Deep Thoughts: How are writing skills taught in other languages?

Week 4 is in the books and I'm getting prepped for Week #5! I'm really glad that I started working with another 2 students this past week - it's provided a foundation to develop relationships with them as well as helped me to determine their exact need - which is mainly confidence in their speaking skills. They are both super quiet students and hesitate participating with the whole group. I'm hoping that with our 2 on 1 practice they'll feel more comfortable speaking with a larger group.

I know that other students would benefit from small group work as well; I just am having a difficult time figuring out how to make it all work with teaching skills AND monitoring their course work for other classes - all with only one hour a day. I am thinking that there might be some time next week to conference with them about their latest writing sample. I'll keep my fingers and toes crossed for that!

This coming week, I'm introducing grammar and phonics skills. We'll practice some decoding skills with prefixes and suffixes. And even though I've observed students getting frequent grammar practice in their English classes, their writing samples do not reflect the level of proficiency I would expect with said practice. 

This week has got me thinking about the types of written language lessons that are taught in other countries. I just assumed that if a student had decent writing skills in one language that it would transfer over to a secondary language. For example, aren't capitalization rules consistent across various languages? Is this taught in the schools in their native country? I guess that just goes show that I really shouldn't assume ANYTHING! Ha!

And now for what I created and want to share with you, if you think it'll be useful for the students that you work with. I found that my class could make use of a scaffold to support writing paragraphs that helped them think of additional descriptions for the details of the main idea. The following document is what I came up with. You can get it as a Google Doc HERE.

I found that my students were typing their thoughts into Google Translate and then simply copying and pasting the translation into the Google Document without thinking about the sense of the sentence. I figured if they're going to do that, they might as well be forced to write by hand the words, phrases and sentences that Google provided. So rather than sharing the Google Doc through Google Classroom, I ran paper copies of the worksheet. I'll eventually get to demonstrating for them the imperfections of Google Translate. 

If you find that this structure for adding descriptions to the details works for your students, it's easy to change the writing prompts to suit your needs. 

I hope that your week goes well for you.
Offering my BEST -
-bethany.