Tag Archives: handouts

• Most Important Motivator of Students: How You Can Use It

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Workshop Cover shot

This posting includes sample lessons that give students a lot of autonomy.*

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video ESL Writing Workshop Approach

The most important ingredient for motivating students is autonomy. 1 The sense of being autonomous can produce a very positive effect on students’ attitude, focus and their performance.  Best of all, it’s very effective and quite easy to include this in ESL classes.

Having autonomy doesn’t mean that students decide what is taught in a lesson.  Instead, students can experience autonomy if the lesson is set up so that they can individually choose which exercise to do first, second etc., how fast to work, when to ask the teacher a question or for help and even when to take a break.

A lesson plan template that gives students autonomy (Writing Workshop)

Teachers can organize their lesson in a Writing Workshop using many different types of materials, but it works best when using inductive exercises.  That is because inductive exercises require little or no time taken up with teacher lectures.

These are General Steps for a Writing Workshop and Sample Specific Lesson with handouts

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• “Finally I now Understand What Nouns, Subjects and Verbs are.” (And it took only 30 minutes to learn inductively.)

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Is beautiful today.

We the soccer match on TV.

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

Here in the U.S., Ami has a good job in family counseling, but in order to be promoted, she needs to improve her writing skills, so she enrolled in an adult education class.  Unfortunately, the “direct” approach the instructors took of presenting rules and assigning exercises was not effective for her.  After months of studying, she became frustrated and embarrassed when she couldn’t even identify mistakes with subjects and verbs.

When she entered my academic ESL class, she demonstrated an advanced style of writing and vocabulary but had some breakdowns with basic grammar and struggled to fix these.  For example, she once started a paragraph with this sentence:

            People are social beings who has a need to be connected to other beings.

To help her edit her paragraph, I told her that there was a verb mistake in the first sentence.  She looked embarrassed and uncomfortable and after about 20 seconds of starring at the paper asked me to remind her of what a verb was.  In her next two sentences, she wrote:

            Individuals cannot be isolated for too long.  Through our brains, have the ability to connect with other’s emotions and develop empathy.

I pointed out that in the last sentence, she was missing a subject.  Again, with a pained look on her face she said she couldn’t remember was subjects were.

I realized that for me to be able to lead her to her mistakes and not just tell her what they were and how to change them, she needed to first be able to identify subjects and verbs.  So I gave her these three worksheets :

The results

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• Teaching Gerunds (a discussion from LINCS)

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                                  SOME COMMON PROBLEMS

                                              Run is good exercise.
                                          I finished read that book.
                               He made some money by work hard
                                Eating in restaurants are expensive.
                                      They enjoyed to do their work

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

I was invited to participate in a discussion about how to teach gerunds.  You can read the discussion at this link: LINCS discussion of gerunds

Below you’ll find brief samples of  some exercises that I’ve used to help students at all levels and include a links to handouts that you can use with your students.

Brief sample exercises

First handout: Inductive exercises to introduce gerunds to students.

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• The Huge Advantage International Student Writers Have Over Their American Classmates

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COVER REV shot

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

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video  Huge Advantage International Student Writers Have Over Their American Classmates—A Writing Technique

It can be liberating to ESL students to realize that almost anything that they can include in their essays/papers about their culture and country will probably be interesting to their American instructors.  This is a great advantage that they have over their American classmates.

However, just encouraging them to include this kind of information in their essays often results in paragraphs like this one from an essay about raising children:

In addition to teaching skills, parents sometimes need to discipline a child who misbehaves. Some people will spank their children in order to get their attention and redirect them.  However, in my country, parents very rarely do this.

The writer did include information from his country, but he missed an opportunity to exploit this information and make it more remarkable.  After being asked for more details, the writer revised the end of the paragraph:

… However, in my country, parents very rarely do this.  Instead, if a child refuses to listen to his mother or throws a tantrum, his mother will tell him to stand outside the house. The worse thing that can happen to someone in my culture is to be excluded from the group, so this type of punishment can be very effective.

An Inductive Approach to Teaching this Technique (and handout exercises)

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