Write and Discuss – An Essential Literacy Activity for Communicative Language Teaching

I have used Write and Discuss ever since I began teaching with CCLT strategies, but it was my experience with it at Comprehensible Cascadia last week in Portland that finally brought it all together for me. This is an ESSENTIAL strategy for classes centered on providing engaging CI, as it makes concrete the beautiful aural experience that students have just had with the language. If the Create phase of the lesson is playing a jazz ensemble piece with your students (structured with some improv), the Write and Discuss is putting that composition on sheet music so you can enjoy those moments and that exciting language again and again.

Why should you do it? To show students the written form of the language they’re able to understand aurally, and introduce how to be a strong writer in the L2 by modeling writing moves that push students towards higher levels of proficiency. Plus, the texts you create can be used for literacy activities and extension in the future!

When do I use Write and Discuss?

Use Write and Discuss after having any sort of language experience with your students, what we might call the Create or “Guided Oral Input” phase of the lesson. These Create experiences could be Card Talk, Calendar Talk, co-creating a story using an OWI or Invisibles, Scripted Stories a la TPRS, Picture Talk, Movie Talk, Special Person Interviews – whatever provides rich, compelling aural input in the L2 to learners. Move from the Create phase to a Review phase (any sort of activity that orally reviews the information learned/discovered/created in the Create phase of your lesson), and then to Write and Discuss.

How do I do it? – Logistics

There are a couple different ways to do this, but they have the same underlying principles. You can 1) write directly up on the whiteboard, 2) write by hand on your doc cam, or 3) use a keyboard (maybe a wireless one!) to type up the information into a word processing document. With any of these formats, you’ll want to save the texts you create somehow because they can become the basis for great literacy work the next day, the next week, or even much later in the year. If you write by hand on the board, take a picture of the completed W+D at the end of class so you have it for later. If you have a hand-written version or a pic of your board, you can type it up, or use Voice Typing in Google Docs to dictate it into a document. (Click “Tools” and then “Voice Typing”! LIFE-CHANGING – make sure you change the document language in the “File” tab as well to ensure maximum awesomeness / self-editing.) Some teachers also assign a student job of typing up what you are hand writing, to save you time and to give a special job to a fast processor.

Once the W+D is in digital form, you can share it with students in a format that allows them to “review” (aka just reread) it whenever they like. I usually create a class Google Slide that has all of the texts we have created as a class over the year, one on each slide, and I share a link to it on our learning management system. Whatever works for you and your students!

How do I do it? – Procedure

1. The first time I do it, I say (in L1 or L2) that we are going to write a summary text about our class conversation/experience. Also, something to the effect of “Please help me, my memory is terrible!” (Not a Teacher Lie for me…)
2. I find it helpful to begin every Write and Discuss by writing a good starter word in the L2 (e.g. “Today…” or “There is…” or “Once upon a time…”), and then saying it expectantly while slowly panning out across the class. This says “hey, this is the first word, keep it going!”
3. Give students a bit of nonverbal encouragement to help finish the sentence, especially at first. Students might be silent for a long while, but then you might get one who says some stuff in the L1. That’s okay – see if giving them an encouraging smile pushes them to try some L2. Or! You’ll get a random string of L2 words from a student. CELEBRATE! This is a chance for students to tentatively try some L2 production in a low-stakes setting. If a student tries to finish your sentence with literally anything, love on them!!
4. …And then take the language they provide and formulate a (probably more correct) sentence. Say the sentence slowly and thoughtfully – this may cause more students to shout out more details that you can use to enhance the sentence. For German at least, this may trigger some fun adjective endings or some subordinated clauses – fantastic! The students are aware of the language you’re using (because it came up in class and they’re able to provide it now), so you’re just reformulating it in a more natural, flowing way. This will serve as good input that will result in good output – in the future!
5. Ride the wave of the details you can elicit to make the sentence fuller until you reach a good stopping point. To use Card Talk as an example, this might be repeating the information you learned about a student until students have filled in all the details. (“Ben plays soccer…oh! On a team. Ben plays soccer on a team…is it a school team?” etc etc) At the beginning, you don’t want to go all Thomas Mann (#DegreeInGermanLit) and have a 3-page sentence, but you can safely integrate all familiar language into a nice-sounding sentence that flows naturally. This is the Discuss part of Write and Discuss – if you just take what students say initially and write it right away, you might get shorter, choppier material like, “Ben plays soccer. He plays soccer on a school team. He likes it a lot.” Why not something more like “Ben plays soccer on a school team, and he likes it a lot.” This conveys the same information, but flows more like the language we would want our students to eventually produce. If you have established all this info with those shorter sentences during the Create phase, students will get to enjoy the natural melody of your language as they polish up what they’ve heard with you. Make a nicely flowing sentence, then write it up! Boom! (You might have an opportunity to show students language/conventions that are hard to hear…very fun/natural time to make comparisons between languages or marvel at the majesty of Umlauts.)
6. After every few sentences, pause to reread the sentences you have already created to the class. More input! And they can appreciate the fruit of their brain labors.
7. Keep going – discuss, and then write! You don’t want to go too long on this, because it can certainly lose its luster after a while. Some teachers choose to set certain limits: they only write for 6 minutes, or they write until one of their board spaces is filled, or they only write until they have like 5-6 solid sentences. Try not to let the energy die as you get some more good input in, and then choose a stopping point and be satisfied with that.
8. After the text is completed, many teachers have their students copy the Write and Discuss into their own class notebooks. Do not have them do this while the text is being created – they will be distracted from the conversation if they are simultaneously attempting to hand copy information in the L2, whose writing conventions may need their undivided attention (especially at first). This copying time can give the teacher a break, too! And a notebook full of Write and Discuss can show families and other school community members all the text that your students are able to read and comprehend – what a lovely PR piece…

What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?

What’s fabulous about Write and Discuss is that you’ve just created a level-appropriate text for students that captures the energy of what class was about that day. It makes concrete what was previously a mostly oral/aural experience.

The first thing I tend to do is reread the text aloud, so students can hear their creation in all its flowing glory. Then, I tell students that they are going to read the text to me, but in the L1. I go along pointing word by word, in the L2 word order, to make sure that students really understand word meanings, and also to illustrate specific characteristics of the written L2. (German word order, y’all…so funky. So fresh!) I stop to clarify any words/constructs that trip up students, marking the text in a different color to support more comprehension, and then reread to allow students to try it more confidently.

I also allow students to notice things about the L2 after they have seen it written. Some recent noticings have been “Oh hey, these two sounds are very similar! Can you re-pronounce them for us?” or “Oh wow, German capitalizes all nouns!” Let students take the lead and you will get lots of neat grammar noticings…without having to shove grammar down their throats. Win!

After this re-establishment of meaning, there are so. many. things (!) that you can do with the text. You can have students illustrate the text, you can give a Quick Quiz, you can dramatize it with a bit of Reader’s Theater – again, it’s a level-appropriate text that students co-created! The sky is the limit!

One thing to keep in mind is that this text you’ve created can serve as a base text that you can enhance during your planning. Maybe it’s the lowest level of an Embedded Reading that you flesh out to build in more transitions or written language conventions. Maybe you have some thematic vocab that your department wants you to target, and you find ways to slip it in to the text. Maybe you rewrite the text from a different perspective, or have students do that to get more input in different forms! (E.g. taking a story written in the third person, and rewriting it from a character’s perspective. With this, you could include more information about how the character is feeling, or what they are thinking!) This text you’ve created with your class can really be the jumping off point for any language or content goals you have for your classes.

Pro Tips!

1. Keep it going! Like I said above, short, choppy sentences don’t sound great. (My early Write and Discusses were guilty of this awkwardness…character descriptions would read like “There was an elf. He was short. He was mean. He was blue. He was 12 years old.” Ugh.) Why not make the L2 flow more naturally with some transition words? In the lower levels, it might just be suggesting words like “and” or “but” to keep the expression of ideas going. (It might literally just be inserting a comma that provokes students to add more life to a sentence.) For higher levels, you might use constructs like “On the one hand… On the other hand…” or “Nonetheless…” Again, don’t get all classic-German-literature with the sentence length, but allow sentences to be more natural, longer, and more connected.
2. Let students drive it! Early on, I tended to just use Write and Discuss to essentially circle information into text form, and I was truly leading the charge on what was written, where, and how. Now, I see it as more of an opportunity for students to try out some L2 and have you be like “AW YEAHHHH” while writing their awesome ideas on the board. Let awkward silence reign – with enough calm slowness in the Create phase, they’ll definitely have language in their heads to play with during the Write phase. (During Cascadia this year, some students – in their first week of German! – were putting the verb at the end in subordinate clauses. German swoooooon!)
3. Use your boards as a scaffold! Chances are, you will have L2 words or images on your board that supported your conversation during the Create phase. Use these during W+D to help remind you and the class what might get included in the summary. You can indicate an image or word when writing stalls out to inspire students, or just erase information that has already been “covered” by the writing.
4. Don’t forget dialogue! I often forget to include dialogue when using Write and Discuss, which is a bummer! Dialogue can be a great place to get reps on stuff in the first and second persons (third person often reigns supreme because we’re always talking about someone or something like that). Make sure to ask students “What did Soandso say?” or “What might Soandso be thinking in this moment?” Or maybe even, “What WOULD Soandso say about this?”
5. Teach some punctuation! While you’re writing, use the L2 words for “comma,” “period,” “quotation marks,” etc. This is easy and natural, and can also help if you are doing a Dictation in the future.
6. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Whatever text you create might be missing some things you talked about as a class, or the sentences may have come out in a less-than-smoothly-flowing order, despite your best efforts. You, as the teacher, can make pedagogical choices about how to enhance and change the text later, so don’t worry about it being ab.so.lute.ly perfect.

What if I want to learn more?

Many people have written glorious posts about Write and Discuss, and posted videos of them doing it with real students – check these out for more info, and to see if something in how they describe helps it “click” even better!

• Mike Peto has an example of doing a Write and Discuss in class here! He also has great posts about what do with W+D after it’s done.
• Annemarie Chase has examples here of doing it at different levels. She loves it because the students are quiet…I feel that feel…
• Brett Chonko has a couple different posts (here, here, and here) that talk about they whys and hows, and improvements he has made to his W+D systems.
• Here’s a video of Tina Hargaden moving from Small Talk, to Card Talk, to Write and Discuss.

What do you think? Do you feel ready to use Write and Discuss? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!