Free, creative writing practice

I would like to make a case for free, creative writing practice, during which the teacher circulates in the class, working as a mobile dictionary and grammar book rather than a punitive mistake spotter. The teacher's role is to help the students and enrich their texts, rather than to use "geo-stationary-positioning" (reading over student's shoulders) to eradicate all the mistakes the students will naturally and usefully be making.

Of course, yes, there is a case for 100 percent correction, but not all of the time. That is what Stevick experienced, and it tied his tongue when he went to his target-language countries.

Creative writing exercises

I want to offer some well-tried classroom activities that may bring students to WANT to write in English. I feel that doing some writing work during class time is useful precisely because the teacher can give SUPPORTIVE help when and where it is needed. The very best time to teach a new word is when the student needs it to express herself.

Activity 1: Writing across the classroom

Tell the students you want them to spend 20 minutes writing short letters to each other. When Ahmet has written his short letter to Maria, he takes it over to her. She then writes him a reply.

Once the technique is understood by the students, everybody should be engaged in reading or writing for 90 percent of the twenty minutes. You go round helping, but not reading over their shoulders. This could be the first time the students have ever written anything in English to actually say something to another person. As happens in all good writing exercises, each person has an interlocutor, a reader. It is extremely hard to write convincingly to the sky or to the teacher's red pen.

If you use the technique with 14-year-olds, it is best to get the students to write their names on slips of paper — you collect the slips and shuffle them. Each student then picks a name and writes his or her first letter to that person. This avoids a handsome boy getting 12 letters from the girls in the class and makes sure that marginal students are included.

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Ii What is self-assessment?	\|	Activity 2: Tree-leaf correspondence

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