1. Why writing shouldn’t (always) be sent home.
2. How to encourage learners to plan their writing.
3. How to write a paragraph.
4. How to encourage learners to check their writing.

1: Why writing shouldn’t (always) be sent home.

I know that most of your students hate writing, and perhaps you’re not so fond of teaching it, either. As teachers, it can be easy to think that teaching writing is too time-consuming (especially if we’re under pressure to finish a hefty coursebook and prepare for the exam as well). Or maybe we think that it gets in the way of the communicative goal of our classes because silence in the classroom means missed opportunities for practising English. Or just maybe you feel daunted by it – your students aren’t that great at it, they don’t like it, and you don’t know where to begin.

I suspect that a lot of ELT and ESL teachers feel that writing is a necessary evil. Cambridge says that 400,000 exams are taken annually in Spain and Portugal, which realistically means most of us are preparing students for these tests. Lots of teachers feel that teaching Cambridge gets in the way of teaching students to communicate in English – whilst I certainly think there is scope for the two in a classroom, there is no doubt that exam preparation can add a lot of pressure.

But it doesn’t need to be a slog. Very often, students are clamouring to get the paper that says their new level, and this means that it’s hard to guarantee their success in the test. But it doesn’t need to be a slog.

If we think about the different skills which are tested in a language exam, the two areas which we have the most control over are the productive ones – speaking and writing.

Of all the parts of the test, writing is the one that as a teacher I have the most control over. If a student in a year long preparation course does one piece of writing per week, they’ve completed approximately 30 tasks by the time their exam comes around. With effective teaching, we can give students a lot of confidence about their writing ability in the exam.

The resources in this writing guide have been developed over many years in collaboration with the excellent teachers at English Language Academy in Úbeda, Spain. They are designed to help you teach writing more effectively and to help you make writing much more accessible and engaging for your students. These materials can help you unlock success for your students in their exams.

2: How to encourage learners to plan their writing

Normally when a teacher tells their teenagers to plan their writing, they either ignore them, nod quietly and laugh inside, or let out a groan. This is because of their attitude to writing as a waste of their time – writing a plan means the whole laborious writing task takes up more of it.

And let’s be fair, teenagers have very little free time. Students here in Spain spend on average 6-7 hours a week on homework, although by the time most students get to B2 or C1 level this will be much higher. Then there’s the time spent studying for the almost weekly exams in every subject. Their time is precious, and they don’t want to waste any of it doing unnecessary things.

So is planning an exam answer a waste of time? Unfortunately for our students, it isn’t. Remember that in Cambridge tests, candidates receive up to five points for four different assessment criteria. This handy graphic from Cambridge for the B1 level explains these in basic detail.

Planning helps students fulfil all of these points: making sure that they include the necessary information (content), that they are writing in the correct genre (communicative achievement), that their ideas are logically ordered and coherent (organisation), and that they have a variety of language appropriate for the level (language). Planning, then, is the first step to achieving success in ‘the writing’.

1: Read the question. Too often this is something we fail to do, especially if we have been preparing for the exam for a long time. Remember that including the necessary information is key to getting a high content mark (and ignoring it can mean students fail the task entirely). Students need to carefully read the question and be able to identify the main points they need to include. Whenever you set a writing task, make sure you give yourself time to review the question with your class. The traditional way of doing this is just to underline the important points. To mix it up, why not write the content points on the board and have the students try to reconstruct the question in the correct format? Or, give them an example answer and a question with gaps for them to fill in from the text what they think the content points are.

2: Find the target reader. Every writing task in the exam will have an audience, which is always identified in the question. It might be the students’ English teacher (the classic B1 story question), a college principal, readers of a magazine, or a prospective employer (among others). Identifying the target reader helps us improve our communicative achievement mark. If our B2 students are writing a review we can say that the target reader is an unknown teenager or adult who is interested in the subject, that the register (the style of writing) will be neutral or informal, and that the target reader expects to get and evaluation and some kind of recommendation about the thing being reviewed.

3: Create your ideas. Once they’ve identified the content points and the target reader, the student needs to use the question to generate their ideas. Remember that for an English Language exam, there are no correct or incorrect ideas: as long as students express them appropriately for the type of task, and they are relevant to the question, they will get the point. This stage is especially important for B2 level essays, where students have to think of their own idea to add to the question, and for all part 2 tasks at B2 level and above.

4: Choose your language. The final step in the plan is to pick out some grammar and vocabulary which your students can use to show off their level. The Writing Recipes are perfect for this, as they help students identify the different structures which are best suited to each type of task. Remember that we need to be pushing our students to be ambitious with their choice of grammar and vocabulary.

3: How to write a paragraph: a step we often forget when teaching writing

We saw earlier how students hate having their time wasted. And so do we! We have far too much to do, and not enough time (or money!) to do it. If you ask your ‘just-got-their-B1’ B2 to write a part 1 essay without any training, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The motivated ones will do it in thirty minutes or so, the unmotivated ones will do it in 20 minutes if you’re lucky, and you’ll spend far too long marking and correcting some terrible writing.

To solve this, we should be teaching writing in small chunks; if our students can produce effective paragraphs, the whole task of writing a 190+ word task becomes much more manageable. As with plans, there are four stages to this:

4: Always keep the target reader in mind: who are they, what do they want and what do they expect?

Several years ago, on a break between classes, I picked up a copy of the excellent EL Gazette and started flicking through the articles. I came across this catchy headline:

It engaged me. I was thinking about changing academies, and as a competent speaker of English I knew that the why not + infinitive question is used to introduce a plausible and often attractive option. I continued reading, and the introduction kept me engaged:

Matt Salusbury visits Poland to discover modest pay packets for English language teachers – but generous holidays and a rich history and culture could make it a country worth considering.

So far, so good. As the author’s target reader, I’m hooked and want to keep reading. But that changes with the second paragraph:

It can be tough earning a living as an English teacher in Poland. Even being a native speaker there doesn’t necessarily confer an advantage over locally recruited teachers in terms of hourly rates.

At that point, I stopped reading, closed the magazine, and made a coffee. If this text had been an exam task, it’s communicative achievement mark would be affected because the target reader is no longer engaged with the article. I suspect this effect would be improved if that paragraph had one final sentence to encourage the reader:

It can be tough earning a living as an English teacher in Poland. Even being a native speaker there doesn’t necessarily confer an advantage over locally recruited teachers in terms of hourly rates. Nevertheless, there are many upsides to consider.

Maybe the author’s point was to brace the prospective expat for a frugal life, or to weed out casual readers like me. But this point of keeping the target reader engaged is crucial if we want our students to produce effective pieces of writing. Take a look at this (unedited) paragraph from a C1 student in a mock exam:

Secondly, convencional wisdom holds that language skills are now much deficient and they blame Smartphones. Ten years ago, if a child was boring he would read a book, which improve their language, but nowadays, they spend all their free time chatting online. That won’t be a problem if people wrote properly in social network sites, but it is not the case. It may be because they are in a hurry or simply because it’s more convenient for them to avoid writing some vocals or even words, and punctuation signs are out of the question. On the flip side, smartphones bring us the possibility to search on the internet any spelling or gramatical doude that we have.

There’s one sentence here that doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the paragraph. It’s the final sentence, starting with on the flip side. It doesn’t fit because the whole paragraph has been discussing negative aspects of Smartphones. It’s a negative paragraph. Introducing this alternative viewpoint, without any explanation or evaluation, makes the message less clear. Communication isn’t achieved.

Our students often tend to throw all of their ideas into a given paragraph. After all, if the ideas are there, they’ll get the marks, right?

Unfortunately not. Paragraphs should have topic sentences, and a clear order of information, to keep the target reader engaged. I often demonstrate this with the following activity, where I ask students to build up a paragraph one sentence at a time:

What’s interesting is that when you do this with your students, you can pinpoint exactly when the writer starts to disengage the target reader. It happens at the start of sentence 4. Can you decide which of these paragraphs is the better?

Before you decide, let’s look at how we order information in a paragraph. Several decades ago, a linguist called Norman Fairclough wrote about the known-new contract, which is essentially a formula for the order of information in a sentence. Take a look at this sentence about a black hole, and decide which is the correct sentence to follow it (a) or (b):

If you said sentence (b) is the correct one, you’re right. You’re probably saying it’s because it sounds better (and that’s what your students will probably say, too). That’s correct – it sounds better because it follows the expected order of information in a sentence.

The known-new contract explains how a sentence will usually start with information which is known or understood by the reader or listener. It will then introduce a new idea or information at the end of the sentence. If we start a sentence with new or unexpected information, it often surprises the reader and makes them work harder to understand your ideas. This is where the target reader becomes less engaged, and communication is harder to achieve.

So, now go back to the paragraphs about Gabriel and Sheeran, and decide which one is better. Click here to find the answer

5: Use Topic Sentences to capture the reader’s attention

Several years ago I attended a Cambridge English training day on the B2 and C1 updates in 2015, led by the brilliant Mike Epps. Mike outlined how we can divide organisation in writing into three different levels which correspond to the writing assessment scales for B1, B2, and C1:

For students to pass the organisational element of their C1 writing, they should demonstrate effective use of these organisational patterns. However, I argue that an organisational feature like topic sentences is something basic which can be introduced to students at the B1 level, and maybe even earlier. With a clear topic sentence, students can (a) identify the subject of each paragraph, making sure they include the necessary information for the task, (b) engage the target reader, and (c) demonstrate an advanced-level feature of organisation. In other words, using topic sentences well can help students nail their Content, Communicative Achievement, and Organisation marks. They’re worth teaching.

Topic sentences are short introductions to a paragraph. They inform the target reader of the theme of that part of the text and usually are found at the start of the paragraph. For our purposes, we only really need to teach three types of topic sentences (although a Google search will give you many more possibilities for higher-level students).

We should give our students lots of practice in identifying topic sentences. Here are five simple ways of developing awareness of topic sentences:

1. Give students a selection of topic sentences to identify the type.
2. Give students a theme/topic, and in groups write examples of each type for the topic.
3. Use a text from a previous class to identify the topic sentences and their type.
4. Give each student a different topic sentence, and ask them to write the rest of the paragraph (around 3 sentences). When they’ve finished, they post their paragraphs on Padlet. In the next class, give students all the topic sentences, and in pairs try to match the different paragraphs.
5. Take the topic sentences from a new text and display them on the board. Students work in pairs to identify the type and predict the content of the whole text. This can be an effective method for reading a text quickly for gist and can be invaluable for higher-level exam students.

A crucial aspect of using topic sentences well is to bear in mind their function: to help the reader understand the text’s message. It’s therefore essential that students become aware of the dangers of including unnecessary ideas or information (which are not relevant to the topic) somewhere in the paragraph. For example in these paragraphs below, the topic sentence appears in green whilst the additional, unwanted sentence appears in red.

Here is a full lesson plan for B2 level on using topic sentences in writing.

6: Is teaching writing about painting by numbers? Almost!

The perfect paragraph has six simple ingredients. To make your ideal short text, follow these simple stages:

1. First, plan your writing to decide what content points you need. Choose your main idea.
2. Brainstorm some ideas to explain this main idea.
3. Choose a type of topic sentence. Write it. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect, as you’ll review it later.
4. Write one or two sentences to support and explain your topic sentence.
5. Remember to use a variety of ambitious grammar and vocabulary for your level.
6. Connect your sentences together using a variety of linkers.
7. Write a final sentence, like a conclusion. Explain why the main idea is important, and how it connects to the topic of the writing task.
8. Read your paragraph again carefully, and check your topic sentence fits.

7: Get lots of practice writing paragraphs.

There’s no point trying to run before you can walk. Successful exam writing comes from having lots of practice writing paragraphs, and having them critiqued and corrected. I recommend you start by doing micro-writing tasks in class in pairs or individually. Use scraps of paper or the chat box, or get your students to post their writing on a Padlet page.

You don’t have to scramble for topics either. The next time you come across two or three warmer questions at the start of a lesson, turn them into a micro-writing task. Give you students one or two minutes just to think about their ideas, and another five mintues to write their responses. Then tell them to read their writing again and add that all-important topic sentence. Collect the writing in for you to read and give feedback, and set the students on the warmer questions in pairs or groups. By doing this, you’ll not only get an opportunity to practice your students’ writing skills, but also give them a chance to rehearse their ideas in private before they reveal them to their classmates. In short, they’ll speak more.

When you’re happy that students know what they’re doing, why not start setting mid-week homework of a short paragraph? I’ve borrowed this idea of the ‘paragraph’ of the week from a colleague in the US, and it works a treat. Spend a few minutes at the end of the class brainstorming ideas for the paragraph, and collect them in at the beginning of the next class. Click here to get a whole pack of tasks.

Answer to paragraph task:

The answer is the Gabriel one, because that final sentence follows the order of information. Click here to continue reading.

8: How to encourage learners to check their writing

The pun is intentional. There are two elephants in the room with writing. Firstly, just as students hate planning their essays, they loathe to go back to them and check them when finished. How many of us have invigilated internal exams and had this dialogue with a student:

Student: Teacher, finished!

Teacher: Really? Have you checked your answers carefully?

Student: Yes!

Teacher: Oh… Well do it again!

The other elephant is all about us as teachers. If our students are doing writing every week, we have to do something with it to make that effort meaningful. If we don’t, our students will come to resent the writing, and eventually the English. But then does that mean hours of marking every week?.

It doesn’t need to. Here in this final section, we will explore some ways that we can train our students to check and correct their writing alongside different strategies and tools we can use to correct and mark it.

9. Getting students to check their work.

If you tell your students to check their writing, they will read it once (quickly) and probably change nothing. Instead, here are some ideas for getting students to check their writing.

As with all aspects of language teaching, we cannot expect students to be able to do these naturally. They will need lots of guidance in class time before we can expect them to do this more independently. I also strongly recommend that you and your students keep a portfolio of their writing. Every writing task, even micro-writing ones on paper or in the chat box, should be filed or saved here to serve both as a record of how students are developing in writing, and so that we can do subsequent correction activities with older pieces of work. If you aren’t using it already, Google Classroom or Edmodo are excellent for this purpose.

• Find mistakes with x. If you’ve been working on perfect forms in recent weeks, why not ask your students to first underline all the examples of them in their writing (a great way of reminding students about the need to be ambitious), and then checking for the accuracy of their writing. It’s not enough to say ‘check your grammar’ – at least not at the start. The process of underlining the target language and later checking it is valuable.
• Take a break! Try doing a micro-writing warmer task at the start of the class, and have students hide their answers for the time being. Towards the end of the class, get your students to read their writing again and correct it. We are much less likely to think critically about our work in the moment it’s finished, simply because we’re happy it’s finished. Coming back to it later means we’re more likely to view it critically.
• Collaborative checking. This can work very well, especially with shorter texts (such as paragraphs). The golden rule is that you pair students with someone they know well and trust. If not, they’ll be too nervous or shy to make a criticism. First, ask students to swap their writing and read it. When they’re finished, they tell their partner three things they liked and one that could be improved. Then they have another 3 minutes to underline all the things they think are mistakes. Finally, together, they work to correct the two pieces of writing.
• Mistake diary. After you’ve handed back corrected writing, students should take some time to review the corrections and ask questions, and crucially they need to do something with those corrections. Old school teachers (or my old boss) would get them to write their mistakes out ten times. Seriously, this is still a thing. I on the other hand ask students to keep two types of mistake diaries. The first kind, which they keep in the back of their notebooks, is a table with three columns:

My mistake	Why I made it	The correction
I have went to Paris	Use present perfect with have + past participle	I have been to Paris
I studied hard becouse I had an important exam.	A spelling mistake because of how I think the word sounds	Because Be – coz

• The second type of mistake diary is simply a list of the types of mistakes students frequently make. I recommend my students keep this in the inside back cover of their notebooks. If this is done well, and students use this list when checking their writing, they can be aware of the things that usually trip them up.
• Write and highlight. A simple trick that also encourages students to write more slowly (important, since every teenager thinks an exam is a race). As they are writing, get them to highlight or underline words, phrases, or even sentences which they are unsure of or have some doubts about. In checking time, it is these parts of the writing they need to correct. When it’s your turn to look at their writing, take a careful look at these parts to determine what your learners are feeling insecure about.
• Every other line. Hidden away in one of the bullet points in the Cambridge handbooks is this gem: if students are hand-writing their work, they should only use every other line. This makes it much easier to make correction and additions and makes it easier for the examiner (or teacher) to read.

10. Tips for Correcting Student Writing

Our time is precious, and marking large pieces of writing takes up a lot of it. Nevertheless, it strikes me that time management is something that very few teachers are good at; I recently met a Director of Studies who spends 30 minutes marking each piece of writing she receives. I’m sure that her students are getting really detailed as thorough feedback on their writing, and that’s great for them. What I’m not sure about it whether those students would take 30 minutes of their time to use that writing feedback to their advantage, and I’m certain that DoS could put those 12 hours a week to much better use.

This isn’t to say that detailed corrections aren’t useful, but just as we vary the types of activities and interactions in a class to keep our students engaged, so we can vary the form of feedback we give them. Here are some feedback techniques that I frequently use to good effect:

• “This time, I’ll be correcting errors with X and Y.” I do this with writing and speaking feedback on a regular basis, as I believe that informing students what they’re being assessed on helps them focus on developing their language skills in specific and achievable ways.
• Use Google Docs to give effective feedback quickly. I’ve been using Google Classroom with my adolescent and adult classes since 2015, and the deciding factor was the ease with which I could give feedback using Google Docs. On Classroom, you assign some writing and students have the option of sending it to you in many formats, although Google Docs offers the most features. When it’s submitted, as the teacher you can highlight and comment on specific things (good for pointing out style issues, or trying to guide students to self-correct) or you can rewrite the student’s work. This will appear as a suggested edit for the student to see. Students can then review all your comments and revisions and click a tick to accept them. Remember that all members of the Google Classroom group can see work, edits, and comments, so I tend to use the private message function to send individual feedback and marks.
• Use a correction code to encourage students to self-correct. Many teachers believe that simply ‘correcting’ students’ work is unhelpful, as they might read these comments but probably not do anything with them. A correction code can help with this, at least in theory. Instead of the teacher writing in the corrections themselves, they highlight or underline the mistake and leave a code to identify the type of mistake (or highlight in different colours if doing this digitally. For example, WR = wrong word GR = grammar issue WO = word order R = register (formality) Sp = Spelling error / / = add a word here? = I don’t understand. If you are to use this type of correction, remember to give students ample time to work through the corrections – best done with a trusted partner whilst the teacher is monitoring or available to answer questions.
• Use Jing to record a video with corrections. If your students have completed their work digitally, the free Jing app for Windows or Mac lets you record videos of what you’re doing on your computer screen (or just a part of it) So why not open up the document in Word or Acrobat, click record, and talk your students through their word and your suggestions. Often it’s easier for us to explain corrections to students in spoken English, and many students enjoy the extra chance for listening practice. The added benefit of Jing is that videos are limited to five minutes (after which the video automatically gets uploaded to the cloud), so correcting a single piece of writing takes a maximum of ten minutes.
• Become familiar with the assessment scales for your exam. There’s no getting around the fact that if your students are to sit an exam, they will want to know how they are progressing with the level and what score their writing might get in the test. The Cambridge handbooks for teachers have lots of examples of student writing and the types of marks they would be getting, and this is a good place for you to start if you’re new to the assessment scales. There are also lesson plans and guides that you can use with your students to make them aware of these scales – remember we always need to make sure our students know how they’re being assessed.
• Use the assessment scales to give feedback. This can be more challenging, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with or confidence about the exam. There’s always a risk that as teachers we give generous marks and give students a false sense of security about their exam success. Nevertheless, using these assessment scales can give students a clear idea of their strengths and weaknesses relevant to the test. I use student-friendly ones, highlighting where on the scale I think students have performed and giving comments about what they can do to improve next time. Towards the end of a course, when students are familiar with these scales, I ask them to complete one of these self-assessment forms as they check their work. I highlight the answers myself and then discuss the disparities with students in tutorials. It’s lengthy and laborious – I’ll maybe do it twice in a course – but it’s definitely worth it!
• Don’t (always) give a mark. Simply put, often students will bypass all your dutiful corrections and focus on their marks. So don’t give one (all the time). Students are probably going to be frustrated with no indication of their achievement, however, so consider giving an emoji instead!