#8 Teach English Writing – Commas, Three Essential Rules

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Teach English Writing – Commas, Three Essential Rules

Main Idea

Learning English rules governing the use of commas is tough. My writer’s grammar guide has 20 pages about commas, half of which includes exceptions to the rules. This lesson helps ESL students become better writers by showing three common uses for commas and some exceptions. It’s not comprehensive. Instead, it builds knowledge, slowly and progressively. Too much grammar at one time is like drinking water from a fire hydrant: it can be overwhelming.

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#9 Teach English Writing – Sentence Fluency

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Teach English Writing – Sentence Fluency

Main Idea

Here’s an ESL writing activity that might become part of your weekly lesson plan. It helps students improve English writing fluency by targeting specific sentence patterns in timed writing exercises.

This lesson asks students to write targeted sentence patterns based on pictures prompts in conjunction with their own imagination and experience.

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The 21 ESL Writing Tools Project

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21 Writing Tools:  Project Outline (a work in progress)

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.

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#10 Teach English Writing – How to Self Edit

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Teach English Writing – How to Self-Edit

Main Idea

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:

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