Help students understand that writing is a process. Ask students to write down and share their own writing routines. Discuss various steps of the writing process, such as pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing. Write examples on the board for each step to help students visualize the strategies and understand how using them can improve their writing.
Assign in-class brainstorming activities, such as listing, which is quickly listing everything the writer knows about a topic; clustering, or writing the topic in a center circle and supporting ideas in surrounding circles; and free writing, or writing quickly about the topic for a set time, such as 10 minutes. Have students select a different brainstorming strategy at each session to become comfortable with each.
Require students to turn in multiple drafts. Provide in-class writing opportunities for students to develop parts of their papers. Have students work for 10 to 15 minutes on an introduction, a thesis statement and topic sentences. Ask them to share their ideas with a small group of two or three other students to generate even more ideas and content.
Schedule revision workshops. Help students appreciate the value of writing more than one draft by having peers review each paper. Raise accountability for revision by assigning points for coming to class prepared with a complete draft and having students fill out written evaluation sheets on each paper they read.
Plan editing workshops. Provide enough dictionaries so students can look up questionable spellings. Supply style guides for students to double-check punctuation and usage. Have students edit one or two papers to catch any errors in formatting, sentence structure and word choice.
Use active learning techniques to help students learn English usage. Assign or have students sign up for a mini-lesson about a style or grammatical rule they will then teach to the class. Schedule the presentations over several weeks to prevent information overload and to give students time to practice new skills.
Give mini-grammar lessons. Create a short handout or put a few examples on the board to discuss issues present in student papers. Review student papers for patterns of errors and, where those patterns exist, return their work, asking them to find and correct their mistakes. This increases the chance they will remember the rules.
Schedule conferences with students early in the semester. Working one-on-one with students on specific writing problems early will help them overcome what could become serious issues with their writing. The extra attention can also help students realize the teacher is there to support their writing efforts.