M11: Teaching Writing

Teaching writing is essential to student success but for whatever reason it is less political than teaching reading.  It gets much less attention, too.

In this module, we will focus on writing instruction in general and then also some specifics for multilingual students.  We will also take into account different writing systems as well as cultural schema about writing.  Most importantly, this module will be a bit different from the others as we will focus on different age groups... we will focus on young writers (and you can think of this as across ages for learners who are new to the alphabetic system of English) and then there will be a different section on adolescent writers or older, more experienced writers.  I think this is necessary in particular when discussing writing instruction because you see different needs and developmental differences in both physical ways (ie. holding a pen) as well as mental/psychological (adolescents tend to have more angst and want to write about different things).

Guiding questions for this module:

1. What are the stages of writing development?
2. What are some methods of teaching writing in general and how is writing related to oral language and reading?
3. How does writing promote language acquisition for multilingual students?
4. What does the research tell us about effective writing instructions for multilingual students?
5. How can we design high-quality, research based instruction in writing for our students that is culturally responsive/sustaining and affirming of our students' values, languages and cultures?
6. How can assessment inform our choices of instructional approaches, methods, and strategies for our multilingual students

We have a lot to cover to make sure you have the foundation you need to effectively teach ELs to be great writers! Let's get started! Read the article linked next for an overview on what differentiation for ELs might look like...