Motivating EFL High School Students to Write Effectively

Introduction

Too many teachers view writing as an intrinsically tedious subject. Part of that impression may originate from reading works such as A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, which presents nine major pedagogies — process, expressive, rhetorical, collaborative, feminist, critical, cultural studies, community service, and basic writing — taught in colleges since the 19th century. While such a text serves as an invaluable tool for many graduate students, it can simultaneously be overwhelming.

The purpose of this essay is to show how English, taught in an appealing, relevant, and humanistic manner, can help the foreign student master it despite the fact that the surrounding language may not be their own.

Fun and Games in the EFL Classroom

Grammar must be mastered through practice (Fuchs & Bonner, 2006). That can be intimidating to students of writing, but practice can be converted into fun. Raimes (1983) stimulates students to write through pictures, readings, and discussion. In a similar vein, the website Stickyball.com promotes itself as "resources for the frustrated teacher." It makes EFL fun by presenting games and activities to make writing more enjoyable, such as interactive stories where students collaborate to write each other's narratives; the lying game, in which students guess which statements are true and which are false; writing scenarios; idiom worksheets offering practice in giving advice using idioms; and an "explain the idiom" exercise, where students use an idiom in a dialogue and try to guess its meaning.

Other activities include Phonics Bingo, Grammar Shapes, and the Bubble Game, whose intent is to review different parts of speech such as nouns and adjectives. There is also interactive writing, where students cooperate in writing part of a story, and conversation cards, where students answer questions on the cards or take turns answering one question each. Stickyball offers separate games and activities for both adults and children, making it a terrific resource for the frustrated teacher.

In a similar vein, "Daybooks" or "Writer's Notebook" can be less intimidating terms than "journal" or "diary," particularly for young children (Urbanski, 2000). Even for teenagers and older writers, Urbanski cautions against using the term "journal" or "diary," which she says sounds too intimidating — particularly since it represents the ongoing, daily task of recording one's life.

Modeling the Writing Process

The most important way of teaching writing to EFL students is to model for them the fact that writing can be fun. Teachers must dispel that fear, and the only way to do so is by setting themselves as an example. As Graves notes:

"The teacher does not use modeling to beat the child over the head with a new skill. Rather, the teacher uses modeling to confirm the commonality of all writers, as well as to confirm new approaches by the child in the writing process." (50)

Donald Murray's book Write to Learn is an excellent example of modeling writing in action for the EFL teacher. Murray shows teachers — and, in turn, students — how to discover writing subjects through activities such as brainstorming, mapping, making a tree, free writing, and interviewing yourself. Most importantly, Murray's process shows students how to absorb themselves in the activity in a fun way: thinking about what they are doing and responding to it as they work through the exercise, rather than treating it as a necessary but tedious assignment.

All students of creative writing — and perhaps particularly EFL students, who take great care with their writing — have problems with free writing. As Graves (1992) mentions, this is precisely where modeling comes in. When students notice that their teachers, although more proficient in English than they are, face similar difficulties — that free writing comes slowly and tediously to them too, and that original drafts are predictably chaotic — they may feel more encouraged in their determination to produce effective assignments. Emig's (1982) study supports this assumption. Since students, particularly EFL students, struggle with their words, the first draft of their essay is inordinately precious to them, and they are reluctant to eradicate any of those words and rewrite. Emig (1982) maintains that if the teacher, through her actions, shows that even she — far more proficient in English than they — nonetheless habitually rewrites, students might be more apt to do so as well.

In a similar vein, imitation assignments can be used to teach EFL students how to write effectively. Instead of having students write test essays about the style of a particular author, have them mimic that style. To accomplish such a task requires a firm understanding of the conventions the author used and brings purpose to a discussion of those conventions (Dellinger 41). The teacher who writes an essay alongside the class — simultaneously demonstrating the techniques of free writing and revision — therefore models exemplary behavior far more effectively than mere instruction can. Adolescents, particularly, crave sincerity and genuineness. The fact that the teacher faces the same problems as they do, and is with them on their level, struggling with writing too, can be a truly comforting and stimulating situation.

Conclusion

Writing can be fun, and, if taught in the right way, can certainly make English an enjoyable and stimulating language for students to internalize. Students who are shown the extended value that mastering writing can provide them — since writing is essential in every subject area — will be more motivated to master the subject (Howie, 1984). In A Guidebook for Teaching Writing in Content Areas, Howie demonstrates how a quick, exploratory, and creative style of writing can help students relate to the content of their material in a fresh, engaging, and immediate manner, thereby building connections, reflecting on, and retaining their learning.

Romano's description of high school English teachers is instructive here:

"After all, high-school English teachers have subject matter to transmit. We know the way to do things. We know how to construct a paragraph, how to excise redundancy, how to maintain a point-of-view, how to formulate a thesis. We know so much that students don't. We must fill them up with all we know . . . And in our haste to tell young writers how to do things, we forget that merely telling of new concepts doesn't usually lead to learning, and that students best learn what they're ready to learn, itching to learn." (30)

Students want to learn the language. We can show them how.

Sources

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Connors, Robert J. "The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse." College Composition and Communication 32.4 (Dec. 1981): 444–455.

Dellinger, Dixie Gibbs. Out of the Heart: How to Design Writing Assignments for High School Courses. 1982.

Fletcher, Ralph. Breathing in Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Notebook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996.

Fuchs, Marjorie, and Margaret Bonner. Focus on Grammar 4: An Integrated Skills Approach. 3rd ed. White Plains: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.

Glenn, Cheryl, and Loretta Gary. The Writer's Harbrace Handbook. 3rd ed. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007.

Graves, Donald. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996.

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Murray, Donald M. Write to Learn. Philadelphia: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.

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