Technology Departmental Meeting 20/05/21

This is an example of peer teaching. The idea is to go beyond the usual support we give students for a writing task, i.e. paragraph templates, sentence starters and examples.  Back in the 1960s Halliday was responsible for us adopting the non-grammar position because native speakers of English intuitively know the structure of the language. Many of our students do not understand the difference between the spoken and the written form of English. Many of our students must get despondent when their attempts to write a fluent paragraph fail. The point of the posters and the shared writing task is to make fluency and content issues explicit.  The use of the functional grammar approach here is a way to reduce to a minimum the number of features students must focus on in order to improve their writing. No one wants to overload teachers with yet more learning initiatives but it is hoped that teachers can help students with these basic grammar features: noun groups, opinion statements or modals, and verb groups. This, combined with shared writing tasks and the white board presentations, encourages students to take risks. The instant feedback on the white board also works wonders. I'm happy to work with class on a specific writing task. All I need is a student exemplar of the finished product. I'm happy to take the written model and adapt it into a few literacy tasks and then to work with a class on a shared writing task and presentation. Bish bash bosh but never bosh bash bish. Shared Writing Task and Group Presentations