Planning my writing lessons is often a challenge for most EFL as well as EAP teachers. Keeping lessons interesting while making sure that students walk out of your class with a satisfactory level of understanding of the writing task, its layout and its target language can prove slightly challenging. The fact that this is now coupled with the unfamiliarity with the online teaching environment certainly won't make things easier. Therefore, over the past few days, I have been trying to gather as much information as I could on the topic of teaching EFL writing online and decided to share my findings with my fellow teachers in the hope of making our virtual sessions run more smoothly.
- Students must write at home
At the end of every face-to-face class, I used to ask students to start working on their essays while I walked between them to make sure that they understood the task and were headed down the right path. Unfortunately, this cannot be done in a virtual classroom. My suggestion here is to divide the writing task into smaller tasks, allowing students to complete a single piece of writing over multiple tasks. Although this method may take longer to complete the final piece, it allows students to pay more attention to the teacher's feedback and make corrections accordingly.
That being said, you may want to elicit some ideas on how to begin a certain paragraph and what structure(s) works best to achieve the goal of the paragraph.
- Your Time in Class: Model paragraphs are essential
Just like in a face-to-face class, you are likely to show students a model as an example of what their writing should look like. This can be either copied from the textbook or modified to suit your students' levels and needs.
You may also want to spend your time in class to focus on sub-skills of writing such as punctuation and outlining and organising paragraphs. This can be done through multiple choice, gap fill and reordering exercises.
- Giving Feedback
It is up to you whether to give in-class or after class feedback. Whatever you decide to do, be mindful of the tool(s) you use to provide feedback to students. You can of course give in class, collective feedback by using the virtual interactive whiteboard but you have to consider the its limited space. Choose your examples carefully and make sure that they are representative and illustrative of common patterns such as, for example, a common grammar or punctuation mistake. On the other hand, if you are giving offline feedback to be viewed by students after class, word processing documents that enable track changes are your best bet. Track changes allow you to correct errors and write comments to explain your suggested changes. However, one disadvantage of using track changes is that students may accept your changes without reading them. In this case, if you notice that certain students keep repeating their mistakes, talk to them directly and ask them to join you in your virtual office hours.
- Taking advantage of added affordances: Using corpus and corpus-like methodology
While online classes do take away some aspects of face-to-face meetings, they also provide teachers with new affordances that are not available in conventional classrooms. Since students now submit their work electronically, you can create a small text corpus (structured set of texts) of all your students' writings and use either corpus software (such as #lancsbox: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/) or any other word processing software to perform different kinds of analysis on students use (and misuse) of language. I am currently in the process of studying students correct and incorrect use of the definite article (the) and its relation to their mother tongue.
At the end of this essay, I would like to recommend taking the Future Learn online course on Teaching English Online (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/online-tutoring) for more information on teaching writing along with other skills through a virtual medium.
That being said, you may want to elicit some ideas on how to begin a certain paragraph and what structure(s) works best to achieve the goal of the paragraph.
- Your Time in Class: Model paragraphs are essential
Just like in a face-to-face class, you are likely to show students a model as an example of what their writing should look like. This can be either copied from the textbook or modified to suit your students' levels and needs.
You may also want to spend your time in class to focus on sub-skills of writing such as punctuation and outlining and organising paragraphs. This can be done through multiple choice, gap fill and reordering exercises.
- Giving Feedback
It is up to you whether to give in-class or after class feedback. Whatever you decide to do, be mindful of the tool(s) you use to provide feedback to students. You can of course give in class, collective feedback by using the virtual interactive whiteboard but you have to consider the its limited space. Choose your examples carefully and make sure that they are representative and illustrative of common patterns such as, for example, a common grammar or punctuation mistake. On the other hand, if you are giving offline feedback to be viewed by students after class, word processing documents that enable track changes are your best bet. Track changes allow you to correct errors and write comments to explain your suggested changes. However, one disadvantage of using track changes is that students may accept your changes without reading them. In this case, if you notice that certain students keep repeating their mistakes, talk to them directly and ask them to join you in your virtual office hours.
- Taking advantage of added affordances: Using corpus and corpus-like methodology
While online classes do take away some aspects of face-to-face meetings, they also provide teachers with new affordances that are not available in conventional classrooms. Since students now submit their work electronically, you can create a small text corpus (structured set of texts) of all your students' writings and use either corpus software (such as #lancsbox: http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/) or any other word processing software to perform different kinds of analysis on students use (and misuse) of language. I am currently in the process of studying students correct and incorrect use of the definite article (the) and its relation to their mother tongue.
At the end of this essay, I would like to recommend taking the Future Learn online course on Teaching English Online (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/online-tutoring) for more information on teaching writing along with other skills through a virtual medium.
