Building the Writing Habit

Harmer Jeremy pointed out a number of engaging and effective activities focused on building the writing habit. Here, I’d like to list the ideas I will definitely use with my EAL learners and I also want to add a few more activities I find interesting for this purpose (they are in cursive).

a. Sentence-Writing

- Dictating sentence for completion, this activity is also called Half Dictation: the teacher starts a sentence and learners are supposed to complete it.

- A Postcard from Somewhere: first learners fill in a small questionnaire (they name a country, an animal, a place, an adjective and so on) and after that their answers are pasted into the prepared in advance text of the letter. As a result, learners have a lot of fun (“I went to the zoo to see the rare and round Chinese cat. It was tasty!”)

- Creative writing prompts (the weirdest dream you've had; imagine you're a chef... what type of restaurant would you open and why?)

b. Using Music

- Words (write word associations while listening to music)

- Film scores (describe a film scene while listening to music)

c. Using Pictures

- Describing pictures/photos

- Suspect and objects (each learner describes a random picture, than all pictures are mixed and peers are to guess a picture by reading descriptions)

- Write the postcard (based on the picture)

- Portraits (write a letter to the person on the portrait, write day in life)

- Stories (write a story about the picture)

d. Writing Poems

- Acrostic poems (first letters of each line form a word)

- Model poems (using the same poetic forms, models)

- Poems with rhymes (each learner makes sentences ending with a certain word; these words rhyme with each other)

e. Collaborative Writing

- Writing a story sentence by sentence

- Dictogloss (write the text after listening to it)

- First lines, last lines (story writing is provoked by giving first line/last line)

- Story circle (each learner writes a sentence on the top of a sheet of paper, than folds it so that the next writer can’t read it and passes it to the next learner, who writes the second sentence of the story. )

- The story circle may be combined with “Dictating sentence for completion”. For example, the teacher may start each sentence and learners are to finish it with their ideas (Last Thursday…; But suddenly …; It turned out that …)

f. Writing in Groups and Pairs

- Pen pals, emails, live chats (interacting with native speakers or English learners all over the world)

- Learners may also choose some forums (interesting for the) or social network groups and participate in discussions there.