Sophomore ESL Writing, Week 3

by

Learn English Writing

This is week 3 of the semester. What did we do and learn in the English class so far?

  1. wrote a short descriptive story (i.e. a place – or a place and food) as part of the Before and After exercise
  2. first draft of a summary about a video story (Momentos)
  3. leaned how to create a hypothesis sentence pattern
  4. learned the basic elements of a summary (e.g. ask the question – what’s the story about)
  5. learned/reviewed eight parts of speech
  6. read and answered the questions chapter 1 in the textbook
  7. weekly fluency activity (e.g. freewriting)

Basic Elements of a Summary

  • use interesting opening (first one or two sentences) that grabs the reader’s attention
  • opening tells us the main theme, message or idea
  • the summary does not have to follow the same order as the story
  • avoid unnecessary details (e.g. squeeze many ideas into a single sentence)
  • many students can’t seem to see patterns or reduce many actions into a group (e.g. it seems obvious that many people worked together to find the homeless guy and mentally prepared him for a shock – seeing his daughter and wife again).

Some General Feedback

  • some really good ideas and sentences – nice work
  • first draft has many errors – that’s normal
  • use white space to make your paper easy to read
  • left and right margins
  • create paragraphs – what’s a paragraph?
  • filter – keep the important stuff
  • what’s important? – the information that is connected to your main idea
  • where is your main idea? – the first one or two sentences
  • where do you find the main idea? – you create it by thinking

This week the ESL writing class students will:

Write a summary based on the data in a video. The summary must include four main parts:

  • an interesting introduction (e.g. first sentence) that describes what the video is about
  • at least one hypothesis to summarize the speaker’s main idea
  • an explanation of why that idea might be true (e.g. cause and effect)
  • your own idea – agree or disagree

We will also:

  • begin the process of feedback and rewriting
  • continue the weekly fluency development exercise
  • reading the textbook and completing the exercises (your homework is chapter 2 this week)

Processing Information and Writing an Analysis

Here is another writing assignment to be completed this week.

The assignment follows a teaching technique called Picture Word Inductive Model. Basically the assignment works like this: your challenge is to write an interesting analysis of this photograph.

  • a summary of what you see (e.g. details, words)
  • a question you ask about the picture
  • an attempt to answer the question (e.g. conclusions based on patterns , concepts, representations)

Flow

The first step is to spend a few minutes looking at the picture and generating a list of words and phrases. Then try to organize that information to groups or categories. Don’t try to describe every detail – there isn’t enough time or space to wrote everything. Try to think in terms of concepts.

Then write a few sentences. Then put your sentences into paragraphs. Then write a complete analysis – summary, question, answer.

More Work to Learn Writing Skills

Here are a few worksheets to help students improve their understanding of writing skills: