Teaching Expository Writing: Genre Practices and Thinking Skills

Teaching Expository Writing offers a practical approach to improving students’ writing through the explicit teaching of writer-reader interaction and thinking processes. Instead of merely describing the features of good expository writing, this book describes teaching methods and provides sample exercises for training students in specific discourse behaviours and thinking strategies. It demonstrates, with examples of O-level-type topics, how these processes can be identified and practised in the classroom. To help teachers prepare writing lessons, there are guidelines for sourcing and adapting instructional material to fit the needs of a class, conducting joint writing with students, and constructing writing exercises. One chapter offers suggestions on how to provide feedback on students’ writing with the aim of nurturing a particular discourse practice or thinking process.