How we teach writing in Poland

Anna Głogowska-Frączek

Introduction

Developing writing skills causes a lot of problems for primary school students. It is shown in the results of primary school leaving exam. The situation is caused mainly by students’ aversion to reading.

Years 1-3

In Poland teachers start to teach writing (years 1-3) from the very simple exercises, such as putting words in the correct order to form a sentence, filling in the gaps in the text or creating simple, short pieces of writing (with teacher’s help). Then students try to write their own texts.

Years 4-6

Students start to learn how to write more sophisticated texts in year 4. Then they practise for 3 years creating various pieces of writing: invitations, advertisements, postcards, instructions, letters and some longer forms: stories, dialogues, fairy tales, legends, descriptions of paintings and landscapes and many more.

In the beginning, the rules of creating each text are presented to the students, Then, the learners have to read and analyze the examples. The next steps are filling in the gaps and putting the events in the chronological order. The students have to create the texts using the list of words given by the teacher. The last step is writing students’ own texts. After the texts are checked by the teacher, students have to correct them.

Types of exercises

Checking students’ texts

When a teacher checks students’ writing, she pays attention to the correct spelling, grammar, a proper form of the text and the content.

That is (more or less) how we teach writing skills in Poland.