Nowadays, students have access to a great number of apps designed to improve their writing skills in English. In both, free and paid versions, novice writers have instant feedback about the accuracy of their writing with precise information about their mistakes and how to correct them. The app’s immediacy of feedback can overshadow a teacher’s job.
The usefulness of the applications lies in their ability to detect and correct errors in grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. These characteristics, together with their ability to provide immediate feedback, make them effective applications for those who start writing in a foreign language.
At this point, the reader may wonder about the need for students to take writing lessons, since apparently by using writing apps, students can develop this skill on their own.
As attractive as apps may be, the teacher’s role will remain indispensable if teachers stop handling corrections as apps do. Instead of competing with apps, teachers should start developing in the students their ability to organize and evaluate the quality of their ideas before writing.
The organization of the text is essential for the reader’s understanding of any kind of written text. In general, our students start writing without planning what to say and how to do it. That is, without checking the quality of the ideas to be developed, their logic, and how they are related in a paragraph.
Frequently, our students pay attention to only one aspect of their written production that deals with aspects related to the form of the language, thus neglecting the very important aspect of text organization (see table below). As teachers, it is important to bear in mind that errors made in the organization of a text such as a lack of coherence and cohesion, among others, (see the right column of the table) impede the understanding of the written texts much more than an error of form.
Related to form | Related to content |
| Correct grammar | Text organization |
| Range of vocabulary | Quality of ideas |
The complexity of structures | The logical sequence between ideas |
| Punctuation | Text coherence |
| Spelling | Paragraph development |
| Length | Cohesion |
Writing lessons are all about learning to write. Teachers commonly believe that the development of writing skills is achieved through continuous practice of writing compositions. This oversimplified understanding of writing skill development does not help teachers focus on specific writing difficulties as teachers limit to their correction and feedback on grammar, vocabulary, spelling, or punctuation.
An effective way to design a writing lesson is by determining the specific learning objective to be achieved. Each writing practice needs to be focused on reaching a specific objective such as the following:
- Prepare an outline before writing a composition or essay
- Carefully organize the ideas they want to develop in a text
- Write topic sentences
- Illustrate main ideas with examples
- Detect inconsistencies in each text
- Summarize a paragraph
- Practice writing an effective introductory paragraph or conclusion
If at the end of an English course our students have achieved the objectives mentioned above, then we can be sure that they have developed an important skill that they will be able to apply when writing in any foreign language. A wonderful contribution of their English course.
