Authenticity in Writing Prompts

Of course the more pertinent a prompt is to the student, the better his/her writing will be, and I'm in total agreement of having authenticity in writing. However, we have to teach all modes of writing and sometimes prompts can be boring and mind blocking to students.

I'm a teacher in desperate need in getting my ELL students to read and write. Many ELL students have a very, very hard time when it comes to writing. Mention writing or give them a prompt, and they're completely blocked. The only time they're interested in writing is when given a prompt about their life, country, home, friends, family, etc. Yes, this is pertinent to them, and we do write about all these subjects. But, academically, we do have to write about other things. In addition, some of these students' developed level of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other grammatical conventions are lacking.

What does a teacher do? In my class, I start very slow. I start with descriptive writing using pictures, letters to a friend and small paragraphs which students try to expand on and write a composition. For some students, this is a very difficult task due to their lack of vocabulary and second language acquisition.

Therefore, during the first semester, I use the whole language approach to reading and writing. This has seem to help most students in doing creative writing, but I can't seem to get them out of that mode of writing once they've started.