ESL Writing Drill: 4 Key Sentences

This 45-minute (or less) drill helps students learn to write 4 kinds of sentences. 

Lesson Introduction

This guided writing activity reinforces skills by reviewing existing knowledge and focusing student attention on 4 sentence patterns.

It’s not designed to provide a comprehensive review of the grammar points. Instead, the aim is to help high beginner+ students practice 4 useful sentence patterns:

• appositives
• simple sentence
• compound sentence
• complex sentence

Step 1 Review (10)

Run through the slides. They provide basic explanations and examples. At the end of the slide show, there is a sample question for students to complete as a whole class. This is a chance for the teacher to inspect understanding before moving on to the next task.

Step 2 Introduce Task (5)

With this fresh knowledge, students will begin a writing assignment. The students will:

• watch short video called Paperman (5 minutes).
• make notes about plot and details
• identify 5-7 main chunks in the plot 

Step 3 Watch video (5)

The 5-minute video is called Paperman.  

Step 4 Writing (25)

I suggest the following process:

• give students a chance to work in pairs if they want (some of my writing students hate pair work)
• allow 10-15 minutes to outline main chunks of the plot
• point out that each will chunk will need 4 sentences

Output:

• Each student will divide the story into 5-7 chunks. Each chunk will have 4 sentences.
• That means each student will have written 20-28 sentences.

Step 5 Option (15)

This activity is designed for student development without the need for teacher review or feedback.

Peer review is possible. Honestly though, it’s not something I do because many students don’t like to get writing feedback from other students.