Teaching writing

Modern methods of training of the letter. Improvement of skills of the letter of students. Constructing sentences from words and phrases. Drawing up of paragraphs of words, phrases, and offers. The methods of developing creative writing skills.
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The plan

Introduction

Chapter 1. Teaching writing as a type of communication

Part 1. Skill building and the process approach to writing

Part 2. Main techniques for getting started writing process

Part 3. Teaching writing techniques

Chapter 2. Teaching creative writing techniques

Part 1. The methods of developing creative writing skills

Part 2. Activities for teaching creative writing techniques

Conclusion

The list of used literature

General characteristics of the work

The actuality of the work. In recent years language researchers and practitioners have shifted their focus from developing individual linguistic skills to the use of language to achieve the speaker's objectives. This new area of focus, known as communicative competence, leads language teachers to seek task-oriented activities that engage their students in creative language use. In the process of learning English as a foreign language, writing is considered as one of the most essential skills. In addition to being a communicative skill of vital importance, it is a skill which enables the learner to plan and rethink the communication process. Therefore, teaching writing skills should be taught gradually starting from instrumental skill to content-based writing. Teaching writing should be started from beginning level. Most school textbooks are focused on teaching writing separately without integration of other skills. In other words, our qualification work pursues as its major aim to help foreign students improve their writing skills with the integration of other skills from the beginning level. The significance of our work can be proved that we tried to find optional methods of improving writing skills from the beginning level and we applied them in practice.

The degree of studiedness. Teaching writing is a common theme among most researchers who worked in the sphere of language learning and methodology.

The tasks and objectives of the work. Having based upon the actuality of the theme we are able to formulate the general goals of our qualification work.

a) To study, analyze, and sum up the modern methods of teaching writing;

b) To analyze the major results achieved in the studied field;

c) To prove the idea of importance of improving students' writing skills;

d) To analyze school textbooks and work out a series of activities for improving students' writing skills.

The methods of the research. The main methods for compiling our work are the method of analysis and the method of research. In our work, we analyzed school textbooks and added some new activities which we considered suitable for teaching and improving students' writing skills.

The methodological foundation of the work. In our research we used the ideas of Uzbek, Russian and foreign methodologies who worked in the sphere of foreign language teaching methodology and language learning. We addressed to works of J. Jalolov, G. Rogova, Spack.R, G. L. Rico, J. Arnold, M. Boden and others for theoretical part of our work. In practical part of our work we appealed to school textbooks “Fly High” 5 and 7.

The novelty and practical importance of the work. The novelty of this research work is to find information about how to improve students' writing skills, analyzing school textbooks and applying found ideas into the lessons appropriately. This theme has been worked out by many scientists and researchers before but from the point of analyzing Uzbek school textbooks and creating a series of writing tasks in those textbooks hasn't been done yet. Also, we consider the idea of approbating new writing materials on English language lessons during our pedagogical practice is also one part of the novelty of our work. The present work might find a good way of implying in the following spheres:

1. In High Schools and scientific circles of language teaching methodology it can be successfully used by teachers and philologists as modern material for writing research works dealing with improving writing skills.

2. It can be used by teachers of schools, lyceums and colleges by teachers of English as a practical manual for teaching writing.

3. It can be useful for everyone who wants to enlarge his/her knowledge in English.

The structure of the work. Content of the work. The present qualification work consists of four parts: introduction, the main part, conclusion and bibliography. Within the introduction part, there is given a brief description of our qualification work where we described its actuality, practical significance, and fields of amplification, and described the role of writing skills in learning English. The main part of the qualification work includes several items. There we discussed issues such as skill building and the process approach to writing, main techniques for getting started writing process and teaching writing techniques. In the second chapter (practice part) of main part we described different types writing activities and included worksheets. In the conclusion part our qualification work we tried to draw some results from the scientific investigations made within the main part of the qualification work. In bibliography part we mentioned more than 20 sources which were used while compiling the present work. It includes linguistic books and articles dealing with the theme, a number of used encyclopedias, textbooks and some internet sources.

Chapter 1. Teaching writing as a type of communication

Part 1. Skill building and the process approach to writing

Within the communicative framework of language teaching, the skill of writing enjoys special status--it is via writing that a person can communicate a variety of messages to a close or distant, known or unknown reader or readers. Such communication is extremely important in the modern world, whether the interaction takes the form of traditional paper-and-pencil writing or the most ad- vanced electronic mail. Writing as a communicative activity needs to be encouraged and nurtured during the language learner's course of study, and this work will attempt to deal the early stages of EFL writing. The view of writing as an act of communication suggests an interactive process which takes place between the writer and the reader via the text.1 Such an approach places value on the goal of writing as well as on the perceived reader audience. Even if we are concerned with writing at the beginning level, these two aspects of the act of writing are vital importance; in setting writing tasks the teacher should encourage students to define, for themselves, the message they want to send and the audience who will receive it.

The writing process, in comparison to spoken interaction, imposes greater demands on the text, since written interaction lacks immediate feedback as a guide. The writer has to anticipate the reader's reactions and produce a text which will adhere to Grice's (1975) cooperative principle. According to this principle, the writer is obligated (by mutual cooperation) to try to write a clear, relevant, truthful, informative, interesting, and memorable text. The reader, on the otherhand, will interpret the text with due regard to the writer's presumed intention if the necessary clues are available in the text. Linguistic accuracy, clarity of presentation, organization of ideas are all crucial in the efficacy of the communicative act, since they supply the clues for interpretation. Accordingly, while the global perspective of content organization needs to be focused on and given appropriate attention, it is also most important to present a product which does not suffer from illegible writing. Writing is, in a very sense, a mirror image of reading. Both are interactive. Readers decode what writers encode. Both draw upon schemata. The reader brings prior knowledge to the comprehension of a text; the writer draws upon similar knowledge in composing a text.

Wilga Rivers1 makes the distinction between notation, or writing practice, and expressive writing, or composition. Notation ranges from mere copying to the construction of simple sentences describing facts or representing typical, uncomplicated speech. Expressive writing or composition involves the development of ideas either of a practical or a creative nature. Pedagogically, there is considerably more control in the development of notational skills than in more expressive types of writing. The expectation is that the EFL student will progress through several stages of writing practice to the early stages of creative composition. This development from control to creativity continues a line drawn throughout this manual in the chapters on dialogues, oral exercises, and reading comprehension.

The first activities are skill building exercises taking the learners from the very beginning to the mid-intermediate proficiency level. Here the focus is on structural detail and accuracy in the use of the written language. Learners are presented with textual segments, clues, and models of typical prose to assist them as they attempt to rearrange words or sentences, complete partially written texts, and imitate or modify entire paragraphs. In skill building exercises the progression is from simple to more complex structures, a so-called bottom up approach. The second part of the chapter, which is meant for int...