learn English writing

25 Thought Provoking Questions

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The new semester is almost here and it’s time to start thinking writing prompts for my ESL university students.

Paragraph Writing

Here is a link to 25 questions. Many of the questions are excellent prompts for short story writing or one paragraph compositions for ESL students: ESL writing prompts.

ESL Student Writing Assignment

Look at the list of questions. Choose one question that seems to appeal to you right now.

  1. Think about the question.
  2. Make some notes.
  3. Think about how you will answer the question in one paragraph.
  4. Consider your first sentence carefully.

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Quick Writing Ideas

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ESL students and teachers sometimes need a quick, simple idea to start a writing project. Not a big essay. But a small prompt to get writing into action.

Here are three great ideas. I found them on a website. Here is the link. The site has lots of good writing ideas.

Writing Prompt 1. Visualization

Think about a place.  Maybe your favorite room. Living, kitchen, bathroom, workshop. Describe the room in great detail. The size, shape, color. The things in the room. What’s on the wall? What’s under the bed? What does it smell like?

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ESL Writing Lessons – Categories

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In this ESL writing lesson, students will practice grouping words into one category. This English writing activity has two parts.

  • First, read the worksheet and add one word to each group. The new word must be part of the same category.
  • Second, complete the second page by writing the name of the category for each group of words.

Writing Skills

Every paragraph has one idea, which we describe in the topic sentence. By knowing how many small things can be grouped into one category, ESL students will be able to imagine and write good topic sentences and paragraphs that show unity.

Click here to download the ESL lesson writing worksheets.

ESL Writing Lesson – Country Profile

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This ESL writing worksheet teaches English students how to write a profile of one country. There are three important tasks in this writing lesson.

  1. Learn the vocabulary used to describe a country by completing the worksheet.
  2. Choose a country for your report. Go to the web and research your country.
  3. Write a one page report using the same ideas and vocabulary.

Here is the worksheet we will use for this writing lesson.

ESL Research Resources

You can save a lot of research time by going to the CIA Word Factbook website. Choose a country and then find your information.

Note: every student in the class must choose a different country.

Report Format

Your final report should be about one country. You will give me that report one week later. There are two key points for this writing assignment.

I want you to show me that you learned and understand the ideas we talked about in class about paragraph style and sentences.

  • First, the paragraphs in your report will have a good topic sentence, good organization and unity.
  • Second, you will use the writing tools which we studied in class.
  • Third, you will write the report in your words. Please do not copy and paste words and sentences from the website. This is really important. I want you to write your ideas. If you copy other people’s work, I will know. And you will get a zero.

Your grade will be based on these three report format parts.