Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Keepongoing]

i will be teaching a 3 hour basic writing class to mixed level, English major students. If you had to do this, how would you lesson plan each class? I have done 2 hour classes with no problem, but never a 3 hour one. The class will meet once a week

[winterfall]

[Hamlet]

Don't think of it as one 3-hour class. Think of it as two 1 1/2 hour classes that just happen to be on the same day.

Have one lesson for the first class. Take a break. Then come back and start fresh for the second lesson, just as if it were another day.

The same material has to be covered in a semester. Whether it's covered in one hour, 1/12 hour or 3 hr blocks doesn't really matter.

Have fun!

[Young FRANKenstein]

My advice is to not even bother attempting essay writing. Most Korean students don't have the knowledge of English writing skills to even attempt an essay.

Concentrate on paragraph forms: drill topic sentences (and the differences between main idea and controlling idea) into their heads, support sentences, conclusions, transition phrases, etc.

Once they have the basics of the paragraph itself, then you can concentrate on different kinds of paragraphs: description, opinion, definition, process, etc.

I would also throw in other basic writing skills they should know: capitalization, punctuation, articles, recognizing comma splices, fragments and run-on sentences (among other errors), etc.

You can save the essay for later once they are comfortable with the paragraph writing style. If they are comfortable with paragraphs, expanding the ideas to essays is pretty easy. Topic sentence becomes introduction paragraph (with thesis statement), support sentences become support paragraphs, concluding sentence becomes concluding paragraph. Transitional phrases become even more important now that they are used to connect paragraphs together.

Many of these lessons can easily fit the 90 minute format, so doing two lesson for a 3-hour class is easy enough.

I usually take most of the first semester just on basics and 3-4 paragraph types, and maybe a class or two explaining how to expand our ideas to the essay. The following semester we work on essays and essay types nearly exclusively (if they did well with paragraphs the term before), or review paragraphs again for a couple weeks (if they didn't)

[cubanlord]