The use of group work in teaching writing

Writing is a skill that can help us in many areas of our life. It helps us observe more of the world, understand people better, and communicate more clearly. Writing is also used to succeed in school and on the job. Furthermore, writing, as one of four skills, lends itself to integration with other activities in the classroom, for example reading and speaking activities from which a piece of writing involves. For teachers, writing is a means to examine students' performance. And writing is needed for our social and personal lives, for instance writing letters, messages, notes, and keeping records. Unfortunately, writing is not just a 'natural' extension of learning to speak a language. It means if we are able to speak a language, it does not mean that we are naturally able to write that language too. We learned to speak our first language at home without systematic instruction, whereas most of us had to be taught in school how to write that same language. Learning and teaching writing in the foreign language is considered a tiring job for both students and teachers. Students are tired to do the writing assignments in which they make a lot of mistakes. Teachers are tired of controlling the writing of their students so they do not practise making errors and of training them to communicate effectively in English Time has changed and so has the focus in the classroom. Instead of having teacher as the central attention in the classroom, nowadays, the focus shifts from the teacher to the students. Students are given more responsibility for their own learning. Letting students work in groups motivates them as group work provides an affective climate where students feel less shy and as a result, they participate more freely. Group work make them responsible for their own learning and the learning of others. Students help correct each other's mistakes and help out with a needed work. For teachers, group work enables them to have more time that can be devoted to help weak students. Finally, this thesis is still far from perfect. However, it is worth trying to use group work in teaching writing. Hopefully, it will help both writing students become better writers since they are teachers-to-be and writing teachers have less burden