Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Gary-Korea]

So I have reluctantly agreed to teach a bunch of 1st grade high school students how to write an essay in 3 hours. The students English ability is meant to be good, which will be very refreshing compared to my usual students.

I want to make this class as painless as possible for me and the students so I am asking the Dave's Cafe community for some advice. How can I make this extremely dry topic a little bit more fun and palatable for the students?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[The Gipkik]

As a first step to writing coherent paragraphs, you could start with this activity. It may not follow the introduction, body, conclusion type of format required for an essay, but at this stage getting the students to see and understand how to put paragraphs together may be a more useful mini-goal.

Write some sentence connecting words on the board: Then, after that, next, furthermore, moreover, finally...

1) Get students into teams. Have at least five teams with one strong student on each team.
2) Write an initial sentence on 5 pieces of paper. For example: Last night, I heard a loud noise while I was sleeping.
3) Pass a paper to each team and ask them to brainstorm together (in their L1 is okay) and write a followup sentence. Encourage imagination and creativity, an anything goes kind of license, and they write one sentence.
4) Give a time limit for this, say 1 or 2 minutes. When they hear the bell, or your call, they pass their papers to the next team in a clockwise or counterclockwise route.
5) Each team continues to add one sentence to the paragraph. Stress that they should read the first sentences before they add on their sentence.
6) When the team that wrote the first sentence gets their paper back again, ask them to write a concluding sentence, something to wrap up the paragraph. Give some examples on the board to guide them.
7) Finally, have each team stand up and read the paragraphs to each other.

[waynehead]

I teach essay writing to some advanced middle/high school students and I've found the most important thing is finding a topic that's interesting to them.

For example, I feigned ignorance about Dokdo and they couldn't wait to write an essay explaining why it belonged to Korea "forever and utterly," as one student put it.

[Goku]

Essay writing is incredibly fun and interesting if there is a lot of emotion or logic behind it.

The key is to do both. Naturally, someone more logical is going to have a better essay, but for some people it takes a lot of emotion to get them charged enough to write or even think.

Fairly obvious, but choose topics that are controversial.
More importantly make the emotionally driven people, charged. Give them some god awful immoral idea that people can argue about.

People HATE when their beliefs are challenged. It can drive them to defensive positions, and more importantly it can drive them to write really exciting essays. Have them write contrary to their own beliefs, it will make them stronger essay writers and more open to other sides and of the world.

I remember I had to write an essay arguing FOR cannibalism. It was probably the most provocative and interesting essay I had ever written. It changed my perspective a bit of the world and made me wiser.

One topic you can choose is have the students argue that civilization and modern technological advances are all bad things. They are ruining society. This is less fun than cannibalism but at least you won't be stepping on toes.

Have them argue that innocent people should go to jail, not criminals.

Have them argue that music is destructive and can harm society.

Etc...

[Bloopity Bloop]

Have them argue that drugs SHOULD be legalized and regulated by governments.

They should, you know.

[ddeubel]

Here's a nice essay cloze along the lines of the persuasive essay ideas described above.

Prewriting activities are key. Get them organizing their thoughts etc.... Use brainstorming , I often play Angel/Devil. One group are angels and say the adv. of things. / other devils and state disadvantages using transitions etc....

Videos about issues can help too.

Cheers,

DD
http://eflclassroom.ning.com

[schwa]

I started a 10-week course in creative writing today with a small afterschool group of middleschool students. Different from your situation but this technique might help.

The first hour the students were a bit shy & reluctant to really commit to paper so in the 2nd hour I tried an idea I stumbled upon on the net: 3-minute free-write.

I asked them what you need to do before hard exercise or playing a sport & elicited "stretching." I explained that writing requires stretching too. I told them they would have 3 minutes to write as much as possible about anything whatsoever & not to worry about spelling, grammar, or content. Just quantity & speed. Ready, set, go!

If they stopped I urged them not to think too much, just write quickly. For the most part they all scribbled away diligently. When the 3 minutes was up I had them put down their pens & count their words. I praised them for their numbers (with a small prize for the wordiest) & told them to close their books. The activity was finished. No reading, discussion, or revision. It only took up 5 minutes of classtime.

This really worked. When we started the next serious exercise, their ink flowed much more easily. Simple & amazingly effective. They noticed the difference too.

I plan to use it weekly & to encourage them to increase their word counts. Probably some good material they can mine later on as well.

[iggyb]

Didn't have time to read the other comments...

If you have the semester to work on it, I wouldn't focus on working on Timing until the last third of the class. I'd work on understanding what makes a good essay in Western academia and work on that and focus early on revision and revision and revision.

As far as motivation --- I've gotten results by increasing the audience for the essays. In most classes, the teacher is the audience. Many use peer review. I like to take it to the whole school and the world using posting on the Internet and on the wall in the hall. I do this through the whole writing process.

When they know their friends and teachers and administrators and parents and anybody will be reading it, it helps motivate them to take it more seriously.

Letting them pick the topic for each group of essays is another good idea...