Writing Strategies
From the previous posts in this blog, we have spoken directly to how important it is to help our students develop their skills in writing. To recap, we mentioned writing along with our students, providing them with opportunities for daily practice, giving them their own writing choices, providing helpful feedback and instilling, nurturing and assessing good writing traits within their writing pieces, as some of the effective practices/ideas needed to aid this effort.
Bearing in mind the importance of writing as a great communicative tool, these practices are vital to our students' writing success. We have also discussed engaging them in enriching writing workshops, through which we carefully guide and journey with them through the stages of the writing process, while incorporating the above aforementioned practices.
these processes, are several strategies that students must employ to aid with their writing. There are different strategies that they may find workable for them at all times and some that may work only at times for the particular piece of writing they may be doing at one given time. Students have to be made aware of and taught these strategies, so that they can have them as additional instructional writing tools.
Based on our class discussions this week, today's blog will look at these writing strategies. What they are or look like and under which stage of the writing process they fall. This is to help us as teachers be better abled to understand when our students can or should use them.
The Writing Strategies.
What are they? 
These are said to be
"deliberate thinking procedures that writers use to solve problems that they may encounter as they write."
This is to say that as students write, they must be able to think of and draw upon ways that can assist them with dealing with issues that may present themselves as challenging to them.
These strategies include:
Elaborating👉 Writers expand their ideas by adding vivid details.
Evaluating👉 Writers review and evaluating their pieces and judge how well they met their goals.
Formatting👉 Writers design the layout for their final copies and ensure that their writing is legible and illustrations enhance the text.
Generating👉 Writers collect words, sentences and ideas for writing, often using background knowledge, information they've collected through research, or other classroom resources.
Monitoring👉 Writers monitor their progress and coordinate writing strategies.
Narrowing👉 Writers limit their topics so they're specific and manageable.
Organizing👉 Writers group, sequence, and prioritize ideas for their compositions.
Proof Reading👉 Writers carefully reread their writing to identify errors in spelling and other conventions.
Questioning👉 Writers ask themselves questions as they develop their compositions.
Rereading👉 Writers review their writing to check the flow of ideas and determine whether they're meeting goals.
Revising👉 Writers add words and sentences, make substitutions and deletions, and move text around to communicate more effectively.
Setting Goals👉 Writers set action-oriented goals to direct their writing.
Pre-writing Drafting Revising Editing Publishing
👇 👇 👇 👇 👇
- Generating -Elaborating -Elaborating -Evaluating -Formatting
-Organizing -Organizing -Evaluating -Proof Reading
-Questioning -Rereading -Monitoring
-Narrowing -Revising -Organizing
-Revising -Rereading
-Setting Goals - Revising
As was mentioned in our discussions and further readings, these strategies help our students become strategic writers, which is an important characteristic of leaning. Students who use them are said to be better writers than those who do not use them and these strategies are especially helpful to our struggling readers. The skills our students gain from using these strategies develops their thinking and their ability to monitor their writing and learning.
While I have been aware of these strategies for some time, and surely many teachers are too, they are usually overlooked and forgotten in our writing classes. Even in classrooms that claim or try to incorporate the writing process, some of these strategies are left out. I believe however, that reasons for doing so are not always intentional, but is due to lack of knowledge of these strategies and lack of the skills to teach them properly, causing some teachers to shun or avoid this very important teaching tasks.
Continuous training and development sessions in schools could play a very important role in alleviating this problem and making our teachers better abled to teach these writing strategies. I believe that once we teach these strategies we are going to see a major decrease of students we classify today as struggling writers. Hence, it is my hope that teachers consider implementing them within our writing classes in an effort to ease the pains and strains of writing for both our students and ourselves.
The fact that you categorize the strategies under each writing process will help teachers understand that these strategies and the writing process stages are very similar. Teachers need to familiarize themselves with these strategies to better aid the students.
ReplyDeleteI like that you state the stage of writing process and not every student go through it the same way in the same time. I also like how you list some writing strategies and categorize the writing process. I am in agreement with you that these strategies help our students to become strategic writers.
ReplyDeleteWriting is truly a critical aspect implemented in the classroom. As trained teachers, providing adequate time for students to write is an essential element of effective writing instruction program.
ReplyDeleteStudents need dedicated instructional time to practice what they learn. Hence, practicing help students gain confidence in their writing abilities. On the other hand, teachers should observe students write , also identify the difficulties and assist them in learning and applying the writing process.
Lastly, a supportive environment needs to be developed. As this is aimed at enabling students to use writing flexibly and and effectively to help learn and communicate their ideas.
Again practice, practice, practice.
The way in which you have categorized the writing process steps and has placed the different strategies under each should make it easier for teachers to teach writing effectively. the students would then be able to produce better writing pieces if the steps and strategies are fully understood.
ReplyDeleteAnother very informative entry. The strategies were clearly defined thus making understanding of the concept idea easier for the reader. The categorizing of the strategies under the stages of the writing process has given me a better understanding of what should be taught. This will definitely help improve writing across the board.
ReplyDelete