Senior EL Teacher Pankova T.A.

Poltava State Agrarian Academy, Ukraine

Teaching Students to Write Essays

One of important and necessary skills for students, studying a foreign language, is doing written tasks, making synopses of special texts, writing essays, preparing presentations. Performing the written tasks, students improve their lexical skills, develop analytical thinking, learn to ground their own thoughts.

Understanding Purpose: For many writing contexts, your students’ immediate purpose may be to complete an assignment or get a good grade. But the long-range purpose of writing is to communicate to a particular audience. In order to communicate successfully to the audience, understanding the purpose of writing will make students better writers.

Adapting to the Audience: When we talk to someone face-to-face, we automatically adjust our speech to be sure we are communicating our message. To be sure that we communicate clearly in writing, we need to adjust our message - how we say and what information we include - by recognizing that different readers can best understand different messages.

Understanding Writing Situations: Many students think of writing as a solitary activity -- something done, when they are alone in a quiet place. Yet most of writing, like other forms of communication - telephone conversations, classroom discussions, meetings, and presentations - is an intensely social activity.

Working with Topics: When students are given a choice of topics to write on, or are asked to come up with their own topic ideas, they must always make choices that appeal to their own interests, curiosity, and current knowledge. However, because they rarely write solely for their own satisfaction, they must consider matters others than their own interests as they choose topics.

Critical Reading: Critical reading is a vital part of the writing process. In fact, reading and writing processes are alike. In both, students make meaning by actively engaging a text. As readers, they are not passive participants, but active constructors of meaning. "Critical" attitude towards what students read will make anything they read richer and more useful to them in their study and life.

Summaries: What it is necessary to include in a summary depends on how the summary will be used.

Planning, Drafting and Organizing:

Development: Details bring our ideas to life. When we talk with others, the details we provide help our listeners better understand our ideas. Writers who develop their ideas usually do a better job of keeping their readers' attention and gaining their readers' trust. With this information, they can then present convincing details to their readers.

Focus: To focus their writing, students will need to know how to narrow their focus, so they don't overwhelm their readers with unnecessary information. Knowing who their readers are and why they are writing will help them stay focused.

Organization: Students need to know about organizational patterns because readers expect what they read to make sense logically. Choosing an organizational pattern for their writing means knowing what patterns are acceptable for their topic and within their subject. Some types of organization work better than others, depending on the information students need to convey.

Editing and Proofreading Strategies: Editing and proofreading are writing processes different from revising. Editing can involve extensive rewriting of sentences, but it usually focuses on sentences or even smaller elements of the text. Proofreading is the very last step writers go through to be sure that the text is presentable. Proofreading generally involves only minor changes in spelling and punctuation.

The table below gives the stages and the sequence of writing essays, necessary skills and corresponding results.

The process of writing an essay

	Task	Skills Needed	Product
1.	Read the question and understand what you are required to do. Think about the subject, the purpose and the audience.	thinking academically	Essay subject.
2.	Think about what you know about the subject. Write it down in some way.	brainstorming	Diagrams or notes.
3.	Go to the library and find relevant books or articles.	library/research skills	Reading list.
4.	Find the books on your reading list and study them.	reading skills: skimming and scanning	List of materials studied.
5.	Make notes on these books and articles. Record full details of the materials you use.	reading in detail selecting & note-taking paraphrasing/summarising	Notes.
6.	Organise your essay/assignment.	planning organisation	Essay plan.
7.	Type or write your first draft.	writing from notes synthesis writing paragraphs typing/word-processing	First draft.
8.	Discuss your first draft informally with friends, other members of your class and your lecturer if possible.	speaking skills listening skills discussion skills	List of revisions/changes.
9.	Revise your first draft, bearing in mind any comments that were made in your discussions. Go back to 2. if necessary Produce your second draft.	use of dictionaries & reference books writing introduction & conclusion quoting/writing a list of references	Second draft.
10.	Proofread your draft.	checking for spelling mistakes, punctuation & grammar, vocabulary use checking style checking organisation, references checking for plagiarism	Assignment with changes marked.
11.	Produce a final typed version.	typing/word-processing writing title/contents page	Final assignment.
12.	Check everything.	final check	Hand in.

References:

1. Allen, Roberta. The Process of Writing: New Jersey, USA, 2007.

2. University of Richmond Writing Center.  « Writer’s Web », 2003.