I will talk briefly about two of the four essential skills for English language: writing
How to teach the students to write English?
One of the skills for learners of English, which I will discuss, is writing. Writing is less spontaneous than talking. The student who is writing a letter or a story has time to reflect on what he will say. He can look in the dictionary if he doesn’t know how to spell a word, or indeed cannot find a suitable word. Speaking is always done in the presence of someone else, but writing may be done quietly and privately . However what is written must be read and understood by others if it is to serve for communication.
In order to help students develop habits of writing correctly, the teacher may follow three stages in teaching writing. The first stage is a controlled one. The student may be given a passage and asked to fill in the blanks. Or the student may be given a series of simple questions. The answers to these questions when put together make a story. Even copying a good story is a valuable exercise for a student of English. Through the copying process he becomes aware of good English form and style.
The next stage in teaching writing might be called “the guided writing stage “. Here the student has more freedom, but is still given some guidelines for writing a composition. The teacher may first introduce some suitable vocabulary, and the class may discuss it before writing a story, and may plan together the out line of a composition. Then each student writes it for himself. Another interesting kind of guided composition is for the student to be given a telegram. The words of a telegram are always very brief, in order to save money. The student may expand this message into a story.
Finally more advanced students may be given complete freedom to write on what subject they like . A wonderful way for students to practice freely expressing themselves in English is through keeping a diary . This may be shown to the teacher occasionally for general corrections. Just by the regular writing process, students are likely to increase their English fluency very quickly .Perhaps the most useful kind of composition for students to learn is the writing of letters to friends telling about recent events or personal feelings; letters to the newspaper complaining about social problems ; letters to companies requesting samples of their products .All kinds of letters should be tried. Maybe you can think up some other types of letters that can be tried. Of course the best practice can be gained if students have a pen friend to write to in English.
The correction of written English can be a heavy task for the teacher. The best way to avoid this is to encourage students to make their own corrections first. Each student should ask a classmate to read his written work and try to find mistakes. In this way all the work is carefully checked before it is given to the teacher for correction. The teacher should only correct those mistakes, which the students are not able to correct themselves. All other mistakes can be marked by a set of symbols, which will tell the student what has to be corrected. For example, a spelling mistake may be marked SP, a mistake in the use of singular and plural may be marked N, a mistake in verb tense may be marked VT, a mistake in verb form may be marked VF, and so on.
Then the student has to find out what his mistake is and correct it himself. If it is a spelling mistake, he may need to consul the dictionary. In this way the teacher can be sure this student will never make the same mistake again, as he has had to search for the correct answer himself. If the teacher gives all the correct answers freely, the students are not likely to pay attention or learn for themselves in this process. They are likely to make the same mistake again.
After reading through all the students’ written exercises, the teacher may choose a few common errors to all, and give the students some exercises to help them overcome the errors. For all the other mistakes, the teacher should check to see that the students have made their own corrections. The teacher might make a rule that any passage with over ten mistakes should be rewritten. This will help to reinforce the students’ use of correct English.