Motivate

Stimulate interest in the subject matter or the type of text used for the writing task. The task could be writing a letter of complaint, a travel brochure, a book/film review, a holiday postcard, an email or just a letter to a friend).

Brainstorm

Get students to think about what is usually found in the text that they are going to write. At the same time get them to come up with ideas of what the text will look like.

Model

Give students an example (or examples) of the type of the of text they are going to produce to read. After it has been read, it could be displayed on the wall in the classroom. Highlight parts of the text that might be useful for students e.g. useful vocabulary, type of language typically used in that type of text and discourse markers. This could be teacher-led but where possible allow guided discovery – let the students find out for themselves.

Practice

When you have finished highlighting, give some controlled writing practice activities that are relevant to the task at hand.

Group work

Allow the students to work in small groups to finish the writing task. Here the teacher should be monitoring and offering support and assistance where necessary. This stage will probably take up a lot of lesson time. Make sure you allocate enough time for this stage of the lesson. Try not to rush students, give them time to revise and edit their work.

Audience

Depending on the type of task the audience will take different forms. Display the student's work in their classroom for their peers to read, if possible, present on an OHP or computer, and if the task is an email, letter or postcard, get the students to send their writing to the intended recipient (this encourages a response and a flow of writing).

At this stage students can start to take notes or look for good language use and incorrect language use.

Feedback

Feedback could be either teacher or student led. As a teacher you should provide a rewording of inappropriate language usage. Feedback could also take place in a subsequent lesson – you could collect some good and bad language examples and have your students identify which is which for homework. In a subsequent lesson, you could see how the students have coped with this task. You could also provide your own writing (from the same task) for students to read and compare to the work they produced. Alternatively, (depending on the task), you could provide students with a piece of authentic written work (e.g. a travel guide, a letter of complaint etc.) for them to compare their work to.