A panoply of teaching resources.
This series of English lessons is designed for teachers who want to help ESL students learn English writing.
These ESL lessons focus on easy to explain, skills-based classroom exercises that improve student performance. The writing skills include sentence structure, vocabulary development, some grammar to improve idea clarity, as well as paragraph organization.
When faced with the task of revising English text on their own, ESL students often hesitate because they do not know what to do. As a result, they may focus on writing conventions, like grammar, spelling or punctuation without addressing higher order challenges like cohesion or style. A few students seem to think that rewrite means recopy. This lesson focuses on one specific rewriting objective and three techniques to help students go beyond proofreading during the redrafting stage.
The objective is enable ESL students with the ability to create emphasis by putting the most important idea at the end of the sentence. To accomplish this task, students will learn how to manipulate three sentence patterns:
Writing fluency is an important skill that students can develop with frequent practice. ESL students, especially new writers, sometimes hesitate to write for a variety of reasons including lack of practice and fear of errors, among others. Like any skill, the teaching of writing needs to be approached from a variety of angles. This activity – sometimes called Power Writing – takes on one specific objective: developing the ability to produce more output through structured practice involving repeated, timed writing tasks that focus on quantity rather than quality.
This lesson teaches ESL students a new thinking skill. It shows students how to look at an idea, issue or object from many perspectives. Knowing how to appreciate something from a different angle helps students become better writers and thinkers.
This lesson is based on the Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono. There are six hats. Each hat represents a different way of looking at something: