Scaffolding ELL to Be Successful Writers

Writing is my favorite subject to teach my students. We write every day in my class. I think that is it an important to know that basics of writing, since I teach second grade, and how to be able to explain what they are writing about. I will admit though that I do struggle with teaching my EL learners during the writing block. They struggle to form complete sentences, sound out words, and even put spaces between the words. I have tried many things to make sure that they are successful, from one on one lessons to peer mentoring, but they still seem to struggle. Chapter 6 was about how to scaffold ELL to be successful writers, and it was defiantly helpful to me. I plan to take some of these strategies back into my classroom this year and implement them with my EL learners.

Effective writers have a lot more confidence than less effective writers. They are able to understand the purpose of writing and what they need to do with language for it to be appropriate for the audience. They understand how to organize and structure the writing. They are able to revise, reorganize, and edit their work. They are also aware of the differences between speech and writing and understand that good writing is not just speech written down. Effective writers use models of good writing and know how to do research. They know about the topic they are writing about, and finally their writing is easily understood by the reader.

Writing pieces always fit into a certain genre. A writing genre is defined as the different forms of literacy (poems, plays, novels, etc.). Genres have a particular social purpose and are used to get something done through language, have a particular structure or organization, and have language features typical of a specific genre. Written genres need to be explicitly taught for the student outcomes to be successful. Teachers need to have a solid understanding of effective writing pieces and the particular genres in order to teach and make them explicit to learners.

The Teaching and Learning Cycle is an approach where the teacher focuses on introducing, modeling, and practicing four writing stages for the students. 

Stage 1: Building the Field- This stage is content focused. The target is to build up info about the writing topic. In this stage there is a lot if speaking, listening, and reading and could involve practical activities.

Stage 2: Modeling the Genre- This stage is language focused. The target is for the students to become familiar with the purpose, organization, and language features of the genre. You will need good model texts to illustrate the language and organization of the genre.

Stage 3: Joint Construction- This stage is content and language focused. Stages 1 and 2 come together at this stage. The target is for the teacher and students to write together, constructing a piece of writing in the chosen genre, conversing as they do both the relevance and validity if the info or content and the appropriateness of the language. 

Stage 4: Independent Writing- At this stage, students write their own text in the chosen genre. 

Using the genre framework approach for an assessment can help you give useful feedback to the students that they can act on in the future. There are seven sets of questions that are in the genre framework.

1. General comments: is the overall meaning clear? are the main ideas developed? does the writing reflect the writer's other classroom language?

2. Genre type: what kind of genre is this? is this appropriate for the writer's purpose? has the writer written this text type before?

3. Overall Organization: is the overall structural organization appropriate to the text type? are at stages missing?

4. Cohesion: are the ideas linked with the appropriate connectives? is there appropriate variety of these connectives? are pronouns used correctly? do pronouns have a clear referent?

5. Vocabulary: is the appropriate vocabulary used? is there appropriate semantic variety?

6. Sentence Grammar: is the sentence grammar accurate?
7. Punctuation and Spelling: is the punctuation appropriate? is spelling accurate? if the writer does not yet produce correct spelling, what does he know about spelling?