Job Discussion Forums

[Lorean]

Preamble: I have to teach a college level writing class two hours a week. I have been given no course-material to speak of. The classroom has nothing but a blackboard.

Problem: I have a technical background. I have no idea how to teach writing to college students.

[Nemesis]

Google "ESL writing materials."

Here's a link to get you started: http://www.eslgold.com/writing/lesson_plans.html

[tw]

From personal experience and in all honesty, teaching English writing to Chinese college students is a waste of time. No matter what you teach and what you tell them, they will still stick to their own style and copy from each other. Of course, you can thank their Chinese teachers for telling them that to write werll in English, they have to memorize all these fancy and pretty English prhases and expressions.

Start counting how often you see "with the development of (China's/today's) (modern) society/technology)..." in papers. Also, do a search on teaching writing and read the various threads.

[Songbird]

Okay, this will be very short as I have a huge MA assignment due....

I teach writing. How long will you do it for? One or 2 semesters (whole year)?

First semester- I am teaching small things, a few weeks on notes, letters, invitations, envelopes (very different in Chinese) and resumes. At the end of this 'period' I held an exam for letters, both personal & business.

For this week I am doing something different- I was given a simple role-plaing game, so they will play it in pairs, write about their experience and then create their own game- I real challenge!

Next 2 weeks- will do the planning process. They are utterly clueless about planning and not throwing themselves straight into it. Even when they do begin longer pieces you will still need to reel 'em in.

The next couple of lessons we will begin differing paragraph structures. Search the net for these in wriiting websites (esp. OWL don't have time to look for site now). There will be an exam on this at the end.

But the last 2 weeks I will be having writing conferences, mainly because I will be continuing teaching them next semester. I will do this over 2 weeks, I barely get through 17 students in the 2 hour period!

Next year- about 6 weeks- will revise planning, continue the various paragraph structures. In the last half will battle it out with bigger pieces, e.g. essays. Won't be too big, less than 200 words (they are barely at CET4 level and they only write 120 words). There's no point teaching them to write pages and pages if they can't refine the quality of what they have first. Take 1 bite at a time.

[eslstudies]

A basic question: What is the students' major? Teaching real life text types that they are likely to encounter in the workforce makes sense [eg, business English]. Some of the textbooks available in Foreign Language bookstores aren't too bad, and may help you.
Also, you need a very strong command of grammar to teach writing effectively.

[mjlpsu]

The best supplementary materials for writing are at http://owl.english.purdue.edu
I use a bit of it for my writing classes because it goes really well with the book the school gave us.
You need to teach them about process, citation, plagiarism, research, and grammar. Those seem to be the most important aspects of writing that students are lacking.

[seperley]

My results from teaching writing have been good, but it required many hours of arduous correction. Why? Although they had Chinese teachers who taught writing, their papers went uncorrected, and the students expected me to overlook serious flaws as well. As soon as they caught onto the fact that I was actually reading their papers, they made corrections and continued to make corrections until I found their work acceptable. From that point on, my students' work progressed nicely.

I found it interesting that my students were willing to write about personal experiences such as their fears, their happiest moments, their most memorable friends or relatives. While these topics may seem juvenile to E1 students, my Chinese students reveled in relating personal experiences. It seemed that they had a very good sense of beginning, middle and end.

One exercise which I found useful was to give the students a five-paragraph essay which I had composed for them. They were instructed to study it and to employ expressions as well as transitional words and phrases which they found in the essay. I began with an informal essay and then gave them a formal essay. I pointed out the differences between the two.

Initially, these students displayed very little aptitude for writing in the English language. Given time and direction, however, they actually produced 300-500 word in-class essays for their final exams which required little or no correction.

I admit that this may be a fluke or the result of greater per-student attention than usual. I taught only one group of forty students for two hours per week, so I was able to spend more time with their papers than any other foreign teacher (or Chinese teacher for that matter) could.

[AussieGuyInChina]

[Lorean]