 As teaching writing, I've always kind of tried to be concerned about the way that teachers or students approach writing. So I called this report. It's my own acronym that is ELT. So I thought I would give it an acronym. So I'll just go through it too and try to address a few things relating to writing. My notes are all over the place so just one second while I try to tidy myself here a bit. So the way I see it when we are as writers, students face four major problems. And part of these problems, they're not necessarily exclusive to language learners. We come across them all the time, increasingly. I know myself because I'm a student and going through my own learning and stuff like that. Getting feedback from teachers has always been an interesting experience. But there are four big problems I see. Three of them are linked together to kind of create a big monster problem, I suppose. And then there's one kind of, I suppose, a new issue that's kind of come up. And I should be careful because I don't really like using the word problem with writing. I think it's very pessimistic and I think we need to be a lot more optimistic in the language that we use. And I'll get into that in a little bit as I go through my problems. So writing isn't exclusively about essays and stuff like that. Different tasks require different kind of skills, different ways of interpreting the idea. Something as simple as a text message has different requirements. So for a text message, it's a specific recipient, a specific language, a specific tone. If anyone has ever read my text messages, as I also know, sometimes I need proof reading. And there's also a... It's predictive texting. I'm a nightmare. I'm terrible. I'm like fat thongs and all sorts of problems like that. And also there's the time element as well. For example, this text message here may or may not require an urgent reply. Likewise, there's an IELTS question. You can't really see it, but whatever. Anyway, it has a particular tone, it has a particular structure. A language is very important, but also there's an unknown recipient and the time is very important in this case here. It's 40 minutes and obviously we pull in other factors. Another problem is that I see what I call the red pen of death and I threaten my students with all the time when they give me homework I'm going to get the red pen and I'm going to destroy your page. And they go, no, but I don't because I feel it's counterproductive. But just by calling them corrections, we're automatically implying that there's fault. And I mean, if anyone's ever written anything themselves, I mean, nobody writes anything perfect. I don't think there's anything such a thing as a perfect piece of writing. But by implying this error, if we're expecting them to always make mistakes, how can they kind of develop the idea that they can do it right? So they're relying on us to fix what they've done. And so they rely on us to learn for them and to always be the right answer. But we always make mistakes as well in our own writing. The next thing as well is something called foreign language anxiety, which is a big thing, which is you were discussing anxiety. The exact same problems connected with communicating in a second language, or maybe not to such an extreme extent, but definitely it's something you come across a lot. And we definitely notice it with writing as we ask students to write something. We see anxiety, people get nervous, they get shifty, they don't want to do it, they think it's wrong. All these things are building up inside of them. And anxiety kind of creates this apprehension, and it unsettles us. We expect this kind of worldview of our own kind of what should be perfect. But it's writing, and if anyone's ever written anything for college or for money, how many times do you rewrite something? How many times do you look at it and go ugh? And error correctionist ties in with error correction. This increases this anxiety as they submit something, and how many times do you get students to write something and they submit it. And they're like, automatically, what did I do wrong? I was like, whoa, just chill out a second. Let's have a look. And the second one is the increasing reliance of technology and AI. Now you mentioned phones in the classroom, and those are a couple of people on the program going to talk about tech. I'm talking about things like Google Translate, which I burn, just in the classroom because I need it when I go on holidays. But also, Grammarly. I do writing assignments, students have to write tests, and they put up in the corner, can I use Grammarly? I'm going to get one of those teachers to say no, Grammarly, and just say it myself. There are other things, even something as simple as spell check on MS Word. Well, MS Word didn't show the red line under it, because it spelled correctly. It's what we call a typo. And I think what this is doing to us is students are losing, they're losing trust in themselves, and they're relying on the technology to provide the right answer. They're actually called to do a task in an exam where they have to write an essay or something like that. They're not used to actually having the device with them. So it's problematic in that. And also, even if they're writing, my guys have to write research essays and stuff like that. And even then, they rely on tools to what they feel is give them the right answer, I suppose, but they're not really using them the right way, or they're over-relying on them, I suppose. But the most important thing is they're not really learning how to write without the tools. And, OK. So as teachers, we need to kind of equip students of all backgrounds to, you can read it there while I find my way around this thing. We take the equip students of all backgrounds with the tools to become confident and competent writers of English. And confident, I think, is important in that you give them a task to write and they can approach it, not worrying about tripping up and stuff like that. Competent means that they can do it successfully, I suppose. And there are different standards. Is it a text message? Is it an IELTS essay? Is it a 1500-word research essay or whatever? OK. The other thing is teachers and students as well rely on feedback. There are numerous benefits to feedback, but it's limited, purely because our time is limited in the classroom. And also, you know, a couple of other problems. It's elastic in that it's stretchable. Sometimes something is fit, sometimes it doesn't fit. Sometimes we give too much, sometimes we don't give enough. Another issue is it's non-transferable, so feedback doesn't really work among, like if you all did a writing task for me, I couldn't give you group feedback, probably wouldn't be suitable. It would be best to go around to each individual person and talk to them. And of course, what that means is we run out of time because it takes five minutes to deal with yourself and 25 minutes to deal with yourself. And another person doesn't even listen, not digging into any, you know, memories there. But yeah, there's the other thing as well, and that kind of touches on to something there. In terms of students' attitudes toward feedback, and I know when I was doing a master's dissertation and I thought I wrote the most beautiful rolling prose describing something ever, and the supervisor sent it in for feedback and the supervisor highlighted the whole paragraph and he said, delete this, it's nonsense. He took me about three days to delete it. I was like, no, I refuse to delete it, it's my, but in the long run I kept, yeah, he's probably right. This is the professional. I'll take his words for it and maybe try to understand it later on. So it is, but this as well, and I come across this with language students who are just kind of like, well, you know, you have to feedback and maybe they don't listen or something like that. So I've come up with this thing called self-feedback. And this raised a few eyebrows when I mentioned it to my colleagues the other day. I think they made it up, but I think it's supposed to describe what I'm talking about here. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to talk about a means of encouraging autonomy in the classroom for learners. It's a method or strategy for learners. It's based on my own experiences as a writer, be it academically or creative writing or for money. I didn't get paid a lot. And the odd tweet, which I'm known to do. But it's about equipping learners to be autonomous and to have a little bit of faith in themselves and a little bit of trust in themselves. And these little steps are just designed, something that I've been teaching for a long time, I feel. And over the past 12 months I've been trying to be put into a more instructable kind of way rather than just kind of trolling suggestions at them. And this is what I came up with. And the acronym or, do you want to guess what they are? Pardon? Relection. Re-disk. No, I'm not even ready to be picked up a pen yet. Evaluate. P. Probe. O is organized, which you could probably say is to plan it. First draft. And test. All right. So what I should say is primarily I work with this when people have already submitted something. They've worked on a first draft. But it is possible that you could actually, you could look at it from the start as well. Most of the time this works is if they have a chance to work at it from a second draft. It definitely works then. But the steps are still the same thing. So just going to do it bit by bit. Read and evaluate. Very simple thing. What's the task or the question that be surprised how many people don't actually read and understand the question? Or what's the task? And this doesn't, like when you read something it also means to think about it. Possibilities. And what can I do about it? Then read, what have you written? It's very straightforward when people write something. I'm sure we've all experienced situations where people write something and then they give it to you. And it's very clean. Suspiciously clean. Where did you, do you have previous workings somewhere? Or are you a genius that doesn't make mistakes when you write? I haven't met one yet. And this is the question of reading back over it and seeing what you've written. And this falls in to, do you understand it? Not just the question, but what you've written because we come across people, especially in the EAP end of things when people might be writing about something with biological sciences or something like that. They've written something and they don't understand it. If you don't understand it, how can anyone else really understand it? So this is just kind of the first step. The next one is to evaluate. And I'm big on this, about getting people to look at what have you done well. So many people, as I said, they look and say, what did you do wrong? What have you done wrong? I'm like, no, hang on a minute. You've written 500 words. Let's look at the good things. What have you done well? Is it structural? Your spellings? Start at the top and try to focus on the positives here. Invariably, they do do things well. But because we have the red pen, I use purple to try to be, you know, but it's still the same. They still see, you know, a tattoos destroys... Apologies, anyone tattoos. But you know what I mean? It's a graffiti, you know, something or another that is illegible half the time if you may have worked something. And then, of course, what can be improved? Okay. All right. Next thing, moving on. Oops. It's like encouraging writers to understand what is actually wrong, okay? Or what is right? What can be done to improve it? All right. Probe is going through it, looking at it, asking questions about what do you want to say? Am I using the correct grammar? Am I using the correct vocabulary? And then questioning your decisions, if I use this tense, why did I use this word? Is there another way that I could phrase this? Okay. Am I happy with everything I've done? And is this the correct way to do this? This is where editing could come in, all right, about, you know, correcting stuff, self-correcting. But as we've already seen, we've read through what we understand. How can we change these things, all right? Organizing, this is if it's a larger text, smaller text that may be a little bit easier or quicker to do, but we're definitely with larger pieces of work. What needs to be done? Prioritize by size and significance. What's the most important thing? Is it big? Is it small? And then allocate your time. How much time do you need to do something? And then finally, you know, set a schedule. When are you going to do it? Finally, some advice that I always give. You need to know your strengths and your weaknesses. With the knowledge you know. And also, communication, your primary objective is always to be understood, regardless of what you write or what you write. If you can't be understood, you're failing. Well, sorry, shouldn't use that word. I'm trying to be positive here. But you're not getting the job done, so to speak. Okay? And then finally, re-writing tests. This is the process of re-writing and re-drafting, fixing stuff. This is the only stage, arguably, where you pick up a pen or go back to your career. Or maybe you might disagree, how you probe through it and stuff like that. You might need a pen. But the process of re-writing, looking at what you know and what you must do, playing with what you've written, and then finally having a little bit of trust with yourself. All right? And the last finish up. And the test is basically about submitting it or giving it in. I'm trying to subscribe to this mantra a little bit too much, fail again, fail better. You're going to make mistakes. It's not going to be perfect. Hopefully it's not your, you know, your IELTS exam and you need a 7 and you get a 6.5 because of small grammar mistakes. But, you know, you're going to... We have to stop encouraging students to believe that writing has to be perfect every time. It's going to improve with time. And I'm sure we've all experienced that ourselves. So the purpose of report is to empower, encourage writers to be confident, to equip writers beyond the language learning classroom. And this, I think, is important because I work in EAP. A lot of the guys, they come to us, they do their course, and then they move on. And if they haven't really learned anything, then it's obviously problematic. To prepare writers to be more like writers, you don't just write something and let it... I do, it's called Twitter. And, of course, give writers the support to notice their own progress as none of this writing business is actually easy.