This ESL writing lesson blends guided writing skills and creativity. Guided writing is a process that helps ESL students learn one or two writing skills in each lesson.
This ESL writing lesson will help English students learn and develop their business writing skills.
In this writing assignment, the students will learn how to read statistical data and write a comparison of two countries. The hard part of this work is to decide how to compare and contrast the data.
Business Writing Assignment
There are two writing tasks.
First, write a comparison of two countries in a letter format. You will probably want to use at least two paragraphs for this writing task.
Second, write a comparison using an email format. Think carefully about how you will make the comparison and how to present the information.
Here is the link for the statistical data for Korea and Australia. These data come from the OECD: OECD-country-data.
Today’s English lesson and homework is about writing an email. Specifically, the lesson is learning the rules to write a proper business email with good etiquette.
Email Writing Lesson
As promised, here are the presentation notes:email-lesson. Maybe these will help you complete your email writing assignment.
Remember the writing assignment:
write an English mail to a local government office: city, county or province;
send your email to the local tourism department (if there is one);
send an email to the government office and c.c. my email account as well
in the email, explain why you are writing;
ask four questions;
use the 7 rules for email writing which we discussed in class;
when you receive an answer from the government office, forward that email to my email address.
You will want to write full and proper questions asking about:
festivals in July and August
best places to visit
where to get maps and brochures
locations of tourist booths with English speaking staff
As a university writing teacher, I wonder what is the best way to help my students see, correct and avoid writing mistakes.
Slowly, I am coming to the conclusion that the old teaching style is not very effective. The old way, for me, is a writing lesson that goes like this: the teacher gives a writing assignment, the student writes it, the teacher goes home with a bag filled with 50 papers, spends part of the weekend making corrections, hands the papers back on Monday, the students try to decode the teacher’s scribblings, the students re-write the paper, the end.
Better Writing Lessons
For a lot of reasons, the old way has to stay. But I’ll do it less. My goal is to teach students how to see, correct and ultimately avoid basic writing errors. And, the old is not the only way.
What is a basic writing error? For Korean students, most writing errors fall into six categories:
word choice
verb tense
prepositions
articles
subject-verb agreement
conventions (e.g. spelling and punctuation)
Self-Editing
Peer review is one way for students to quickly learn how to detect and maybe avoid errors. The idea is simple. Student A writes something. Student B finds the errors. Student A re-writes. Like many teaching ideas in the ESL world, it sounds great in theory but doesn’t always work well in the classroom.
Editing exercises seem to offer more hope for student achievement. They teach the students what to look for and how to correct the errors.
Editing Worksheet
So, for our next class, dear students, download these editing worksheet and try to find most of the writing errors. Then re-write the paragraphs.
In previous classes, students finished several writing exercises about a person’s daily life experience and neighbourhoods. These writing exercises use real life experience to help shape and guide the student’s descriptive writing.
This assignment asks students to blend their daily life experience with a creative surprise.
Video Writing Prompt
Watch the video called Tomorrow (GPS). It’s a story about a man and woman. Their lives follow a n0rmal routine. Then one day, there is a surprise.
Use the ideas from this video to help to think about how a surprise might change your life. Write a short story, maybe two paragraphs, that describes a normal daily life and a big change.
Expansion: Write a one paragraph summary of this story.
Learning how to organize a paragraph is a difficult skill to learn for ESL students. This PowerPoint presentation provides a simple but clear picture of how to write an eight sentence paragraph.
This writing activity is also a short grammar lesson in how to use determiners like some and any in questions and sentences.
Paragraph Writing
This presentation shows students the basic structure of a paragraph. The topic of this lesson is snack food.
