Teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) can use prewriting activities at the earliest stages of instruction to help their students acquire good language skills. Prewriting involves energizing student participation in thinking, talking, group interaction, and skeletal writing activities that become components of a writing task. Concentration on the individual components of a writing task ensures that students actually begin writing early but are not overwhelmed with tasks that they cannot handle. Specific prewriting activities such as group brainstorming, clustering, looping, cubing, pictorializing, dialogue writing, story completion, and short lectures are discussed. Prewriting activities not only help students acquire the target language more effectively, but they build interpersonal, thinking, and planning skills that can be utilized in other fields. (MDM)