Writing is an interactive process by nature as it evolves out of the symbolic interplay between writer, text and reader. By making conditions more ‘authentic’ than the ones in traditional classroom tasks, awareness of audience, purpose and intentionality is reinforced. While planning a written piece, the writer is constrained to consider the audience and to adopt a reader-oriented approach so as to achieve a persuasive, emotive or objective function. Interactivity can be promoted in class by implementing some of the following suggestions (adapted from L. Hamp-Lyons and B. Heasley 1992):

• Group-brainstorming on a given topic.
• Whole class discussion of how a particular text might need adjustment according to the audience it is addressed to.
• Collaborative writing: students work together to write a previously agreed text.
• Whole class text construction and composing on the blackboard.
• Writing workshop or in-class writing: students consult each other and co-construct texts while the teacher moves around listening to their comments, providing    feedback or answering questions. The teacher keeps track of their progress and works out a record of most frequent questions, doubts and inaccuracies for a future  ‘error analysis session’.
• Group research on a text topic: students divide out the responsibility for different   aspects of the information-gathering stage on a certain topic. They then pool their  results and work together to plan a text, which may be collective or individual.
• Peer-editing.

In this way writing becomes communicative and purposeful; at the same time, it enables the students to challenge their language practices and gain the most from the experience. Making writing interactive requires imagination on our part as teachers, but is rewarded by the creativity and enthusiasm that most students display in response.

In order to help our students feel more confident and improve their writing, we need to help them build up from the foundations.

Building vocabulary

Many times I have heard students complain that they lack the necessary vocabulary to write, be it a story, a description or an essay. It may be all right while they follow the step-by-step guidance provided by the teacher or the coursebook, but what if they have to do a writing task by themselves, particularly of the narrative or descriptive kind?

Students seem to operate on a very limited vocabulary repertoire. While their passive vocabulary may be quite extensive, their active vocabulary is often very limited and they end up using the same words again and again:

People always walk or run

Girls are pretty or not pretty, sometimes they can even be beautiful!

Something they like is nice, if they don’t it is not nice

And you do things slowly or quickly

And that’s it! What can we do to help them build up their active vocabulary?

Describing people

Character

Brainstorm on the board adjectives beginning with each letter of the alphabet. If you feel students are going for the most common, give definitions and ask them to say the adjective: ‘Someone who always says ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and lets old ladies go first on the bus is ….?’

If any letters are missing, ask students to use dictionaries and look up more adjectives and provide a simple definition. Have them keep a written record in their notebooks.

Then play a game. Student A begins by saying: ‘I like my friend Albert because he is amiable’, the second follows: ‘I like my friend Betty because she is brilliant’, and so on.

Manners of walking 

Ask students how many words they know that describe different manners of walking. They will probably come up with run, walk, jump and very little else.

Write a few verbs on the board and ask the students to mimic them if they know the meaning. If they don’t, mimic and encourage them to produce a simple definition in English they can remember easily, like:

Stagger: walk like someone who drank a lot

Some interesting and useful verbs:

Slip  crawl  limp  slide  creep  steal  stagger  hop  prowl  spring  stumble  linger 

For revision, give students blank cards and ask them to work in groups. One group should work with verbs of movement, another with adjectives that describe character.  Have them write a set of definitions and the set of words on separate cards. Have the groups exchange the cards and ask them to match the pairs.

This activity can be done with other lexical sets, for example sounds made with the nose and the mouth, ways of speaking, etc.

Puff  snore  sniff  yawn  pant  cough  blow  splutter  sneeze  sigh  hiccup  sob

Ask students to look for pictures or photographs of people and write a vivid description of this person, invent a personality from how they react to the photo, describe how the person moves, feels, their character, etc. this can be done as a writing workshop in class.

In groups, they read each other’s description comparing them to the actual picture and help each other improve the texts. Then they exchange descriptions and pictures with another group, read the texts and try to match them to the corresponding pictures.

You may wish to choose a description from a novel, short story or newspaper, and make copies for the students to read. Encourage them to discuss the good and bad points of the text, the vocabulary used and ask them what they would imitate from it.

Describing places

To excite students’ imaginations when writing a narrative that requires description, you can try modelling the narrative as if you were telling the story and eliciting enriching elements from them.

Suppose they have to write a story about what happened to them one evening when their car broke down in the middle of nowhere. You may begin like this:

‘One day, you were driving along a deserted country road. The sun was beginning to set and the sky was …….

What colour was it? Red, yes red but was it just red? Bright red … and yellow that’s it.

There was no traffic and the nearest village was ….

Where was the village? Near? Far away? How far was it?

Suddenly the car began to slow down and eventually it stopped. I tried to switch on the engine again but nothing happened. 

How did you feel?

You can build the story together by encouraging them to add interesting details and helping them with new vocabulary. It is a good idea to write the contributions on the board classifying words into categories, e.g. verbs, adjectives and nouns. Afterwards, you can ask the students to write their version of the story in groups.

You can also make copies of a short narrative or description omitting all verbs and adjectives and numbering the blank spaces. In pairs or groups, students fill in the missing details. If you would like to make it easier, you can provide two or three options from which they can choose. Depending on the kind of text and the level of the students, you can supply options with different connotations.

When they have finished, you can give them the original text to compare and discuss the differences and / or similarities between the two.

Beautiful sounds 

Words have meanings but when you read a text aloud, they also have sound. It’s sometimes difficult to concentrate on the sounds of words without thinking about their meaning. You can do this as a game to explain what the rhythm of a text is and how the choice of words can affect this rhythm.

Provide a list of words and ask the students to say them aloud and choose three or four they like the sound of most. For example:

Murmur  hush  dribble  home  lullaby  mist  nevermore  lilac  bobolink  fawn  marigold  fair  memory  mouse  harbour  cobblestone  rainbow  trembling   

Then, ask them to write six words, not from the list above, that they think sound beautiful. Allow them to use dictionaries. As a class ask them to share their words with their classmates. As a follow up, they can write a short story or a poem using their words.