Spanish curriculum in my school is organized into delightful thematic units and each grade (6th, 7th, and 8th) covers four units per year. These units are full of cultural elements, exciting vocabulary, authentic readings, games, collaborative activities, and, of course, some grammatical concepts.
As world language teachers, we assess students on three modes of communication: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. Writing most often falls under either the presentational (a descriptive essay) or interpersonal (creating or responding to a letter) category.
Writing in a different language can feel uncomfortable, intimidating, and confusing—all those accents, punctuation marks, strange spelling, and funny-looking letters! In Spanish, for example, upside-down question and exclamation marks appear at the beginning of sentences, neither months nor days of the week are capitalized, and certain consonants have diacritics (e.g., ñ or ć). Teachers must remember that their students do not know these concepts, and that they must teach them diligently and patiently.
To help my students become better writers in the language we are learning, I ask them to write in simple, yet complete, sentences from the very beginning. Asking students to write in complete sentences sets expectations during their first year in class that help them become prolific writers in subsequent years. For example, if I ask students to describe a picture of a puppy in Spanish, I tell them that they may not use isolated words such as "dog," "black," "pretty," "small," or "house." I reiterate to students that they should use complete sentences (e.g., There is a dog. The dog is black. The dog is inside the house).
In addition to requiring complete sentences in writing, I set expectations regarding the volume of writing students need to produce. I start small in 6th grade (at least five sentences, then at least two paragraphs, then three, and so forth), and end up assigning at least one full page, often more. With each writing assignment, I remind students to write in complete sentences and to write productively. I like to ask students to respond to a prompt, such as a picture, a situation, a radio announcement, or a video. Those essays are always fun to grade because students get really creative.
For example, for our "Spectacular Madrid" thematic unit, I asked students to create a writing piece as part of their final assessment. I wanted to see if they could write cohesively about this unit's topic. In other words, could they use the grammar, vocabulary, and cultural concepts of this unit in a writing piece? There were no rigid parameters for this assignment. Students could assume the role of a travel guide, an agent, a lost tourist, or a demanding celebrity. Moreover, students could arrange the writing task any way they wanted--they could write a letter to their families from Madrid, a promotional essay about Madrid, a marketing campaign, a response to a client seeking information about an upcoming trip, a book chapter, or a written dialogue between two or more people in Madrid about the city.
Assignment variety is key when learning to write in a new language. During our time together, my middle school Spanish students wrote book and movie critiques, formal and informal e-mails, letters to pen pal families in Chile and the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, requests for competitive scholarships, captions for memes, comic strips, historical vignettes, interactive picture books, restaurant reviews, and public service announcements. They enjoy it tremendously and I always have incredible samples of work to exhibit as a result.
Producing a good piece of writing in a target language is challenging; teachers need to acknowledge these difficulties and teach writing with diligence, patience, and understanding. Writing in complete sentences, steadily increasing volume expectations, and ensuring variety in writing assignments are my three go-to strategies to mold my students into creative and prolific writers.
