Teaching Writing

As an ESL Teacher, this is one of the hardest things to teach for the following reasons:

1. Sometimes teachers are not that great at writing themselves (see the poor grammar/spelling on Korean forums at ESL Cafe/ hopefully not on this blog!) 

2. It requires serious content based teaching.  For conversation classes, a little chit-chat here and there counts as "learning/teaching."  For a writing class, it doesn't so substantially more prep is required.

3. Students can often "fake it" in a conversation class but in a writing class, it's all down on paper for the world to see and mistakes are made in an obvious kind of way. 

4. The students in a writing class all have very different needs.  And even if they are at similar levels in their conversational abilities, the spread in writing ability can be huge. 

5. It easy to make boring and difficult to make interesting, as opposed to conversation classes that are very easy to make interesting. 

Anyway, here are 10 helpful websites to use when teaching writing compiled by David Deubel over at EFL Classroom.