Taken from http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/the-best-writing-teachers-are-writersthemselves/262858/
Teaching Writing By Michael Barrantes-Solano Pre-Service Teacher, School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Wednesday, April 26, 2016 Post 257
Teaching writing might be one of the most important skills in English; a person has to know how to write and speak in the target language because one skill complements the other one. Writing can be a little difficult at first, but with time and practice you as learners will acquire this important skill in the language learning. According to Chapter 8 from “How to teach English� (Harmer, 2007), writing might be one of the most important skills in the language learning process. Writing helps in language processing; learners have more thinking time at the time to write because the learner will be able to think more about what to write. However, in a conversation you have to think faster.
Two types of writing are mentioned in this chapter (Harmer, 2007). First we have writing for learning; this helps the student to practice the language and work with it and learning at the same time the structure of sentences and paragraph in the target language. Second we have writing for writing; this helps to develop the students’ skills as writers giving them the chance to practice the structure by writing essays. A process should be taken into account at the time to write; it involves planning, drafting, reviewing and editing. These are the main four steps that we as learners must use in order to write a high quality essay. There are some writing sequences that can be used depending of the level of the learners. For example post-cards; we can use these with pre – intermediate to intermediate level. Second we have e-mail interview and this can be used with pre intermediate upwards. Finally we have writing reports, and these can be used with upper intermediate because this exercise is more detailed than the previous two and will take some time. This is used especially with advance students as a challenge for them to prove their knowledge in the target language. Some pros about teaching writing are that we help the student to develop their writing skills in order to help them to improve their selves in the field. We also can pick some interesting topics for the learners so we can keep them motivated while they write an essay or a paragraph, knowing their likes and dislikes will make the difference at the time to work with writing. And also a huge advantage is that we can also include a small oral part so they can expose their ideas about what they wrote. But there are some disadvantages, too, with teaching writing. For example some students seem to believe that they cannot write anything because the lack of ideas. Also they might think that it is boring to write an essay or even a paragraph, or in some cases they have nothing to say about the topic being studied. These are some disadvantages and make that job harder, but if the writing process is taught correctly, this can be changed.
Bottom-line teaching writing might help you as a learner to improve your knowledge in English even more that you think. We have to focus this skill on topics that catch the attention of the learners. Taking into account what was mentioned on this critique can be helpful at the time to teach writing, also it can be helpful to help the student to improve themselves with time practicing writing often. Reference Harmer, J. (2007). "Teaching Reading". how to Teach English. Person Longman