One way to prepare homework writing tasks

Inexperienced teachers (and sometimes experienced ones) sometimes encounter that situation where a piece of written work has been set for classwork or homework  — free writing/composition-style — and students turn in very inaccurate work, heavily influenced by the first language. Or they don't get the work done at all. Or they copy it. Or they use AI. 

If the work is really inaccurate, you then have to decide how much you are going to correct. If you correct everything it takes ages and students are discouraged by the number of corrections. A sensible solution is to do selective correction of key errors which affect meaning. Or you can just hand the work back and admit that you made a mistake setting a task that was too hard. Maybe show them a model version.

My approach to this sort of issue would be to ensure that the written homework was set up in order to guarantee success. Much depends on the class here. With high-achievers you could let them loose with relatively little pre-writing preparation, but even with these high flyers it makes sense to ensure that the written work flows naturally from oral and aural work done previously. The writing then becomes an extension and reinforcement of prior practice. Typically, you might work orally and aurally on a text or picture sequence, generating lots of repetitions and recycling, so that when the students come to write for themselves they have already rehearsed the material a good deal. All good.

With weaker, more mixed attainment classes, I was happy to do a good deal more spoon feeding prior to their write-up.

Here is what I often did. Let's say we had a topic like "My city." The teaching sequence would go as follows:

Ask questions about their town/city. Lots of easy stuff such as:

• Is there a cinema? One, two, theree?
• Are there many hotels?
• Is there a railways staion?
• How many museums are there?
• What types of shops are there? (Elicit lots of vocab here.)
• What types of restaurant?

etc etc

As students answer with hands up (or not) — I used hands up — I would write up partial answers on the board. This meant incomplete sentences that students could either complete in the moment, or later during homework. (They were clearly motivated to do it in the moment, since they might forget later. This ensured the students were concentrating hard, writing a good deal and reherasing chunked language in working memory.) You have to go at just the right pace to give them time to fill gaps.

The number of gaps I left on the board depended on the class. The faster the class, the more gaps and the less time I would give the class to fill them. 

After around 20-25 minutes of this focused question-answer and careful lstening + writing, the pupils had a set of notes, either nearly complete or just partially complete. I would tell them to write up their notes as a composition at home. I would also tell them that it was fine to stick to the information we had covered in class, but that if they could add further information of their own, this would be great too. This ensured that the faster students could stretch themselves and try to impress.

The result would be neatly written up, completed work, largely accurate — though not entirely because there might be some inaccurate copying from the board or faulty gap-filling.

Wht did I like this pattern of work?

1. There was lots of listening to target language.
2. Students were hearing, seeing and writing lots of known vocabulary in chunked form, plus some language they may have forgotten.
3. New language could crop up during the question-answer.
4. They were engaging in multi-skill work — listening, reading, speaking and writing, with each skill reinforcing the others.
5. They were building their phonics skill as they constantly saw speokn language written up in front of them.
6. They ended up with a piece of accurate writing which they could later use for revision and preparation for speking tests.
7. They had a sense of success, even though the work was highly scaffolded — I would say suitably scaffolded for each class and student.
8. The class was fully focused, knowing that every minute well spent in class meant less work at home. With some classes this is a key objective: keeping them on task. Remember, they knew hey had to focus to make the homework easier and feasible.
9. Students were much less likely to avoid the homework.
10. Selfishly, this sort of lesson needs little preparation, but every pupils was invved, even if they were prmarily listening and writing. So you could call this a high surrender value lesson.
11. Students are much less likely to resort to AI when written homework is set up in this way.

Any downsides?

Well, you might argue that I had removed any creativity from the task. But I would answer by saying there was still an opportunity for some students to stretch themselves further and that leaving open more space for creativity would have resulted in much more inaccurate guesswork and negative language transfer from English. Remember too that with fast classes, there would be even more input language, a quicker pace and bigger gaps for them to fill.

For me a key element with those more middling classes was ensuring that they knew they were there to work, that I expected a lot from them and would not tolerate lack of effort. Getting the level right is so important for all classes, and they have to experience success. We know how important that sense of self-efficacy or competence is in terms of generating motivation. I am happy to say that I very rarely if ever ended up with unmotivated classes.