Category Archives: •Advanced & High- Intermediate Writing

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

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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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• Teaching the Most Interesting Type of Essay Introduction (an Inductive Approach)

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Essay introduction

    Dan nervously flipped through a magazine as he waited for the other passengers to get into their seats.  Soon, a very large man sat down in the seat next to him.  His shoulders were so wide that they pushed Dan’s elbow off the arm rest.  The take-off and first 20 minutes were smooth.  Dan lowered the tray in front of him and set his lunch and coffee on it.  Suddenly, the passenger in front of him decided to push her seat back, shoving Dan’s tray into him, spilling coffee all over him.  For the rest of the two-hour flight, he tried not to think about how miserable he felt in his tiny seat and wet shirt.

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

Most people like stories.  And essays that start with a story are often the easiest to enter.  Like these written by a couple of students:

     “A few months ago, in the middle of the night, when I was staying at home, I heard my house’s gate was shaken violently by someone.  There, I saw a woman who was carrying her baby, standing with panic and asking for help. …”

       “The 40-degree Celsius weather was miserable when we were going on the trail to my grandmother’s house in Bucaramanga, Colombia.  We had been traveling about seven hours and were in El Pescadero, which is the curviest and dizziest part of the trip. …

These dramatic introductions are not only enticing for the reader, but they are also fun for the students to write; it gives them a chance to use their imagination and creativity.

At the same time, a good dramatic intro isn’t just a story.  There are three characteristics of especially good ones:

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• Give the Writer not the Editor Control during Peer Editing in Writing Class

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Peer editing thumbnail shot

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

Here is a link to a short video about this approach to peer-editing A Better Way to do Peer Editing of Writing

After a peer-editing session, a student said, “My peer editor was kind of rude.  He was too critical and told me to change my grammar in places that were not wrong.  He also told me to change my thesis statement.  But I think I already had a good one.”

Another students said, “My peer editor read my essay and filled out the checklist.  She said she found nothing that needed to be improved.  I was surprised because I think some parts were weak.”

There is a peer-editing process which can alleviate the problem of the over-critical editor and under-involved one.  In this process, the peer-editor is NOT expected to find places to improve; instead the writer solicits specific advice.  In other words, the writer has control.

The peer editing activity below involves critical thinking on the part of the writer.  Unlike the common peer-editing format of the instructor providing questions /checklists for the peer to complete while reading their partner’s essay, in the approach described below, the writers themselves decide what advice/help they would like from their peers.

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• “Wow” is not Necessarily the Goal in Students’ Essays

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Surprised

“Wow!” can be expected from professional writing not students’ writing.

An English Comp instructor told me that after reading a student’s essay, she wants to think, “Wow!  These are amazing ideas.”  I’ve also met ESL writing instructors who also looked at her students’ writing in a similar way.  She wanted them to write about “something significant.”  She wanted to be entertained.  She wanted to learn something new.

Actually, those are NOT what we are trying to accomplish in our ESL writing courses. And even if they were the goals, how could they ever be honestly evaluated?  I’ve witnessed a conversation between two instructors in which one of them was in total amazement about one of her student’s essays.  In it, the student, who was African, described how happy the people in her village were and how people there did not experience depression even though they were some of the poorest people on earth.  The other instructor yawned and said, “I already knew all that.”

After I read an essay, I might say, “Wow!” but it’s not because of the student’s profound ideas.  It’s because s/he used a technique in a way that really helped explain his/her idea.

What we’re looking for in essays is how well they are using writing techniques.  These are tools that we can teach students, that they can apply to other writing tasks, and that we can evaluate.

Needless to say, we don’t just list the techniques and expect students to apply them.  The art of teaching ESL is leading students to learning the techniques so they can have them available in their “tool box.”

Here a just a few of the writing techniques that we can teach our students:

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