Writing is perhaps the hardest skill for ESL students to learn, and ESL writing activities therefore must be carefully designed if they are to be effective at improving students' writing skills. Perhaps the most important thing to remember when coming up with ESL writing activities is that writing should not always be viewed as a routine and boring process. Many teachers use writing as a form of punishment, making students who misbehave write dozens of sentences, for example. Although this may help reduce the bad behavior in the class, it has the undesirable side effect of affecting how students view writing. When students receive a writing assignment as part of the class, then, they will tend to associate it with punishment.

A better approach for ESL teachers is to treat writing as the art form that it is. Ever since the dawn of the written word, literary works have been a key mode of expression for humans around the world. Treating writing as an art form that is fun-even inspiring-can motivate students to take more interest in writing and devote more energy to perfecting their writing skills. To accomplish this, teachers may want to expose their students to interesting literary works rather than relying solely on ESL texts, many of which tend to be watered down and relatively boring.

When assigning writing activities in class, teachers can occasionally introduce activities that are fun, lighthearted, even silly. For example, one useful ESL writing activity is to have students collaborate to write each other's stories. Each student begins a story by writing a single sentence, then passes the paper to the student on his or her right, who writes one more sentence, and so on, until the paper has gone all the way around the classroom. At the end, the student can read sentences written by all students, correcting the errors and rewriting the entire essay. These are fun ESL writing exercises that involve many language learning skills, including reading, writing, and spelling. In addition, these ESL writing exercises can help expand students' knowledge of vocabulary words, grammar points, and punctuation rules, as they will have to read, assess, and understand the sentences written by their classmates.

Language is supposed to be an interactive tool, after all, so these kinds of writing activities give students a chance to hone their skills and, most importantly, have fun while putting pen to paper. To make this activity even more fun, the teacher can write a "starter sentence", and copy this and pass it out to each of the students. This way, all of the students will begin the story in the same way, and they will inevitably enjoy watching this single story evolve in several different directions.

In short, writing does not need to be viewed as a boring necessity or a means of punishment; rather, it can be something that the children will actually look forward to!

ESL writing assignments http://www.stickyball.net/writing.html don't have to be a bore!

For some fun ideas and useful worksheets that you can print and use in your own classes, check out these > > ESL writing exercises