You have three groups of students with varying levels of English. They can loosely be described as:
Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced
For each group create an activity to improve their writing skills. For each activity please explain what you hope your students to learn and give your reasoning as to why you have chosen the specific activity. Include as much detail as possible.
You should start by outlining the age and demographic of your students. Are you teaching abroad?
English language learners especially need to adjust to the cultural, linguistic, social and emotional newness of a classroom environment. Writing can give students that sense of belonging they need to feel connected with their classroom, teachers and school. Additionally, meaningful writing tasks not only help solve the problem of cultural, social and emotional isolation but are connected to real world tasks – a concept known as authenticity. As students complete these tasks they can immediately see how what they are learning applies to their real lives - both inside and outside the classroom.
Meaningful writing activities tie both motivation and ability and encourage a variety of expressions that do not limit a student’s language ability. The student’s ability to write about topics that are close to a student’s culture, experiences, and other topics of interest increase when one also feels more connected with learning the target language.
Collaborative writing encourages social interaction among writers and their peers through activities such as peer response (Ferris and Hedgcock, 1998). This social interaction and dialogue with others are considered crucial for learning by social interactionist theorists, such as Vygotsky (2000), who stated that learning involves the internalization of social interaction processes, which helps the learner progress from complex to conceptual thinking.
In many existing peer response writing activities, students are expected to proofread and edit each...