This was written by a participant of mine in an online distance course, Teaching EFL Writing. It is one of three examples I will choose to share with the public as examples of quality teacher development and professional reflection.
Irina Lebedeva is a teacher at Moscow State University and was relatively new to teaching writing at the beginning of this course. Her Philosophy of Teaching Writing is below:
If you look through a program book of any recent conference devoted to implementing teaching methods, you’ll be amazed at how many presentations are actually devoted to teaching and learning writing. Moreover, most of the presentations or workshops given by English Language Specialists (judging by my own experience) are devoted to mastering this language skill. This fuss over teaching writing has always surprised me, a vocabulary teacher. I, to tell the truth, used to consider teaching writing to be a piece of cake. I used to think that writing was a sort of inane talent which can be developed but not taught. I used to consider teaching writing unimportant. Due to this, my way of teaching writing mainly consisted of giving students the tasks to write a personal letter, an autobiography or a composition on some topic as a means of checking the vocabulary they’ve acquired rather than actually teaching writing itself.
My philosophy of writing has changed dramatically since I started practicing teaching the subject and even more so after this very course and all the blog posts from its participants. First of all, I do not underestimate teaching writing any more. On the contrary, I believe it to be even more challenging than teaching speaking. On the one hand, writing is speaking, only with text. On the other hand, writing has conventions quite unlike those in speaking. Therefore, this subject requires a very knowledgeable facilitator who should be aware of all aspects of writing at different levels starting with how collocations work on a sentence level, then topic sentences and arguments on a paragraph level and thesis statement on essay level. The instructor must be at home with such writing knowledge as content, system, process, genre and context; must always self-reflect on types of tasks (pedagogical vs. real-world) and activities s/he uses; must possess critical thinking and good analytical skills; must be creative and encouraging, and open-minded, and courageous to move on by trial and error. Yes, one must be all this in order to be a competent teacher of writing.
Second of all, I no longer consider that one doesn’t necessarily have to be gifted to write well. After all, my aim as a teacher is not only to “create” Nabokovs or McEwans (though in the long run that would not be that bad), but to “produce” confident, coherent users of written English who will be able to get grants and score high on international tests, and enter universities abroad because of their essays; who will secure a good job by writing a proper cover letter and a CV; will get promoted due to their business plans and get recognized owing to proper written scientific reports, papers and articles, and after that will be respected in their field of knowledge for their reviews of other people’s works. I believe now that kind of writing can be learnt.
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Third of all, I’m sure now that teaching must be taught as an independent course for a year at least and it should go hand in hand with reading. The fact that writing is the last skill that people acquire in their mother tongue proves it to be the hardest to master. Learning how to write in a second or foreign language becomes an even harder task and should be allotted a proper amount of curriculum time. Also, writing is mostly acquired via reading because written texts serve as a perfect example of genres, styles and so on, and for that reason, good readers traditionally turn into confident writers.
I have not taught writing as a separate course for quite a period of time. I have never taught writing using genre approach; I was supposed to teach it this year (I got scared and applied for the course), but I will be assigned to do it next term (thanks to the course. I am not scared anymore). The number of problems that I face concerning teaching writing has increased after taking the course. Many of them deal with the fact that there are so many things that I do not know about teaching writing and writing itself (but now I know where to look for the answers and how to get about teaching genre writing). Some of them deal with lack of time for proper preparation. Also, I am very strict with myself and expect too much too soon; I often feel that I’m not knowledgeable enough, or not creative enough, or haven’t given the proper consideration while creating tasks, though this is not necessarily the case.
My approach to teaching writing is changing at the moment. I’ve started using Ning.com as a means for teaching writing and peer review. By the way, thanks to this course I put into practice a peer review first time and I did that through Ning, and quite successfully. I’m using more authentic material in the classroom, especially more videos which I upload on the Ning. I’m using new strategy of commenting on students’ works and I’m being more creative as a teacher.
My 5-year goals are to implement everything that I’ve learned in the ‘Teaching EFL Writing’ course in the classroom, thus finding my own way of teaching writing and creating my own syllabus of ‘Reading and Writing’ course in the long run. I’m going to make several presentations on what I’ve learnt during the course and how I am using this knowledge. I hope to continue cooperation with John Mark King in the next course to ‘cement’ what I’ve learnt and to give me a boost towards further self-development as a writing teacher as well as a teacher in general.
John Mark King, thank you for the course. What’s more, thank you for a wonderful and rare opportunity to be a writer. I’ve truly enjoyed creating ‘My Philosophy of Writing’. We teachers seldom have a chance to write about ourselves apart from scientific papers.