Do you ask your students to copy essays?

I used to be very skeptical about transcribing aka copying 😕 Does copying essays blindly for example do any good to a student's language development? To be honest I loathed the idea when I first heard about it. I googled this topic but I couldn't find anything that supports its use in the classroom. But then I realised we have different teaching situations. Some of us are lucky to have good students but the majority do not. ( I'm marking my students' trial 2 essays now and sometimes you feel like you want to cry 😢 reading their essays but I always console myself by praying for them for I believe in the power of prayer 😍)

Do I use transcribing now? Yes! But I've decided to change the way it's usually done. I've thus used two methods:

Method 1: SS transcribe stories and generate 5-8 questions on the story to check for understanding. (Mind you, the students are bad at question formation 😃😏 This can be an area for action research for those who are looking for a topic)

Method 2: Remove target vocabulary (single words and phrases....because research says we learn words better in chunks) from narrative, factual, argumentative texts and get students to copy while filling in the blanks. See the sample below.

Not innovative enough? Well, it has worked so far for my students. What works is sometimes better than what's innovative. I make sure I choose the words/phrases carefully before I delete them. Rather than copy something blindly, give them tasks based on the text (mine is usually a narrative by the way). The samples below are self-explanatory I think. Pardon the handwritten part. Yours truly have tried to type them for two months now but simple couldn't complete the task hahah! 

Give it a try peeps and tell me how it goes.

Happy teaching!

Those who can DO, Those who can do more TEACH