The shear walls constitute the primary lateral load resisting system in a reinforced concrete building with such walls. Hence, a wall needs to be modelled adequately in an analysis of the building for seismic loads. In this paper, a typical reinforced concrete multi-storeyed building with a centrally located tall shear wall was investigated for three approaches of modelling the nonlinear flexural behaviour of the wall. First, the wall was modelled using column elements with lumped plasticity at the ends (Model 1). Model 2 was developed using layered shell elements for the wall. Finally, fibre-based wall elements based on spread plasticity, was adopted to model the wall (Model 3). Cyclic pushover analysis, non-linear time-history analysis and incremental dynamic analysis were performed using the models. It was observed that for the cyclic pushover analysis, the fibre-based approach of modelling the wall gave better estimate of the hysteresis behaviour, as compared to the model based on column elements. For the non-linear time-history analysis, the higher frequency components in the variations of the moment and rotation at the base of the wall were captured only in the fibre-based approach. However, the results from the incremental dynamic analysis were comparable for the three models.