Korean Job Discussion Forums

[tomato]

I have a middle school class with 3 students.
One of the workbook assignments was to write a letter to an imaginary pen pal.
1 of the students did as instructed, while the other 2 did all the tasks except that one task.

I am sure some of you are familiar with that situation:
if there are no answers to choose or blanks to fill in, the student is lost.
Yet these tasks are probably the most important tasks.
In a foreign language situation in real life,
there are no answers to choose or blanks to fill in.

I told them that we will work on writing letters when class meets next Tuesday.

Any suggestions on how to conduct that class?

[littlelisa]

Maybe the problem is that there are no steps in between the choose your answer and free writing? That's a huge leap to make!

I'd do an exercise where you provide a model text and have the students write something based on your model to make it easier.

Like write your own letter, show it to the class. Then talk about how to open a letter (Dear so and so, ) and close one. Relate it to your example. Then have the class construct a letter with different content than your own. You can do this together as a class. Then have them write another different letter on their own.

So for example, write a letter to your friend about your trip to China. With the class, write one based on that model, but about a trip somewhere else. Or move further from it, and have it be a letter about how your summer camp is. Or your visit to a museum, your first trip skiing, whatever. Then have them write their own based on the model. It can be any subject but one that they saw already. The stronger students will move further from your model, the weaker students will stick closely to the model, but at least it provides a middle step.

I did something similar to this in a class once, and it worked great! I also had an activity where I wrote the sample letter, cut it into pieces and had students work together to decide which is the beginning, middle and end. Or you could have one with fill in the blanks with choices, but some choices depend on previous answers, so that you can't just circle something randomly.

I think the key is to just do anything that will provide a transition from circling an answer to writing a paragraph.

[ddeubel]

I think you have to have students writing ANYTHING for purpose. Not to improve writing skills, to complete an assignment, to get to the next chapter or because the teacher said so. This is all important in some way but it must be packaged in real purposeful communication.

So have the students write letters to each other. Even email. I'd also try my transl8it powerpoint where text messaging appears and they translate it. A great warm up.

I also scaffold writing by giving them a postcard and on each line, a topic.
Hi
Weather
Yesterday
Sites
bye.

You might want to try setting up a writeboard www.writeboard.com and having them communicate this way.

Another good writing activity is to have them converse with a "bot", a human robot online. They cut and paste the text and bring to class and use it for more writing or a role play. See the Talk to Dave link on my web community below.

Also, writing prompts in the form of pictures work wonders. So hard for students to just write based on a blank page. Give them pictures to use and prompt for language.

DD

[kimchi_pizza]

Yea, creative writing is one of the more difficult parts of EFL teaching.

Why? One: creativity naturally. Two: the vocabulary as the lauguage and words used are different than what would be used in say a report, essay or article. A lotta discriptive words are needed which if they don't have good foundation or knowledge of then it's a uphill battle.

My experience? First is to read one or several examples from a book or better yet, one that I wrote. Explain the purpose, the structure, the vocabulary and descriptive language being used. I always stress if you use a noun, find a verb or adjective to complement that noun.

It took me the better part of a year of instruction and practice, but I recently had my class write pourqoi tales (tales that give animals and things human-like characteristics that imaginatively explain facts about nature) and I was very pleased with the outcome.

If it's a story, maybe provide the characters, setting, conflict and let'em try to fill in the missing parts and conclusion.

[Scouse Mouse]

I did something similar in my summer class and had great success with it. The first class I did was an introduction class. I had the students introduce themselves to each other and then introduce their partners to other people. It worked well.

Lesson 2 was a letter writing exercise. I had them do exactly as you did, but instead of telling them to write a letter to a penpal, I told them to write a letter introducing themselves to a penpal. This was an easy step to make, as we simply did a refresher of the previous class and then had them carry it over into letter format.

The next task of the letter writing class was a blast. A Letter of complaint to a hotel manager, complaining about a stay there. I explained to them that they were to imagine the worst vacation ever and then write to complain about it... This exercise was group based and the kids went crazy for it. One person had his baby eaten by a dog, another had their pee coming out of the shower whenever they went to the toilet... madness!

The next class was on story-telling, so I explained to them the structure of a story and had them write and tell stories about themselves. Then I had them transfer the hotel incident into a horror story. Again, there were amazing results. These are not high level students, but are poor public-school middle school kids with very few having any opportunity for english tuition outside of public school.

My goal for the class (10 lessons) is to have them combine the situational conversation I am teaching them with some creative writing, and in the last 2 classes they will be writing and then performing a play. Hopefully their imaginations will flourish!

[tomato]

Today was the fatal day and there was a last-minute schedule change.
I taught the elementary class instead.
But I had the same problem there.
I checked the elementary students' workbooks, and sure enough, they did just fine on multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank.
But there was one assignment in which they were to draw a picture of a friend.
They couldn't think of a friend to draw.
There was another assignment in which they were to draw a single item in one frame and multiple items in another frame.
They couldn't think of anything to draw in singular and plural.

I used to work Monday and Wednesday morning at one 어린이집 and Tuesday and Thursday at another 어린이집.
The MW 어린이집 displayed children's art work on the walls and the TTh 어린이집 didn't.
I taught the same lessons at both places.
Each lesson would center around one word.
I would draw pictures depicting that word, hold up the pencil, and asked "Who can draw a _____?"

This went along fine at both places as long as the lessons centered around nouns and the children knew what do draw.
But then I gave a lesson on the word "red."
I held up a red crayon and said, "Who can draw something red?"
This did not create a problem at the MW 어린이집.
At the TTh 어린이집, however, it drew a blank.
I had to coax the children. "Draw anything. Draw a house, draw a tree, draw a boy, draw a girl."
When one child finally did venture forth, a few other children followed.
Even then, they drew exactly what the first child drew.

In the toddler class, where the children hadn't had their creativity beaten out of them yet, I didn't have this problem.
The children all screamed "저요" just as they always did.
Each child drew only a scribble, but each child drew a DIFFERENT scribble.