Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching.

In my sixth podcast I must deal with the writing chapter of the book and I have summarized this information:

1. Writing is the process or result of reading spoken language using a system of visual marks on a surface.

2. The order in which the four skills are presented is still a controversial matter and, depending on the methodology used, one or other of the skills is given priority. Although it’s obvious that languages are spoken before they are written, we should try to make our students learn these skills in a diachronic way and without interfere with the learning process of their own language. Only when the skills have been acquired in L1 can we begin the task with L2. Also, any practice in writing should be based on a previous oral activity. In order to develop complete communicative competence, receptive and productive skills should not be dealt with in separate blocks, they should be promoted in a globally way and we must integrate writing with the other skills:

3. With reading because is a source of input and model for written language.
4. With speaking because when we write we pronounce the sentences internally.

5. With listening because it’s better first to hear the word before writing it down. Besides, there are specific sub-skills involved in writing a text, which are: Graphic or visual skills (which includes abilities like spelling, punctuation and layout), grammatical skills, expressive or stylistic, rhetorical and organisational skills.

6. There are three types of writing:

7. Personal writing: Like shopping lists, reminders or diaries. These texts are normally written to be read for ourselves and to entertain us or helping us with something.
8. Personal and public writing: Like summaries, essays or stories. They can be written for personal satisfaction or shared with a third person. The purpose could be to help ourselves to solve a problem or to communicate with other people.
9. Public or institutional writing: Like curriculums, emails or articles. This type of text has an specific purpose and it depends on the text, the audience or the context.

In my opinion, a blog is personal and public at the same time as you can choose if you want to show it or not. Despite this, they are normally written in order to express our thoughts or knowledge to the rest of the world. We can make a blog with tutorials, films reviews, storytelling, etc.

1. There are four phases for the teaching of writing and the difference between each of them lies in the level of autonomy and free participation of the learner when undertaking each task. The four phases are:
2. Familiarisation with written texts: Writing words and simple phrases, doing crosswords, copying or tracing, etc before pupils can produce their first written sentences.
3. Controlled Writing: The teacher offers guidelines to be followed by the students in order to reduce the chances of failure. It usually consists of repetitive and mechanical exercises whose function is to let learners gain confidence before writing a full text.
4. Guided Writing: In this case students have more freedom than in the previous phase. Although the ideas or content may be provided by others, the pupil has to decide how to express them.

5. Free Writing: The students can express themselves writing about a particular topic although they are subject to a series of rules imposed by the teacher or the textbook.

6. For the fifth question I have made a table that you can find in my tumblr blog.

7. When I was at school my writing activities were usually about answering some questions related to a certain text or, sometimes, I did dictation. I produced written texts once or twice and they were about describing my best friend or my Christmas holidays, so I didn’t practice a more creative writing. The teacher always used the same methodology, she just corrected the exercises and didn’t help us with some feedback or suggesting ways to improve, we only received a number mark.