Getting Students to Write More Interesting and Unique Ideas in Essays

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Argumentation list

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

After your students do this exercise, reading their essays will be much more stimulating for you.

I felt a bit deflated while reading an essay by Jojo, one of my higher-level students. His title was “It’s Best to Marry Someone from a Foreign Country.” From reading his previous essays, I knew he had the potential to be a very good writer with interesting ideas, but on that essay, he just supported his opinion with content that I would expect from students at lower levels.  For example, here is his list of simple support for marrying someone from a foreign country:

  • We can learn a foreign language more easily.
  • We can enjoy eating different kinds of food.
  • We can go easily to a foreign country for vacations.

Although I don’t believe that we, as ESL instructors, should expect our students to keep us stimulated with deep ideas,  (see my posting “Wow” is not Necessarily the Goal in Students’ Essays) we should encourage those students who have the potential to push themselves to write beyond the mundane. This is especially true for our students who are planning to take English Comp and other academic classes with native speakers.

An exercise to help students develop awareness for writing more advanced and unique ideas (handout)

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Stimulating Small-Group Discussion Activity 3: People Will Like You More If You Ask Follow-up Questions

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Discussion triads

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Some reasons why students seemed stimulated by this discussion:

1) They were surprised that some of their classmates’ cultures have different norms about asking questions.  In some of their cultures, it’s actually discouraged.

2) They realized that in order to make and maintain friendships with Americans, it’s a good idea to ask questions.

3) They enjoyed comparing theirs reaction to speed dating.

4) They liked comparing dating in their different countries.

A very important result from this discussion

After this discussion, I noticed students applying what they had learned by asking many more follow-up questions during all small-group discussion.

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Here is the basis for this discussion: According to research, people who ask questions, especially follow-up questions, will be considered more likeable.  The one-page article describes the results from a speed dating study and from an online chat study.  The researchers found that the participants who asked the most questions during a conversation with other participants got the most invitations to have a date or were rated as more likeable.  The article explains why asking questions has this positive effect.

This and future discussion activities include four parts:

1) A one-page article usually including a brief summary of a high-interest research study.
2) Ten true-false comprehension questions.
3) Pre-Discussion Exercise in which students read and think about several questions about their experience and opinions about the topic before discussing them in groups.
4) Small-group discussions of the article in which each student is given a paper with different content/personal experience questions in the form of Student A, B or C.

Stimulating Small-Group Discussion Activity 3: People Will Like You More If You Ask Follow-up Questions (and the handout)

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Mistake: He SURPRISED to see it snowing. (Adjectives that look like verbs.)

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Questions

 

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

When students see an –ed at the end of a word, they tend to automatically assume it’s a verb, and this assumption can lead them to grammar mistakes.

(* mistakes—These sentences are missing a verb.)
*Kai embarrassed during his speech.
* Rumi interested in horses.

To help students in the most efficient manner, I will sometimes paint with a broad brush.  So I simply tell my students that these words are adjectives: surprised, embarrassed, confused, interested and shocked. They need a verb with them.

(correct): Kai was (v) embarrassed (adj) during his speech.

Avoiding unnecessarily complicated information

It’s true that those words can be can be used as verbs, for example:
– It embarrassed (v)  Kai that he forgot some of his speech.

But in all my years of teaching writing, I rarely see students use them that way. They almost always use them as adjectives, so I don’t waste their time/mental energy talking to them about using these as verbs. Instead, I just generalize and tell them that they are adjectives.

Four-step exercises to teach these to students (Handout included.)

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Teachers: How To Sleep Well After a Class With a Couple of Troublesome Students

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Classroom management

Why teachers’ brains tend to dwell on the  “disruptive” students rather than on the “attentive” students after class.  And what we can do about it.

I can have a class composed of 14 engaged students and two or three inattentive ones and guess whose faces I’ll see when I go to bed at night.  Right, the “slackers.”

I was interested to discover that I’m not the only teacher who has this happen to them.  This led me to try to understand the reason and investigate what to do about (in order to get a good night’s sleep.)

Why we tend to dwell on the troublesome ones and what to do about it.

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Conversation Technique: Don’t Kill the Conversation. What to Say When You Don’t Know What to Say.

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kill the conversation

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

There a fewer better ways to kill a conversation than to do one of these after being asked a question:

  • Say nothing for a long time while trying to think about what to say.
  • Say, “Ummmmmm. Ahhhhh” for a long time while trying to think.
  • Just say, “I don’t know.”

It’s quite common for ESL students to be in situations like this.  They are asked a fairly common question like, “What will you do this weekend?”  Then their brains have to imagine what their plans are and how to explain those plans often using their limited vocabulary and grammar knowledge.  That process can take time.  In the meantime, knowing that the questioner is waiting for an answer to a question that would be easy to answer in his/her own language, the student is feeling pressure to answer quickly, feeling embarrassed that it is taking so long and feeling stress from appearing foolish.

In the meantime, the person who asked the question can often feel impatient or frustrated while waiting for a response.  The questioner will wonder if the students didn’t understand the question or if they don’t know what to say or if they just aren’t interested.

Too often in situations like this, the conversation dies and the questioner moves on to talk to someone else, and the students is left feeling foolish and abandoned.

This activity will lead students to learn a technique that completely prevents that from happening. It’s called, “Don’t kill the conversation.”

Here is how it works and here is a link to the activity handout.

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Simple Technique ESL Students can use to Impress Their Academic Instructors

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impressed instructor

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Imagine that you are mainstream instructor (e.g. Psychology, English Comp, Economic), and as students enter the classroom, some stop to talk to you.

First, Josh approaches you and says, “That article you told us to read was so boring.”

Later, Ryan mentions to you,  “I found some interesting information in that article you told us to read.”

Of course you want your students to give their honest opinion, but it’s only natural that you’ll probably have a better impression of Ryan than Josh.  That positive impression could even have a favorable outcome for him when you are assigning grades.

This post is about a writing technique that our ESL students can use in their mainstream (academic) classes which can make a positive impression on their instructors.

Most instructors in any field think that their subject area is very interesting. For example, psychology, history, economics, English lit and engineering instructors often think that their subjects are the most interesting and important ones in the world. Needless to say, they love to hear their students say that they also think their classes are fascinating. Thus, our students can use this insight to stand out in the minds of their instructors.  And it could affect their grade in a positive way.

In addition, it involves good critical thinking.

Here is how it works and a handout activity to practice it.

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Stimulating Small-Group Discussion Activity 3: “Does Social Media Make People Sadder?”

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Discussion triads

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Some reasons why students seemed stimulated by this discussion:

  1. They were interested to hear how their classmates used social media.
  2. They thought it was funny how they tended to post positive events in their lives rather than negative.
  3.  The article stimulated them to be “honest” about their reactions to the effects of social media.
  4. They discovered that some of their classmates have stopped using social media.

Here is the basis for this discussion: In an episode of NPR’s “Hidden Brain,” Shanker Vedantam explores the effects that social media can have on people. He shares examples of people who found themselves feeling dissatisfied with their lives after comparing themselves with others.  After reading the one-page article that I drew from that episode, my students were eager to share their experiences with their classmates.  The ideas in the article seemed to resonate with them.

This and future discussion activities include four parts:

1) A one-page article usually including a brief summary of a high-interest research study.
2) Ten true-false comprehension questions.
3) Pre-Discussion Exercise in which students read and think about several questions about their experience and opinions about the topic before discussing them in groups.
4) Small-group discussions of the article in which each student is given a paper with different content/personal experience questions in the form of Student A, B or C.

About Discussion Activity 3: Does Social Media Make People Sadder? and the handout.

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