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#16 Teaching Writing via Paraphrasing with Synonyms

October 28, 2016August 18, 2015 by eslwriter

Teach Writing via Paraphrasing with Synonyms

Main Idea

This English writing lesson teaches ESL students how to improve sentence flow and expand their vocabulary range by paraphrasing key words and phrases with synonyms.

Benefits

With a broader, deeper vocabulary range, ESL students have some of the tools they need to write with greater clarity, variety and productivity. Without a strategy to improve their lexical strength, it is hard for ESL students to improve the quality of their writing.

Example

Find a synonym for the underlined words/phrases. Re-write each sentence using these new words or phrases. For example:

#17 Teaching Writing via Proofreading Skills

February 28, 2016August 16, 2015 by eslwriter

TEACHING ENGLISH PROOFREADING SKILLS

One of the challenges associated with teaching English writing in Korea is the mindset of ESL students. Not many, it seems, have been exposed to process writing. By that, I mean the expectation that a piece of text will undergo several stages of proofreading and editing before it is considered good or complete.

Because students have not had much exposure to process writing, most are poor at proofreading (i.e. finding and correcting text errors) and editing (i.e. making substantial changes to the text with additions or deletions).

#18 Paraphrasing with Nominalisations

April 26, 2016August 12, 2015 by eslwriter

Teach Writing by Paraphrasing … with Nominalizations

Main Idea

Paraphrasing is a reading comprehension and writing skill. Read a sentence or paragraph, ask questions about the text (i.e. what is the main idea?) and then write the same idea in different words. That strategy is called RAP (read-ask-paraphrase).

Here are some characteristics of good paraphrasing:

#19: Write Sentences with Parallel Structure

February 13, 2016August 11, 2015 by eslwriter

Writing with Parallel Structure

Main Idea

Teaching ESL students how to write English sentences with parallel structure can improve sentence clarity, style and impact not to mention good grammar. As the level of writing progresses, ESL students may find that sentences with parallel structure can serve many purposes, such as a thesis sentence in an essay or the concluding sentence of a paragraph.