Developing Writing Skills at Secondary School

Nowadays the role of writing skills has changed significantly. The author of the present paper who has been working as an English language teacher for ten years states that writing as a skill has become less popular not only in a foreign language, but also in a native language. As a result, it often affects the quality of written texts (reduces the effectiveness of written works) at school, especially at secondary school.

Students who are going to finish secondary school must be able to do some written tasks, but the quality of this work is often not enough evaluated.
One of the written tasks in the exam for 12th formers is writing an essay. Essay writing seems to be especially difficult for school students. Therefore, the author of the diploma paper decided to study the problems and difficulties of writing essays.
Moreover, writing skills are needed not only at school, but also in real life to be able to continue one’s academic studies and at work.

Nowadays information technologies occupy a large place in teenagers’ life as they spend a lot of time communicating over the Internet and writing short mobile phone messages. As a result, young people have often problems with the organisation of written texts, the range of vocabulary and grammar. The quality of their written work is becoming low, and their motivation and interest in the development of their writing skills is deteriorating as well.

The teacher’s task is to help students improve their writing skills, and it is not only students’ knowledge of grammar, organisation, vocabulary and context, but also cooperation between a student and the teacher, which is of great importance to prepare students for successful writing.

The goal of research is to develop writing skills at secondary school by use of different approaches focused on writing essays.…