Reflection 1 - Trends and Challenges in Teaching Writing.

Teaching writing takes time and effort. According to Anne Lamott “almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” As a teacher who will be teaching writing, should be aware of strategies to help struggling writers become effective writers. In this writing course, I was introduced to a variety of strategies to include grammar instruction, summarizing, publishing writing and writing to start class, just to name a few. However, we were enlighten with short demonstrations of how each strategy should or can be used. I was impressed by the strategy “choosing topics to write about”, because this strategy allows students to choose their own topic, so they can better relate to it. Also, there were other strategies I was confused about and still confused of such as teaching writing explicitly. However, I think that all the strategies are good and useful, and they will allow students to become effective writers and to help teachers assist students with difficulties. In addition, we looked at some possible writing challenges students may struggle with including “Writing does not have prosody, body language, facial expression” and “The writer cannot assume there is shared context with the reader.” For instance De-contextualized task, students may be asked to write about their 'Easter vacation', the challenge for them is to rely on their memory and will then indicate to the teacher by saying “teacher I can’t remember or don’t remember” which makes the task difficult for both the teacher and students. Nevertheless if this difficulty arises, strategies are usually used to address or fix these difficulties. So, in class I learnt about trends in teaching writing and found that if this problem arises teachers can utilize gallery walk to help students to remember or to make the task more easier and fun.