How to Teach Writing Skills to ESL Students

Teaching writing is often about teaching grammar.  If grammar comes up anywhere in EFL, it is in the writing classroom.  Most EFL students will have some writing skills when you get them and they will often have an idea that their writing is quite good. Unfortunately, it will very often be quite poor.

In fact, they often will have quite poor writing skills even at the sentence level.  Therefore, you will need to take them back to sentence level and begin to teach them very basic structure and how to write simply.  Run-on and fragmented sentences will be very common until you correct those errors.


The more basic you get with your writing students, the better.  Once a good foundation is built, you can move on to basic paragraph writing and on to essays.  These skills take time to develop though and you will find that most textbooks will move your students forward too quickly.

You may find resistance from your students when you take them back to basics.  This can be done without demoralizing them or making them feel their skills are poor.  Take the approach that We can make the good skills you already have even better by polishing up some good basic skills.