Introduction 2

CHAPTER II.GUIDELINES FOR CORRECTING WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

2.1.Independent Practice

The students write about extra topics of their choice and write the journal topic in each chapter on their own at home (out of class). Here, they are encouraged to write and not to worry about mistakes. The instructor only makes sure that the students have written those, but she does not mark mistakes in them. ¹²The students will improve gradually as they practice more and more strategies for formulating topic sentences, idea development and organization, grammatical structures and editing issues.¹³

Extension Activities
Developing students’ writing ability in EFL requires continual practice and the support and integration of other language skills. For those reasons, the students are encouraged to practice out of class reading, listening, and writing. They locate material related to the theme of each chapter off the Internet and in magazines, read it and keep it in a portfolio. They watch T.V. shows or documentaries related to themes covered in class and write a short summary. They can also write paragraphs about special occasions and personal experience such as Ramadan, the feast, the National Day, birthdays, marriage, death of a relative…etc.
They type their paragraphs and post them in class so that the students have a chance to read each other’s paragraphs, compare and evaluate their own performance. The instructor just reads those and encourages the students to write. Marking errors in those paragraphs will discourage the students and they will quit writing, whereas telling the students that the instructor enjoys reading what they write will encourage them to write more. They will also feel good about their writing ability. In addition, an online course, a blog, a wiki, Facebook, or an online discussion forum can be used as supplement to in-class instruction where students write paragraphs on any topic of their choice. They may post stories and poems. They can have a personal homepage. They respond to their classmates’ posts, locate information from internet, e-mail classmates and instructor and word-process and spell-check paragraphs. Here again the students are encouraged to write and not to worry about spelling, grammatical, punctuation or capitalization mistakes. Positive comments should be given no matter how poor their writing is. Online writing activities give the students a chance to see how good student writers express themselves. The instructor can also post paragraph of her own on topics posted to keep them interested. Marking students’ errors in detail will discourage them and make them feel inadequate. It is difficult for them to conceptualize the corrections of all kinds of errors in their writing. Instead, the instructor can ask a stud ent to clarify a certain point or to add more details or give examples. She should also encourage the students to respond to and comment on each other’s posts. Once in a while, the students may practice online peer-editing (the students mark the errors in each other’s paragraph) following a series of prompts posted by the instructor¹⁴. Each prompt should ask the students to focus on one aspect of the writing process such as checking capital letters, underlining verbs and checking their tenses and forms, checking subject verbagreement of each verb, use of articles, prepositions and conjunctions, making sure each paragraph has a topic sentence, that the paragraph has sufficient details, making details specific and so on. They check each aspect one at a time. Student editors can also give suggestions for improving a classmate’s paragraph.¹⁵