Sophomore ESL Writing, Week 5

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Learn English Writing

This is week 5 of the semester. What did we do last week?

  • completed a second review of cohesion in a paragraph
  • completed a second editing exercise
  • completed third and final draft of the homeless story (hopefully)
  • start and maybe finish second draft of health and wealth (summary with a hypothesis)
  • another fluency activity (a little different because we practiced three sentence patterns)
  • started 3rd writing assignment – book/movie review
  • finish chapter 3 in the textbook

What will we do this week?

  • Complete beaver/frog summary (ENG 260-04 only)
  • Complete chapter 4 in the textbook
  • Finish homeless man and health and wealth stories
  • Complete second draft of book-movie review
  • Start 4th writing assignment (see below)
  • Look at quiz review questions (see below)
  • New text analysis to find elements of cohesion

The One Hour Class

Part 1. Practice Key Concepts

Part 2.  Correlations and Cause and Effect

Look at these charts. Describe the relationship as a hypothesis. That is a correlation. Do you think there is a cause and effect relationship?

Part 3. Even More Cohesion

Here is the third practice exercise worksheet to see and identity words and phrases that help students learn cohesion.

 

General Observations About Student Writing

After reading several hundred stories by the students, I can make a few observations.

  1. focus is what most students need to improve
  2. focus on the main idea – in the opening sentence
  3. focus the story on explaining, proving or describing the main idea
  4. it’s impossible to do # 3 if you don’t do #2
  5. students need to learn how to remove unnecessary information
  6. it’s impossible to do #5 unless you do #2
  7. create paragraphs – one paragraph should include one idea
  8. often make claim or statements without proof or evidence (e.g. he looked happy – how do you know that?)
  9. students need to focus on telling me instead of showing me

Show Me, Don’t Tell Me

This is an important but difficult writing skill. It makes good writing great.

Imagine you are a painter. You are painting pictures with words.

You want to paint a picture of happiness. Do you paint the word happy? No, you create a scene that represents happiness. Then you hope the person looking at your picture also thinks, that is happy.

Here is a lesson to help ESL students learn to be more descriptive with their words and paint beautiful pictures: show me don’t tell me.

Quiz Review

During Week 6, the writing students will have a quiz. Preparing for this quiz will also help you get ready for the mid term exam. Here is the study sheet for quiz #1.

 

Image Credits

Featured image by Virtuous One. Its use complies with the owner’s creative commons licensing terms.