Reflection on Teaching Writing

Group six’s presentation reflected some magnificent principles when teaching writing. Students benefit more if the teacher integrates writing tasks with reading activity. Traditionally, the focus of teaching writing was the production from students. The output-oriented process of writing without the input often made students difficult to come up with a great composition. Nowadays as the emphasis on the integration of language skills, writing tasks usually follow the activity of reading messages. Through reading, students retrieve their background knowledge and merge the old information with the new one. Writing is the performance of the combination of these two message based on the students’ daily life experience. Therefore, in group six’s case, they present the dialogue (reading passage) first, the purpose of which was to guide students to write the invitation letter.

Another principle lies in the meaningfulness of writing. Learning activities should be meaningful to the students; otherwise, they will feel bored and unmotivated. Whenever the author writes something, there must be one or more than one reader. Similarly, if students make a composition, it’s more meaningful that there is one (or some) real reader(s) to read their passages. The writing activity in group six’s presentation required students to write an invitation letter to someone they want to invite for a particular event. Apparently, they application of this principles made this writing activity quite successful.

It’s undeniable that they made a lot of time and efforts on the design of the lesson. These included the creative way of grouping students (by using postcards with different cartoon figures), the way they teach dialogues (using Taiwanese or the super model’s tone to translate the dialogue), and writing invitation letters to classmates. Although I had a lot of fun during the presentation, there are some suggestions for group six. The color in the PowerPoint slides needed more consideration because I can’t see the words clearly in the middle row of the classroom. The use of money, even though it’s fake one, as means of increasing learning motivation is not quite appropriate in terms of long term goal of teaching. In general, they did a good job on this topic.