“Hey, David. Did you notice the two semi-colons that I used in my essay?” Alvin asked me as he entered the classroom.
It’s easy to think that ESL students can live without semi-colons. However, after doing a brief lesson with them, I found that they not only can understand what they are, but also, how useful they can be.
This posting includes sample lessons of a Writing Workshop that give students a lot of autonomy.*
Since posting this back in 2019, I’ve heard from teachers who decided to try out a Writing Workshop with their ESL Writing classes even though they were skeptical at first. Their hesitation seemed to be doubtful that their students would actually be productive without more direct teacher control. However, they reported that their initial skepticism was quickly dispelled after seeing the same great benefits that I had described in the post below. Almost all of them stated that they couldn’t imagine teaching a Writing class in any other way in the future.
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*
This is the perfect activity for integrating four skills into one activity. And it culminates in a writing task in which students focus on controlling their grammar and on their sentence style. It’s also one in which students can practice those two aspects of writing without having to spend time thinking about what to write.
These fluency activities can be used throughout a term when instructors would like to have students work on their grammar in a writing context and/or when they would like to add some group work in their writing classes. Also, it’s a good lead-in to teaching paraphrasing skills.
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*
This posting is an updated version of a post from April 10, 2018: • Writing Class Person Description Activity: Fun, Lively and Productive
I knew that this activity worked well with my ESL students. However, I hadn’t realized what they were experiencing internally until I did it myself.
Several of my colleagues and I decided to try out some activities by putting ourselves in the roles of students. And this was one of them.
In brief, we were randomly and secretly assigned one of the colleagues in the room. On a paper with only a number, we described the colleague physically and/or their personality and/or habit etc. Next we put all our papers on a stack, mixed them up and then each of us taped one on the wall. After that, we walked around reading the description and writing on a paper the name of the colleague being described. Finally, we shared our decisions with each other.
