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IfItWereMyHome.com The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience I’ve been spending time over this past year reflecting and evaluating on how I can be more effective in teaching writing — both to English Language Learners and my mainstream ninth-grade students. In fact, all the English teachers at our school have been doing the same thing. Our school got a grant that enabled us to contract with the California Writing Project to do ongoing teacher development. In addition to that work, those of us who teach English Language Development (which is what most others call ESL) classes have been refining our work with the extraordinary The Write Institute curriculum. I’ve also been thinking more about the idea of students writing for an “authentic audience” — in other words, someone other than me. In practice, so far that’s meant my ELL’s writing penpal letters (with pen and on paper) to students (who would respond) in another mainstream English class, and that has worked very well for both classes. Book reviews are great writing opportunities. Related