5 Summary

You can help your students to move from copying and memorising texts to writing their own answers and compositions. You can help them to compose their own answers to comprehension questions by:

• giving them time to think about their answers
• encouraging them to work in groups to discuss and compose their responses
• providing models and writing frames that they can adapt according to their abilities and confidence.

They will make more mistakes as they write using their own words, but this is part of the learning process. You can use different strategies to manage the written work of your students and use their mistakes as opportunities to learn.

Over time and with practice, your students will develop the confidence and skills they need to write texts in English independently.

If you would like to develop your own writing skills in English, see Resource 4. If you are interested in reading more about teaching writing, see the additional resources section.

Other Secondary English teacher development units on this topic are:

• Helping students to develop their writing skills: You can learn more about helping students to write longer texts in this unit, and how to help them to develop their writing skills.
• Supporting language learning through formative assessment: You can learn about giving feedback on and assessing written work in this unit.