Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Unreal]

I have been working at my hagwon for 4 months now and two weeks ago the director suddenly decided that all of my conversation classes should be changed into essay classes. I was told something to the effect that conversation classes were not serious enough (too many games) and that parents want to see their kids doing real work - that is, work that parents can see and that can help their children do well on exams. Our school is very exam oriented and almost everything we do focuses on the students doing well on their school exams.

So I would like to know if you teach any essay writing classes and how you teach them. Are there any fun or interactive activities you do with them? How do you encourage them to do homework? (I haven't given homework for a long time as most students won't do it anyway in my experience unless the teacher threatens with sticks or phone calls).

For a couple of these classes I'm teamed up with a Korean English teacher and for these particular classes we are expected to create our own curriculum. I don't even know where to start with these classes, which will begin this week.

[Scott in HK]

I have a load of advice for you...far too much to put into this post...

A quick hint is too put 'five paragraph essay' into a browser and starting looking around...plenty there to build a writing program...though it would be have to be brought down to the level of your students...

if you want some more info..pm me and I will give you my phone number and we can chat about writing classes...I taught writing in Hong Kong for about six years...and I did my Masters work on how young learners develop their reading and writing skills...lots of texts lying around...

[lookingtoteach]

I taught a two writing classes, one for beginners/intermediate learners three times a week for 40 minutes each, and one for advanced students twice a week for 75 minutes each. For the MWF class, I taught basic writing skills like topic sentence, sequencing, cause and effect, etc. I focused mainly on creative stories, movie and book reviews, etc. for that class; the students ranged from Gr. 2-7. For the T/Th class I focused on reading comprehension for the first part of the class and creative writing for the second. This class had three students from Gr. 6-9. I had them write a lot of research essays, but because the class was so long they also wrote some creative stories during the second half of the class. I also gave these ones a chance to do some English homework they may have from their public school so I could help them out on it. This class had really strict parents, so I thought I'd throw them a break once in a while with the English homework time. But I had to come up with my own curriculm as well. I used Spectrum Writing Gr. 4 for my intermediate class and various Reading Comp books for the advanced one.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I'd suggest trying to find out what the written composition portion of government English exams consists of, and trying to taylor your teaching to that.