Shared Writing
Effective teaching emphasizes on teaching at the point of writing, which focuses on demonstrating and exploring the decisions writers make as the writing happens. It is necessary for teachers to guide the students through the whole process by modelling the way a writer thinks through shared writing session. By so doing, the writing process will become familiar and fully understood by all students.
Shared writing refers to whole-class composition. It is a strategy that slows down the writing process and demonstrates and models for learners the way a writer needs to think. Because writing is a private and personal act, it is challenging to find a teaching strategy that intervenes at the point of writing, but shared writing does just this. It makes the invisible processes used by good writers visible to the students.
As the students become involved, allow them to make suggestions—consider them and make decisions about which ones to adopt. Ask them to draft the writing orally by rehearsing sentences and inviting the others to improve the sentences before writing them down. Experiment with different sentence structures and different connectives. Carry on building up the writing, demonstrating the drafting process as we go by rereading each section as we progress. Ask the students whether the draft can be improved—with a more appropriate word, with added descriptive details, with reorganised word order, with the addition of direct speech and so on.
