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July 14, 2005
Lesson Planning - Incorporating Writing
Good morning everyone!
If you do polls at the beginning of your classes asking students what they most want to get out of your class, you likely see "writing English" on the lower list of expectations. Why?
Too many students focus on speaking the language, and don't seem to care about the other important aspects of learning a new language. I don't know about you, but whenever I have tried to incorporate writing lessons into my curriculum, I'm always met with groans from the students.
Until I figured out how to sneak it in! I asked my students to . . .
. . . bring a spiral notebook to class one day, and then explained to them that we were going to start journaling. And despite themselves, my students are becoming better writers!
Here's how I do it. I meet with my classes twice a week, so on the first day of the week, they are required to bring their journals and hand them in to me with a journal entry. I don't put requirements on the length of the entry (I'm lucky to get a sentence out of some students!), but they do have to turn in something. I take the journals home with me, and correct the grammar, sentence structure, etc. right in the notebooks, and then hand it back to them the next class.
I like this method because it allows the students to have a "record" of their mistakes with clear instructions about how to fix them. I find that they learn this way and are improving their skills with every journal entry.
I hope this helps! Let me know how it works for you.
Until next time,
Michelle
Looking for more articles about lesson planning for the ESL classroom? Click HERE!
Posted by msimmons at July 14, 2005 04:02 PM
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Comments
I'm an exchange student teaching on the side in Japan, and I do the same thing. Part of the reason is that I feel like my Japanese has improved a lot from reading and writing a lot. I went from not being able to write a coherent paragraph a year ago to writing research papers now.
I usually have my students write ten sentences per week [the lessons are once a week]: three with this pattern, three with another one, four with another one, or something like that, and lately I've had one student write a paragraph a week. It gives them a way to review what they've learned, and inevitably we find some point that didn't get across, so we're able to work on that.
Also, composition homework is a jumping off point for the next lesson. I've had some private lessons where the first hour of a ninety minute lesson is talking about the homework, the words the student had to look up to write the sentences, similar expressions, etc.
Posted by: Stephen at July 15, 2005 07:42 AM
good day everybody i am at present living in the phillipines i have a bacheler degree but never used it i am in a difficult position at the moment as i was robbed in my appartment so now i need to get a job heer teaching english as any body out there any ideas on were i can go thankyou
Posted by: raymond dearden at August 25, 2005 07:18 AM
