There is this homework group of secondary school pupils who are all ambitious yet underachieve due to English being their second language. When they speak, the speak with a Glaswegian accent. They are as giggly or boisterous as any kid their age. They have friends, from their country, form here, and generally get on well, as well as you can if you are an asylum seeker. Their problem is spelling and writing, and because they know they aren't as good as others, they have started hating anything that involves taking a pen in their hands and putting words onto paper. Fear of making mistakes, fear of looking daft, fear of not being as good as their friends.

The adults who Volunteer ESOL Tutors support often have just the same difficulty with the written word. Usually, after some time in the country, people pick up some survival English to speak, they get by. More difficult is the writing, particularly for those who due to war, unrest, culture or personal circumstances did not receive the same level of formal education, or simply read and write a different script. The reluctance to write, to express oneself on paper, to tackle any task that involves writing, is very much the same.

The only way to tackle this is to bring the fun back into writing and reading, and in that, volunteer tutors do a very similar job to primary school teachers, literacies workers and anyone involved in basic skills. So where is the fun in writing? It lies in play, in creating situations where there is no assessment, no competition, just an open, free and secure space to give it a go.

Creative writing is a fabulous tool with that and of course we're not aiming at turning writing shunners into published authors. Not that it doesn't or shouldn't happen, but the objective is to make writing and reading enjoyable and take the fear out of people. Gerry Stewart, a writer and creative writing tutor, gave the volunteer tutors some food for though on how to achieve this:

1. Get people to write by using writing practice. Give a simple topic which has some relevance to people (how about letting them pick the topic?) and ask people to write for five minutes, without stopping. Three rules apply: don't stop, don't worry, have fun. For this writing practice it's important to make absolutely clear that there's no right and no wrong, that most of what will come out will be rubbish but that's fine, that rather than stopping, you should write the same word again and again until something else comes to mind. The benefits for the English learners are that for once, they can use their own vocabulary, rather than being fed new things, that they simply have to put into practice what they know. Mistakes don't matter at this stage, but there may be a reflection phase to ask learners if they wanted to write something and couldn't think of the term. It can then be discussed, but the actual writing practice has to happen without a dictionary.

After the writing practice, ask for volunteers to read something out. Don't coerce anyone into doing this. Pick something in the piece to praise (very important). Praise a lot. This is at the same time listening comprehension for everyone else and they may learn new words. Get the class to ask the writer questions. Ask questions yourself. Let the writer ask questions. Praise again. Build confidence. Eventually, everyone should be confident enough to read something in class. The best ideas that came out of such a writing practice could be used to develop into a piece of writing.

2. Give a first sentence, ask learners to finish it. You may want to give a structure to this:
In the past ...           Now ...
In my country....      In Scotland ....

3. Play with rhyme. It's fun, helps with phonetics and pronunciation. Give a simple word and find rhyming words, the put them together into a simple poem (cat - hat - bat - sat - mat - shat (oops)

4. Introduce metaphors and similes: as warm as ...

5. use senses: sight, smell, hear, touch: What did it smell like, what did it feel like, what did it sound like (sense of sight comes to us quicker than the others)

6. Think of one of your hobbies, then list 10 nouns to do with it. Next: think of another hobby of yours, and list 10 verbs to do with it. Then: make up sentences using one noun and one verb from each list. This helps make new connections between nouns and verbs, as well as build up vocabulary. It helps with thinking a bit more about language and not taking set phrases and word connections for granted. It also enables creativity with limited resources, and in a structured fashion. With these sentences, a poem could be made.

I later added some ideas taken from production oriented language teaching to this. Production oriented means that it's about active and intentional activities using language. In natural contexts, language is always oriented towards a goal, in order to achieve something. It is therefore an action. Any meaningful language teaching has to be authentic, i.e. imitate such actions, or create real actions. It also has to make the learner use the language, rather than just listen or read. There are three simple forms of incorporating this into the classroom:

1. rewrite/transform a text into a new form/genre (i.e. transform a poem into a story, an article into an interview, a report into a fairytale, make a modern version of a fairytale, i.e. set little red riding hood in Royston)

2. Continue a text: write an end to a story, write a second stanza to a poem, write something about a minor character of a story and what happens to him, write about what a character thinks at one point ...

3. React or counteract to something: write a letter to the editor about an article. Make a survey about some issue expressed in an article. Express a different opinion ...

4. Other fun activities: leave gaps in a text and ask learners to fill in something suitable or even something strange and funny. You can leave out a word in a poem, all nouns or verbs in a prose text, titles, adjectives.  It's great fun to compare what students come up with with the original, and it'll give learners a better understanding for why a writer chose the words she did.

5. Write a text where all words start with the same letter, or an alphabet text, or where the next word starts with the last letter of the previous word.

6. Start a story. Each learner adds one sentence to it in turns (either knowing all previous sentences, or only knowing the last sentence)

7. Use word grids: pick a known story, such as a fairytale. Ask for words that relate to the tale (for little red riding hood: wolf, forest, grandmother, cake, wine, walk eat, ears, mouth, flowers, path, watch...) then reconstruct the story with the whole class, using these words and trying to link them. This is a good step by step approach to moving from individal words to sequencing and story writing.

8. Give learners a few words and ask them to make up sentences with it.

9. Do a thought shower on a relevant topic, such as winter. Collect all words on the board, in three categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives. Then ask learners to write a text or poems using some or all of these words.

10. Keep a diary or blog. A blog can be very empowering because it's theoretically open to anyone, and gives total control to the writer. It can be edited. It's easy and also gives IT skills to learners. Still, confidence needs to be built up before starting to blog - I remember the initial dread of posting to my blog simply because I didn't know what was ok, what wasn't, what I wanted and what I didn't want to share. I still don't know, but at least I'm not too bothered about it, but many people are, because they imaging thousands reading their stuff (which of course is unlikely, unless to market your blog considerably). Especially learners with low literacy skills simple need to build up their confidence and realise the vast knowledge they have that they can share. It's a long road but worth travelling!

Good blogging sites for those interested (I'm partially writing this up for the workshop attenders, those who couldn't make it or had to leave early): www.blogger.com, www.civiblog.org. There are more, they should be free of charge and easy to maintain.

Whatever you do, keep it real and relevant all the time, and appreciate every effort, praise the differences in ideas, and make it unmistakeably clear that every input is as valid as the next. Some people will always feel they're not as good as others, so praise such people to bits whenever they come up with something unusual or simply good. You simply cannot try to increase confidence enough because what holds all of us back most of the time is simply lack of confidence in doing something. Above all, keep it light and fun! 

(Any additions, ideas or samples of our writing practice effort, please leave in the comments section. It's easy, you do need to register but that won't hurt and won't have any dire consequences - it's only necessary in order to protect my blog from indecent spammers. C'mon, give it a go!)