Functional Tasks for Mastering the Mechanics of Writing and Going Just Beyond--Olshtain

Olshtain views writing as "an act of communication" and suggests that "it is an interactive process that takes place between the writer and the reader via text. Olshatain also stresses that the goal of writing is that it is for an audience and you must write in order for you audience to understand you. This chapter in the book focuses on the development of the mechanics of writing as well as early functional writing for ESL/ELL students. Olshtain also suggests many activities within the article where the primary focus is on the mechanical aspect of writing and moves on to purpose for writing and language focus activities. In order to teach reading and writing in ELL/ESL classrooms mechanics must be the first focus. Letter discrimination, word recognition and basic rules of spelling, punctuation and capitalization are all part of teaching students the mechanics of reading and writing. As part of these mechanics teachers must teach students the English consonants and ELL/ESL students tend to have difficulty with this. Teaching students one to one letter sound correspondence works well when teaching consonants unless the sound of the consonant depends on the environment which it is in. Ex: c can have the sound /k/ when followed by an a, o or u as well as l or r. In this case one to one correspondence will not work. In order for students to recognize these consonant changes it is important to stress that students need to really pay attention to every consonant letter and teachers need to provide extra exercises for practice when needed. When teaching vowels, it is important that learners are made aware of the two basic types of environments that are very productive in English orthography. These two environments are CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) for short vowels and CV(consonant-vowel) and CVCe (vowels that end in an e) for long vowels. In teaching basic sound-spelling correspondence it is important to provide students with rules that support generalizations and can help them become effective readers.

When teaching students the mechanics of reading and writing teachers have three different goals. They are to "enhance letter recognition, to practice sound-letter correspondence via all four language skills and to help the learner move from letters and words to meaningful sentences and larger units of discourse." Olshtain talks about three different recognition tasks that are used in the early stages of reading and writing. They are matching tasks, writing tasks and meaningful sound-spelling correspondence practice. Matching tasks enable learners to develop effective recognition based on distinctive graphic features. Tasks include games, puzzles and other so called "fun" activities. Writing tasks start with basic letter formation and lead to meaningful writing of words and sentences. Sound-spelling correspondence tasks require the learner to focus on the pronunciation as well as the written shape of spelling patterns. Proper capitalization and punctuation is also stressed while writing sentences at this early stage.

Practical Writing Tasks: After getting the basic mechanics out of the way it is important that learners begin to write in order to be able to communicate and communicate effectively. At this stage students learn how to write lists, notes, short messages, simple instructions and other written pieces that are particularly useful in reinforcing classroom work. All of these writings are useful in combining spelling rules with morphological rules in addition to creating a meaningful message. All of these activities should have an appropriate focus on orthographic, mechanical and linguistic accuracy.

Emotive Writing Tasks: These tasks focus more on personal writing. Letters to friends, personal narratives and personal journals and diaries are all examples of emotive writing. Letter writing helps focus on format, spelling and proper punctuation. Personal narratives can help students with their spelling and knowledge of past-tense forms of words and diary/journal entries can help serve as a review of letter writing in general. Emotive writing is generally quite fluent and is usually used with upper ESL/ELL students but it can be done in the earlier stages of language instruction as long as specifications are laid out for students at the beginning of the assignment and the specifications are appropriate to their level of knowledge.

School Oriented Tasks: These include writing assignments, summaries, answers to questions and a variety of essay type passages. Usually the audience for these writings is the teacher however students need to eventually learn to write to an unknown reader whose only way of getting the information is via the text. Dialogue Learning Journals are very popular school oriented tasks in the early stages of ESL learning. They enable students and teachers to interact on a one on one level in any learning context. They also are very useful communicative events at the early stages of learning to write in a new language. Children as well as adults can use Dialogue journals. They usually start off as interactive picture books between student and teacher and move on to pictures with labels and brief descriptions. Gradually the texts become more and more detailed and the communication process is enhanced.


Task: Out of the three tasks mentioned above which do you think is the most important students learn and why? Give examples of what kind of activities you would have students do in each task and provide a brief summary of the specifications for the assignment and what you would expect your students to be able to do.