20 benefits of paired / group writing

This is one of those activities I’ve never read about in ideas and resources books but which is so simple and effective it must be in one somewhere.

It is the idea of communal writing – putting students into pairs, or groups of three, four, five… and getting each student in each pair / group to write exactly the same thing, down to the spelling, punctuation, paragraph breaks, etc.

(Of course each pair / group will give you a different piece of writing.)

My instructions to students are as follows:

You will write as a pair/group.

You will all write EXACTLY the same thing as the other student(s) in your pair / group.

You will all write at the same time (please do not make one draft and then let other students copy it later).

EVERYTHING you write in your pair / group must be the same. Check that your spelling, grammar and punctuation are the same as those of your partner.

If there are things you do not agree on, write them on a separate piece of paper and I’ll take it later, or quickly e-mail it to me.

Why do I think this is an utterly and totally fantastic exercise?

1. It’s collaborative.
2. It turns a writing activity into a multi-skills task.
3. Students learn from each other.
4. In my experience, students tend to think more about what to write, which produces better quality ideas. It’s great watching students have fun brainstorming and bouncing ideas off each other.
5. It’s a good opportunity for students to share their writing exam tips and hints (in their L1 if necessary).
6. The finished piece of writing is often of a quality better than if students were to write individually.
7. Mistakes are more likely to be ironed out within the group, leaving any incorrect work to be errors, which are more useful for the teacher to work on.
8. The activity contains many elements of process writing, but student controlled.
9. If you assign group names and tell students their work will go up on the board, they tend to write better for the future audience of their written work.
10. Students think and talk about spelling, punctuation and grammar.
11. It makes a nice change from individual writing.
12. It gives the teacher a whole lot more time to monitor – five pieces of writing among 20 students is a lot easier than 20 individual pieces of writing.
13. It drastically cuts down on marking / correcting papers – I take one finished piece of writing from each group (making the assumption the other students in each group wrote the same thing) and correct it.
14. Give feedback is quicker. I return a copy to each student in the group and talk to the group as a whole.
15. Stronger students can help weaker students.
16. The teacher can use the points students do not agree on for a boardwork correction stage.
17. If students mail the teacher the points they do not agree on, (s)he has a ready-made sample of work to copy and paste into an activity on the smart board / projector. This sample is likely to be useful in monolingual groups in that it is likely to consist of common errors.
18. It’s fantastic for whole class writing project work. You can swap students around so each new student adds ideas to the original group.
19. The activity can be used for grammar test practice activities where accuracy is key.
20. It can be used for spelling tests and is fun if you make it a competition – the group with the most correct answers being the winner.

I hope you try this and then write a comment below. Or you could just write a comment below

My StoryMaker.com

Perhaps my favourite classroom tool of the past year is My StoryMaker from the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh. It’s great fun and has never failed to entertain me or my students – always the sign of a good activity. Most importantly, it really gets students thinking about language and focuses them on producing creative, quality work.

What is it?

My StoryMaker lets students choose their story’s characters, setting and certain objects. Students start by writing their name. They then choose their main character, the general theme of story (love, making friends, travel…) and a third variable (who the main character falls in love with, what the main character wants to find, etc.). This is usually a lot of fun for the students as they have to agree on the basics of their story.

With these three things chosen, My StoryMaker gives students the title of the story, such as:

• The Dinosaur Who Made Friends With The Fox
• The Boy Who Fell In Love With The Mermaid
• The Girl Who Wanted The Cheese
• The Ghost Who Traveled To The Desert

I used it this week and as usual the students collaborated brilliantly and focused on their language and story. Even the most reticent students eventually quitened and applied themselves to the task (10 minutes of moaning followed by 35 mins of concentrated effort). I usually put students in pairs to share one computer – that way they have to work together to create their story. This gets them sharing ideas, discussing grammar and spelling and taking pride in their shared efforts. I can’t remember any other activity in my career as a teacher where students have worked together so totally focused and lost in their activity for 40 minutes – and still continued after I left the classroom.

My Students

My students are in their late teens/early twenties but they loved the characters and the story titles.

I’m in my mid-40s and so did I.

My students are also Arabs, who have little formal tradition of writing stories but a very long history of narrating them. The fact they were so interested in My StoryMaker leads me to believe it would work incredibly well with students more used to writing.

Fun

Once the title and characters are chosen, the fun begins/continues. There is a whole story to write with as many pages as time and imagination permit. A small green arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the page moves the story on to the next page.

Students write their story in the dialogue box. They can click on objects to the right of the box and introduce them to the story. Of course they have to write about why the objects are there and what part they play in the story. Clicking on a character or object activates three mini menu wheels from which students can let their character interact with other characters and objects. The menus also let the characters do something or change their emotions. The menus provide a lot of useful vocabulary for lower-level learners and provide a welcome aid to move the story forward if the students run short of ideas. Selecting any options in the menus automatically puts the related text in the dialogue box. (The cleverer students will learn this is a good way of having the story written for them )

Why I like My StoryMaker so much:

1. Students love it.
2. It is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
3. It encourages independent work – Many students have given me new stories they’ve written because they enjoyed writing them.
4. It focuses students on writing a real story – the visual aids really inspire them.
5. The end-product makes the students want their language to be more accurate.
6. Students really want me to help them with ideas, language and correction.
7. It totally engrosses students in producing written English.
8. Students have a lovely colour story to read, add to their writing portfolio and show people.
9. It creates situations where there is language students need and do not know. This is an excellent and authentic opportunity for dictionary work. The printed story provides a record for students of that new vocab in context. It is likely they will remember it the more times they read it.
10. The stories they write can be shared with other students – Once students have written their own story, they are genuinely interested in reading the work of other students.
11. The stories can be built into a classroom library and read again to revisit vocabulary and grammar.
12. My StoryMaker is great for incorporating into work with tenses.
13. It really allows me to facilitate student learning. I spend my whole time listening to students and helping them fill gaps in their understanding.
14. Students really want to do as well as they can.
15. My students say they want to take it home and make stories with their little brothers and sisters.

There is another amazing story maker I came across a while back called ZimmerTwins. Might write about that later – Will take it into the classroom in the next week or two.

PS – My StoryMaker doesn’t open in certain versions of Internet Explorer. It has no problems with Firefox.

Feedback on Writing

I provide feedback to my students using mp3 files. I record them using the free audio editor and recorder Audacity (you can download versions for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix).

I have found providing recorded oral feedback via an mp3 file to be a very useful addition to my feedback arsenal. I needed a little time to get into the swing of things but once I did, I loved it (and so too did my students). It’s very easy. I just record the feedback, save as mp3 and then e-mail it to the students.

I would suggest reducing the file size to 32 kpbs (if you can) so files don’t clog up e-mail InBoxes.

Example

Here’s an example text. I write numbers on the text where students need to focus their attention. When I record the feedback, I ask the students to look at number one, and then provide the feedback, and then do the same for #2, etc.

Teachers have asked me if it’s quicker than providing written feedback. In my experience, it takes a little longer if the text is short but saves time if the text is longer. Using audio files also saves time if you want to provide more extensive and comprehensive feedback.

Here are some of the things I initially had to get used to:

• Finding what to say and how to say it to be of maximum benefit to students.
• Starting a new sentence again if I made a mistake (in Audacity you just select the mistake and delete it, as you would do with a piece of text in Word).
• Cutting down on umms and ahhs.
• Creating an easy to recognize naming system when saving the mp3 files. I used the class name + student initials + writing task name (e.g. DF2-05_AM_cities.mp3).
• Finding the time and a quiet area to get into the habit of recording feedback.
• Some people might say they don’t like the sound of their own voice, but this disappears after a while.

Here are the reasons why I like and recommend using sound files for feedback:

• Students like them
  They really pay more attention to what’s on a sound file than what I write on paper. They also seem to get ‘excited’ at receiving one in their mail.
• It makes a change from red ink
  Whatever colour ink you use for correction, it’s usually messy business. Some students might need a microscope to read your notes. I know my corrections can sometimes look more like a maze of insertion marks and words.
• It practices listening
  Listening to the corrections is a valid and authentic listening task. Students are usually quite motivated to listen and will press play several times to make sure they got it all.
• It’s an activity in itself
  This is a sneaky one – The audio provides students with a whole new activity of listening for specific information and re-engaging and correcting their text. Great for recycling language and getting students to think.
• It makes the students rewrite the draft
  Always a good thing. In my experience, they are more engaged in the rewriting process with audio correction than with my scrawled notes.
• It gets students used to metalanguage
  The audio files are a good opportunity to reinforce grammar terms they might not be so familiar with. This is particularly useful for lower levels. Audio files give students more processing time to work out exactly what those big, confusing words are the teacher keeps saying in class (like present progressive, apostrophe, adjective…).
• It is quicker than writing if there’s a lot you want to say
• It’s useful with tiny handwriting on A8 paper
  No matter how hard I try to convince my students of the virtues of A4, I still get essays on Post-It-note-sized paper. You need an ultra thin pen and a microscope to notate these. Using numbers and audio makes this process cleaner and easier.
• It forces me to think more carefully about grading my speech and saying what I need to say as succinctly as possible.

So, I thoroughly recommend using audio to provide feedback. However, if you really want to push the boat out – use audio and visual. This is one of my New Year resolutions. Russell Stannard has excellent tutorials on how to use screencasts in providing feedback on writing:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=207117

and
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec08/mart04.htm

Or check out Vance Stevens’ list of screencast software:
http://vancestevens.com/casting.htm#screencasting