Category Archives: •Advanced & High- Intermediate Writing

• Developing Paraphrasing Skills: Oral Paraphrasing Before Written. (Revisited)

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Cover paraphrasing shot

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

YouTube I discuss this posting in this video: Developing ESL Paraphrasing Skills Naturally: Start with Oral Paraphrasing Exercise

A good paraphrase can demonstrate to the teacher that the student truly understood the source. And if it is clearly written in the student’s normal style and level of vocabulary, the teachers can feel reassured that the writer wasn’t plagiarizing.

Paraphrasing may be a new concept for many of our ESL student. However, we can help them understand how to do it in a way that will let them “experience” what a good paraphrase is through a very natural process.

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• These Three PowerPoint Slides Have Stopped Students from Plagiarizing

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(This posting includes two PowerPoints which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

ESL students often don’t realize how easy it is for their teachers to know when they have plagiarized on an assignment. In fact, it’s so easy that even students can identify plagiarized sentences. I have found that once they realize this, they stop doing it.

To demonstrate how easy it is, I use the following PowerPoint composed of three slides.

In the first slide, using an inductive approach I start with this:

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• Writing Class Person Description Activity: Fun, Lively and Productive (Revisited)

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Cover secret classmate shot

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

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video ESL Writing Class Activity: Fun, Lively and Productive

This is a paragraph that a student secretly wrote to describe one of her classmates.  All the students are circulating around the periphery of the room, reading description hanging on the wall with no names on and trying to determine who is being described in the paragraphs.  Each student seems very focused on reading the descriptions, searching for the classmate who is the object of the description but also looking out of the corner of their eyes to see what kind of reaction others are having to the description that they secretly wrote.  There is energy in the room, a lot of interacting and a lot of laughing.

Describe your classmate activity

In brief, the steps for this activity are:

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• Fluency Writing: Reading, Speaking In Triads, And Listening Culminating In A Writing Task (REVISITED)

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                                          Integrating the four skills

(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.

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