And letters also are familiar, even to students who seldom write them. They have no doubt heard of and perhaps read or written letters of complaint or letters from creditors or thank-you letters to grandparents who send birthday gifts. Electronic mail offers an opportunity to design letter-writing activities that are easier or faster to disseminate than their paper counterparts and that foster both individual and collaborative planning, writing, editing, revising, and learning. Writing letters was not among my strategies when I began teaching.
Somebody forgets to bring a letter, disrupting the process.
Students e-mail each other with a copy to the teacher and others. More important, the text is meaningful. In a letter to a classmate, even though the teacher receives a copy, the primary audience is another student. My students often are more conscientious when they write for each other than when they write for me alone. Students can e-mail experts in the fields they are researching.