The Writing Paper

Although writing is an important social skill, its mechanical nature can seem quite laborious to students. Consequently, it is often neglected and ends up being the last of the four skills to be developed. You may even find yourself in a situation where you have students who have very good oral skills but loathe writing as it reveals weaknesses in the target language.

For FCE teachers the gulf between the students' writing ability when they start an FCE class and where they need to reach by the time the exam comes can be difficult to bridge. Therefore making the teaching of writing an active part of your lesson is of paramount importance.

One approach to this is by first identifying where your students are at. Students rarely enter an FCE class without any understanding of the features which make up a particular genre of writing. Take a fairy tale as an example. If asked to make one up, most students would include a hero, a villain and someone in distress, and perhaps conclude with the hero getting married to the person he has rescued. These are common features in most European fairy tales. Although this particular genre is not one normally associated with FCE, inviting students to contribute what they do know about the more typical FCE genres is a good starting point. From this you will be able to identify the areas in need of development, dispel any misconceptions about writing in English and highlight the importance of planning.

If your aim is to teach students how to write a letter of application, you might choose to begin with an open class discussion. From this you would be able to identify which conventions of letter writing they are already familiar with. For example, do they know how to start and end a formal letter? If you find they all do, you can then probe them a little further to find out what else they know about the layout of the letter (see page 20 Gold First Certificate Maximiser, for an example of an exam question). Usually students have come across formal writing by this stage but they are still making mistakes with standard letter conventions. Sometimes this is because they transfer ideas from the conventions used in their own cultures and, in certain cases, the features they incorporate are not normal even in their own countries. Very often the latter is due to the age of students. There are many young learners who have never written a formal letter in their first language so they make certain assumptions. For example, students open with lines like 'My name is... .' At this stage you do not need to dispel these preconceptions by overt correction, but directing students to a suitable model (see pages 178-186 Gold First Certificate Coursebook) and then asking them to compare and contrast their ideas with the features of the model.

This can then be followed up with an 'Examiner's comments task' (see pages 26-27; 52-53 and page 95 Gold First Certificate Maximiser). An alternative way to use this type of task is to copy the candidates' attempts and ask your students to comment on them before they see the examiner's comments.

Once the students have been made aware of the features required of a particular genre, have seen a model answer and have been made aware of common mistakes they should avoid, they are often more confident about writing their own examples and value the need for planning more.