1.  Practice all four skills. When teaching writing, don’t be afraid to include short speaking, listening, and reading exercises in your lesson plans.  For example, if you’re trying to help learners to understand the value of using adjectives, you could verbally describe someone or something to them.  They will immediately see how much easier it is to identify the target person or object if they are given a more detailed description.  By giving students a chance to do more than writing in a writing-based lesson, the lesson will be more varied, and your students will be more interested and more involved in the exercises.

2.  Activate prior knowledge.  When teaching your students new material, always remember to start with what is familiar to them and then gradually introduce more challenging information.  This will allow them to begin each lesson with confidence, and feel more comfortable working their way into new material.  For example if you are trying to give your students practice in using new vocabulary, you could ask them to complete a short exercise where their job is to provide a single word to complete a number of sentences that you prepare in advance.  If you provide students with a list of words that contain some familiar words and some new words, they will feel more confident about trying to complete sentences with some of the newer words.  Later in the lesson, you could ask students to provide a greater number of words that are missing from a larger piece of writing.

3.  Connect writing practice with real life applications.  Always try to give your students a practical reason for trying to learn a new skill.  For example, if you are trying to give your students practice in using the simple past tense, you could have a brief discussion with your class about the different situations in which they would need to write a short note in the past tense.  For example, before they leave work, they might want to leave their supervisor a note about what jobs they completed while they were at work, or perhaps they would like to write a note to their child’s teacher, in which they explain why their child was absent on a certain day. 

4.  Build community through pair and group writing tasks.  Learning writing skills doesn’t need to be stressful or boring for students.  A class can be enlivened and students can feel more connected to each other if their teacher gives them opportunities to complete short, purposeful tasks in pairs or small groups.  For example, students can have fun practicing how to form complete sentences by working together to match sentence fragments.  This kind of activity doesn’t take a lot of extra work to prepare on the part of the teacher, and it gives students a chance to practice their writing skills while working together to solve a puzzle.

5.  Don’t be afraid to dictate.  You can greatly improve your students’ writing skills by frequently giving them short dictations.  If you are working on using the past tense in class, your dictation can consist largely of verbs in the past tense.  If, instead, you have been practicing using adverbs, you could dictate a short paragraph that is full of useful adverbs.  The exercise does not have to be long to give students very valuable practice in a certain skill.  Dictations give students a lot of practice in a variety of writing skills, especially spelling.  If you provide your students with an easy-to-read, double-spaced copy of the dictation afterwards, they can check their writing by themselves and thereby increase their attention to detail and their ability to self-edit.

6.  Model good writing.  Before you ask your students to complete an exercise with new material, be sure to first provide some kind of warm-up activity, an introduction, and a teacher-led practice.  Once students know what they will be doing, and they’ve had a chance to do so with their teacher first, they will be much more confident and better prepared to try to practice the skill with each other and independently.

7.  Provide feedback and make time to revise.  If you ask students to write a paragraph for you, take time to edit their writing, and return the corrected writing to them so that they can write a final draft with the appropriate corrections.  The more practice they have in identifying and correcting their own mistakes, the more they will be able to avoid making those same mistakes in the future.