21 writing tools

#17 Teaching Writing via Proofreading Skills

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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).

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#18 Paraphrasing with Nominalisations

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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:

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#19: Write Sentences with Parallel Structure

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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.

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#20: A Short Grammar Lesson about Articles

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Definite and Indefinite Articles

Main Idea

Explaining the long list of rules about articles to English students is easy but boring. Using them correctly … well, that takes time, practice and resources. ESL students need frequent practice over an extend period of time to learn how to use articles in written and spoken form.

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