _____ _____

 Can you get rid of virtually all such mistakes? _____ _____ _____

The Writing Centers at YVC * Grandview L101 * Yakima G125 * www.yvcc.edu/owl