Перед новым учебным годом немного о важности extensive writing с практическими советами.

Extensive Writing

There is a vast market for writing courses. Typically, these are short courses either self-paced or arranged as Zoom training sessions with home assignments and teacher’s feedback. Some of them are arranged by literary writing centres and aim at teaching learners how to write short stories, novels, poems, etc. Others are centred on ESL/EFL field and prepare learners to take exams, such as IELTS, FCE, CAE, CPE. The issue is that a short writing course is often not enough if you did not write before and are not willing to keep writing, practicing, applying, honing and polishing your writing skills throughout a period of time. To assume that you can have high marks for the Writing part at IELTS, CAE or CPE merely after attending a few workshops or doing several assignments is to lend yourself to illusory hopes and waste your own time. Certainly, such courses do help to develop technical skills as well as garner some vocabulary and syntactical structures. But bringing some other approaches to bear upon the writing tasks instead of doing cut and dried exercises ad nauseum may be beneficial for those who are willing to learn to write. One of these approaches is extensive writing.

Extensive writing is by far less in the spotlight than extensive reading. That said, writing as a skill requires multiple trials and errors to enhance it. You need to write a lot in different situations and thus develop ways to generate ideas, see the world through the writer’s lens, being able to notice things and describe them, committing vocabulary to memory, etc. Writing requires long-term memory capacity alongside keeping in mind your rhetorical goals. In order to ease the cognitive load, the development of writing skills should become automatic. You do it regularly. You grow into it. You get better at it.

 Sun argues that extensive writing is writing that is done regularly and frequently in- and outside of the classroom; covers different genres and topics, and is not necessarily meant for assessment (Sun, 2010). It is set to make writing a habit that is reinforced by continual practice and to help to wing it as well as give you an opportunity to become aware of what impedes your writing, how you feel about it, what exactly appeals to you in this process and what does not, and self-regulate.

Some researchers rightfully claim that ‘many writing assignments produce poor results not because students are overloaded by the process but because they are bored by the process’ (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987). In order to assuage the feeling of boredom we need to decrease the cognitive load on students and their feeling of being overwhelmed and under-capable to write. Below you can find some ideas to traverse.

These activities can be arranged both in class and out of class:

 ·       ‘What can you see, hear and smell?’. Give your students several pictures of any place in urban or rural setting (coffee house, restaurant, stadium, flower shop, museum, etc.). Ask them to make a list of 3-5-10 things they can a) see, b) hear, c) smell in these places.

 ·       Flash fiction. Give your students an interesting visual. For example, I usually give a photo of a platform of an underground station in their city or in any other city of the world. I ask them write a piece of flash fiction (from 10 to 60 words usually) describing what they see and how they feel standing on the platform if they feel a) happy, or b) scared.

 ·       Free writing. During a short writing session (3-5 minutes) students develop any ideas on a given topic. By doing this, teachers can relieve learners of the pressure to write correctly. I usually collect freewriting samples, if the students want to share with everybody in the class. However, I never evaluate free writing and use it mostly as a means of generating ideas and eschewing constraints.