Writing: A Key Component of Language Development

During class, I learned that writing is just one part of the larger process of language development.

Writing is basically the final product of thinking, talking, reading, media and forms of communication. It can also be defined as written communication. 

Three major goals teachers should achieve when teaching writing are to:

1. give students the opportunity to write for a REASON. (Students' writing should have a purpose.)
2. allow students to write for different audiences (readers)
3. provide students with the proper guidance or knowledge they need so that when they write on their own, they can self-evaluate their pieces. 

Despite its advantages, writing also has many challenges. Some of these include:

1. Time constraints 
2. Poor foundational skills
3. Teachers lacking confidence in their own knowledge and abilities of writing. 
4. Limited vocabulary and sentence structure skills. 
5. The difficulty of differentiating instruction for students with varying abilities. 

Ways to overcome these challenges can be:

1. Using short writing tasks or integrating writing into other subjects.
2. Teaching mini lessons on grammar, spelling, vocabulary so that students can catch up or gain some sort of knowledge on missing information, model writing (show, don’t just tell) and providing sentence starters.
3. Offering workshops for teachers or encouraging teachers who are weak in writing to collaborate with stronger teachers.
4. Making effective use of available materials and resources or creating materials and resources if there isn't any. 
5. Providing tiered writing tasks and offer scaffolds such as word banks and graphic organizers.