Job Discussion Forums

[xiguagua]

I'm at a new school, new province, new everything; and when I looked at my schedule I notice they have me down for teaching English Writing. I know we had a thread about this previously.....but the search function is ALWAYS borked. Fact is, i'm excited about doing something new, particularly writing, but i'm also unsure what that entails for us FT's. I think i'm a little more lucky since my co-FT is teaching......Newspaper Reading.....

Anyway I wondered if you guys have some advice. I personally feel i'm much more suited for spoken English since I have all those nuances down, and frankly, my grammar kinda sucks, so i'm worried about it. Any of you guys have some expertise to share?

Did you have to basically help prepare them for TEM4 and adhere to that horribly crappy Chinese rubric they use? I have some general ideas, but i'm a little worried about what i'm gonna be doing day in and day out. Lemme know you guys' experience with this.

[roadwalker]

In a word......

I've only had the pleasure once and it was a few years back. First thing I would stress with the students is that plagiarized work will receive a zero grade. Many students will undoubtedly cheat. I received one paper with underlined links to "our home page"! I had two classes and one girl from each class turned in the same story, which of course I found online by googling the first sentence. Don't go nuts though, since some students will be trying to improve their writing. I got so caught up in the cheating that I think I neglected the students that deserved more attention.

Check out the textbook, if the school provides one. A good one will take a systematic approach to writing mechanics, as well as covering different types of writing. Someone hopefully can chime in with good writing textbooks (for you to have a better idea) but I'm drawing a blank. If you can get the idea of paragraphs for new thoughts or for successive steps in a process, etc., into their heads, you will have done wonders. Same with verb tense agreement. That one was easy to explain with timelines, but hard for them to put into practice consistently.

[xiguagua]

Definitely plagiarizing is something i'm worried about. I'm guilty myself of worrying too much about cheating in the past and hopefully I can find a system that works better to correct that problem or simply avoid it.

Another worry is that I don't have enough diversity in topics or methods or practice to keep people interested passed the first week.

[choudoufu]

the plagiarism is usually pretty obvious. if you're not sure, plug in
a short string into the google to find the source. write the web
address on their paper in red, along with a large zero.

at the beginning of class, before you hand back the papers, write the
address on the board. introduce concept of plagiarism.

[7969]

I teach the second year writing class to English majors. The main problems with the university level writing classes are as follows:

1. Few foreigners want to teach writing as they consider it to be too much work.

2. Since few people want to teach the class, most of those who do so, do it reluctantly and therefore don't really care what they teach the students.

3. The writing teacher often has no system in place. No teaching plan, no start point, no end of term goals, and the lessons are all over the map. The students are confused and have no idea what they're going to learn or how to apply it anywhere in the real world. Truly disastrous.

4. There are two university writing classes for English majors, one for second year and one for third year. There never appears to be any logical follow-on from what the students learned in the second year to what they're learning in the third year. The school doesn't really offer much guidance but there has to be some responsibility on the part of the teacher to figure something out as well. I get numerous complaints every year from former students about their third year writing class and their complaints echo all the above.

Here are some of my ideas for a decent writing class:

5. Equipment. Try get a multi-media room as this will make your life a lot easier. I did the first couple of years with nothing but an OHP and transparencies but those were a real pain (ink falling off, had to keep reprinting), so I requested and got better classrooms and now rely on Powerpoint to a large extent. If you use Powerpoint keep it manageable - 20-30 slides at most. I was gobsmacked when I heard from my students that some teachers routinely go through 150-200 slides in a 90 minute class.

6. Make a weekly teaching plan. Start with the very basics and systemically work your way to more complex tasks. I start the year with a review of punctuation, how to proofread, work up to clauses and sentences, short notes, short memo, letter, and finally by the of the second term they're writing short essays and biographies.

7. Set a goal. Most of what I teach is geared towards helping them pass the writing portion of the TEM4 and practical business writing that they can/might use once they graduate.

8. Resources. We use a textbook entitled "A Basic Course in Writing" and it's got some good info (standard text at universities here I think). I don't use it every class but probably every second class at least. I have some business writing books that I bought on my own that are pretty comprehensive and they fill the gaps the textbook doesn't cover. There are also lots of decent websites to consider - esl.about.com has some good ideas and this website is also particularly helpful:

Online Writing Lab

9. Homework. I have 30-35 students per class and I assign writing homework/in class assignments at least 4-5 times per term. It's too much for me to mark all of them on my own so some of the work is designed to be easily marked in class by the students. I only need to collect the papers, take them home, and record the marks, before handing them back the following week. Memos/essays and such are marked back in my apartment and I usually take two weeks to mark each of those assignments, so plan accordingly so as not to overburden yourself. Be sure to give enough time for the students to do the work properly. Some of my writing assignments are done in class, others have to be handed in the following week. There's a risk of plagiarism here, so see #10 below.

10. Plagiarism. I give about 5-10 minutes on this topic in the lesson on proofreading and explain what it is and what happens to people who plagiarize - failure. This applies to any practical writing exercise that they might hand in - memo, letter, essay - and I've had students hand in identical assignments, word for word. What happens is I read one essay, and a few papers later I read another one that's the same. I usually remember if I've seen something before so I go back, find the other one, then compare. If they're the same, or almost the same with minor changes to one of them, then both papers get a low grade or fail. It doesn't happen often but probably at least once or twice a year, and if you warn them beforehand then there's no excuse. Plagiarism isn't a big problem in my classes.

11. Focus more on the major weak points and less on other areas. My experience tells me that proofreading is the weakest writing-related skill these students have. This year I moved that lesson to the third week and I'll hand out more proofreading assignments to give them more practice. I've got a handbook called "Find the Errors - Proofreading Activities" and it's been quite useful to me, although you can make similar stuff on your own. I don't worry too much about minor grammar errors as long as the work can be understood. A professor at a Canadian university suggested recently that since the students (foreign students in Canada) speak English with an accent it should be expected that they're also going to write with an "accent." I don't expect any of my students to write like I do.

All of the above may sound like a lot of work but it can and will make your life easier esp. if you end up teaching the writing class in subsequent years, and this kind of attention to your work will be appreciated by the students.

[fat_chris]

Excellent post, 7969.

I will refer back to it when I begin to structure my Reading & Writing class next week.

Warm regards,
fat_chris

[MisterButtkins]

If you want another way to guard against plagiarism, you can have them write stuff in class. This isn't going to work for long essays, but you can give them 20 minutes in class to write a memo or short letter and you know no one will plagiarize.

[backtothefront]

I can only agree with other posters. If you do it, prepared to be busy all the time when your not teaching.

A good approach would be to use a marking scheme with a key for different problems the learner has. This way you could show the scheme to the students and encourage peer marking, which would also cut down your workload.

For example,
subject/verb agreement problem = ?xxxxxxx xxxxx x?
article missing= ! (only include for high level students as this is hard to acquire)
tense problem = +

etc, etc.

You would include the symbols to show a problem and design a table to explain the problems.

I would avoid giving them the technical grammar terms to ponder but you could give examples to the class and go through an example with the whole class of a written answer with problems where the class has to guess what the problems are.

Include smiles etc as it does encourage learners if you are going to criticise.

You could also include extensive guidance notes in your task delivery, if your teaching elementary or low level students. Use of pictures and giving them some structures can help. Depends on the level really.

Best of luck.

[Ariadne]

Lots of good stuff here. Writing classes are a challenge, but well worth it. I would also recommend having students keep a folder of all their work. Have them keep everything they write, everything you mark and return. You can then ask for the folders sometimes to see if they are making progress. If you see that you have made the same corrections on the last three papers for a student... well, looks like they aren't 'doing their homework'. If you are going to take the time to read and mark the papers, then students need to take the responsibility to note and learn from your red pencil marks.

Have a whole class or a few minutes of each class devoted to words and phrases they should avoid in their writing. (As we all know, in a word.) Encourage short, simple sentences instead of long, meandering ones that lose all meaning by the end.

.

[fat_chris]

[MisterButtkins]

[RPMcMurphy]

In a word, contrastive rhetoric.
They've been taught for so long to think and compose in a certain way, its very difficult to write otherwise. And remember that they're likely to revert to their old habits asap. Amusingly, Chinese kids seem to have memorised set pieces on any topic. I recall very convincing pieces on the feasibility of Moon colonisation, complete with rice growing. And these were [otherwise] intelligent 21 year olds.

[randyj]

[xiguagua]

Thanks guys for the great advice. I've had no internet for while so now I can finally report back. I started my classes and to my dismay.......they don't even have textbooks. They have a "writing" book, but it's more of a reading book.....read this crappy passage and answer the questions. It was written by teachers at the school......so.....problem. They told me the teachers here before me "hated" textbooks, so they told the school to stop ordering them, and they did. I can't quite get my head around that. Sure some books are bad.....but a lot of them at least provide a basic guideline. So I was expected to talk into class and teach a writing class from scratch.

[janeal]

I taught several uni writing classes & it was quite difficult. Several problems:
1. The text provided was useless.
2. 60 students per class. Only about 20% interested in improving their writing. Grading papers was a long term task.
3. Even English majors writing skills were quite poor. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, paper organization were all at a grade school level.

My recommendation: first day of class have each student write a short paragragh (4 or 5 sentences) to find out what level they're at. I focused on reinforcing basics listed in #3 above. More complex writing was a waste of time.