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What comes after ESL students write the first draft? Editing.
Learning how to edit their own work is an important English writing skill.
“Edit what?” students might ask.
One answer is to look for two kinds of writing problems in the first draft: wordy sentences and empty phrases. Helping students improve their writing skills by recognizing and fixing these problems is the purpose of this lesson.
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.
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.
Find a synonym for the underlined words/phrases. Re-write each sentence using these new words or phrases. For example:
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).
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: