Hashem H Mohesein wrote :Writing Lessons for Beginners

Writing Lessons for Beginners

Beginning-level writing classes are challenging to teach because students have such a huge learning curve at the very start. For a beginning-level student, you wouldn’t start out with exercises such as, “Write a paragraph about your family,” or “Write three sentences describing your best friend.” Instead, begin with some concrete tasks that lead to that short paragraph.

Start With the Nuts and Bolts

For many students, especially those that represent letters or words in alphabets vastly different from English’s 26 letters, knowing that a sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period is not necessarily intuitive.

Make sure to teach:

-Begin each sentence with a capital letter.

-End each sentence with a period and a question with a question mark.

-Use capital letters with proper names and the pronoun “I.”

-Each sentence contains a subject, verb and, usually, a complement (such as a prepositional phrase or direct object).

-Basic sentence structure is: Subject + verb + complement.

Focus on Parts of Speech

To teach writing, students must know basic parts of speech. Review nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Ask students to categorize words in these four categories. Taking time to ensure students understand the role of each part of speech in a sentence will pay off.

Suggestions to Help with Simple Sentences

After students have an understanding of the nuts and bolts, help them begin writing by limiting their choices, and use simple structures. Sentences may be very repetitive in these exercises, but compound and complex sentences are not for students at the very beginning.

After students gain confidence on a number of simple exercises, they will be able to move on to more complicated tasks, such as joining elements with a conjunction to make a compound subject or verb. Then they will graduate to using short compound sentences and adding short introductory phrases.

Simple Exercise 1: Describing Yourself

In this exercise, teach standard phrases on the board, such as:

My name is …

I am from …

I live in …

I am married/single.

I go to school/work at …

I (like to) play …

I like …

I speak …

Likes

soccer
tennis 
coffee
tea
etc.

Places

school
cafe
office etc.

Use only simple verbs such as “live,” “go,” “work,” “play,” “speak,” and “like” as well as set phrases with the verb “to be.” After students feel comfortable with these simple phrases, introduce writing about another person with “you,” “he,” “she,” or “they.”

Written by: Hashem H Mohesein

Vocational Training Institute
PAAET