Developing Writing Skills Исполнитель

Developing Writing Skills

Teaching writing

Writing as a skill is very important in teaching and learning a foreign language; it helps pupils to assimilate letters and sounds of the English language, its vocabulary and grammar, and to develop habits and skills in pronunciation, speaking, and reading.

The practical value of writing is great because it can fix patterns of all kinds (graphemes, words, phrases and sentences) in pupils’ memory, thus producing a powerful effect on their mind. That is why the school syllabus reads: “Writing is a means of teaching a foreign language.” Writing includes penmanship, spelling, and composition. The latter is the aim of learning to write.

Since writing is a complicated skill it should be developed through the formation of habits such as:

(1) the habit of writing letters of the English alphabet;

(2) the habit of converting speech sounds into their symbols — letters and letter combinations;

(3) the habit of correct spelling of words, phrases, and sentences;

(4) the habit of writing various exercises which lead pupils to expressing their thoughts in connection with the task set .

In forming writing habits the following factors are of great importance:

• Auditory perception of a sound, a word, a phrase, or a sentence, i.e., proper hearing of a sound, a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
• Articulation of a sound and pronunciation of a word, a phrase, and a sentence by the pupil who writes.
• Visual perception of letters or letter combinations which stand for sounds.
• The movements of the muscles of the hand in writing.

The ear, the eye, the muscles and nerves of the throat and tongue, the movements of the muscles of the hand participate in writing. And the last, but not the least, factor which determines progress in formation and development of lasting writing habits is pupils’ comprehension of some rules which govern writing in the English language.

Since pupils should be taught penmanship, spelling, and composition it is necessary to know the difficulties Russian pupils find in learning to write English.

The writing of the English letters does not present much trouble because there are a lot of similar letters in both languages. They are a, o, e, n, m, p, c, k, g, x, M, T, H. Only a few letters, such as s, r, i, h, 1, f, b, t, j, I, G, Q, N, etc., may be strange to Russian pupils. Training in penmanship is made easier because our school has adopted the script writing suggested by Marion Richardson in which the capital letters in script have the same form as the printed capital letters. The small letters such as h, b, d, i, k, f, are made without a loop.

Pupils find it difficult to make each stroke continuous when the body of the letter occupies one space, the stem one more space above, the tail one more space below.