Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Unreal]

Hello fellow teachers,

I am preparing a writing class for about 40 English teachers next week and I'm looking for ideas on how to go about it. I have five classes of 3 hours each so the classes are long and the group is quite large and the level should be relatively high. I have some materials prepared about how to write essays well (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, different types of essays). So I'm thinking of spending a 3 hour class on each topic, or thereabouts.

I would like any ideas about group activities I could do with them to get them interested and involved as well as use up a hefty amount of time. Most of my classes are immediately after lunch as well so the teachers might feel after-lunch-drowzy or soju buzzed so I need something to keep them awake and interested. I imagine that they want to be there during summer vacation about as much as I do.

I'm thinking of an initial ice-breaker, group brainstorming for prewriting, and peer criticism and editing...although I'm not sure how well peer criticism will go over. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[cubanlord]

check out my website for some information. Don't forget to sign the guestbook!

[denverdeath]

Writing songs, letters(business/friendly/cover/follow-up/rejection/invitation/resignation), e-mails, resumes, recipes, and poems. Jokes might be stretching it a bit.

You can also develop the essay writing further by including various kinds of essays(definition, etc). I recommend Evergreen as it's a great book that moves from paragraphs into essays and focuses on most types of essays written in the humanities and has lots of examples and writing sections, esp for the paragraphs. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of your students still need work on paragraphs first, probably sentences as well. Move from topic sentence into thesis statement. Spend a whole class on hand-outs related to layout, punctuation, and grammar(esp conjunctions and articles). You can also go into other disciplines. Perhaps get them to do some interviews/surveys in class and write about their findings.

The Great Sentences/Paragraphs/Essays series is pretty good as well.

[schwa]

If these are regular secondary school english teachers, I'm afraid you're in for a bit of shock -- their writing ability, for the most part, will be abysmal. Mistakes in every sentence, little sense of the function of a paragraph, etc.

Your units sound helpful. They've already studied that stuff (in theory) but god knows they need the practice.

In your shoes I'd keep the in-class writing exercises at grade-school level & to save their egos disguise them as material they can re-use with their students. Its still going to be painful for them.

They're acutely aware that their writing isnt up to speed but theres no quick fix. I think you'll find that most of them avoid giving their students any writing assignments at all because they dont have the confidence to correct them. So the cycle perpetuates itself.

Even though its a "writing" course, vary your activities & leave ample time for small-group discussions in which they can relax a bit & be funny & use just spoken english at their own speed.

Best luck. Let us know how it goes.

[Hotpants]

Writing for 40 teachers is a joke. There is no way you can monitor everything they are doing unless you have 40 pairs of eyes and spend every minute of a 24 hour day checking their assignments. The effect you can make may be limited, so you are right in that you should try to make it as fun as possible. I do adult writing classes, (this month I have 60 students to oversee - although fortunately split into 5 classes) and I've prepared my own books to stretch for 12 week courses. I can't share them over the internet, but I do know that an instructor at Kyungpook Uni in Daegu (search my website for writing materials below, sub category 'Finch') who has some online books that he uses with his students. One is a diary which I think is a great resource for students. They can just jot things down as they feel by way of free-thinking.

Peer editing will have to be a must if you are the sole teacher. There are also other strategies you can use to fill time. Instead of thinking about purely academic writing, you can set them mini writing-based projects. For example, one project I like to set which works well every time is for the students to work in groups to design a new gadget/invention. They can annotate their diagrams, give detailed instructions, write a sales pitch, and then present their ideas. Uses at least 2 hours - will take 2 days with 40 students presenting! Also, give your students a presentation task whereby they have to prepare a speech on a subject of their choosing (Powerpoint also). One more idea is to write text to accompany storyboards (see also my website for story board resources). They have to start with basics such as fundamental grammar and sentence structure types before they can work up to a full blown essay. Another thing I've found that takes up time nicely is for students to translate a newspaper article from Korean to English. You need to pre-teach the passive for this. One more idea, which my co-worker is currently doing, is to set up a weblog/website for the students to contribute to. They can post pictures and messages on it on a given topic. I would assume that your school has a computer lab.

[matthews_world]

1st hour of class you'll want to work on teaching a different writing strategy, after all, they are teachers and could use the helpful knowledge in their own classes.

2nd hour, bring in a topic. Apply the brainstorming stratagies and have the teachers work in small groups.

You may want to have outlining/free writing next or bring in articles about the topic you would be discussing that day.

You may want to start small and scaffold their writing, beginning w/ paragraphs.

[buster brown]

As others have said, the writing is probably going to be abysmal due to the habit of translation (Coming up with an idea in Korean, then translating it into an English sentence). I generally emphasize the editing phase of writing, demonstrating with examples of my own writing and the amount of corrections and changes it goes through before it's 'finished'.

There are various types of structured sentence-writing activities that can be done either in pairs or alone. For example, pick a letter of the alphabet and have them compose sentences in which each word begins with that letter (Ex. 'A' - An angry ant ate an apple.) I try to have them see how many sentences they can compose with a minimum of 5 or 6 words, nonsense if okay as long as the grammar is correct. You can walk around and monitor, then have some of the pairs write their better sentences on the board as examples. You can use some of these to demonstrate s-v agreement, adverb/adjective positioning, the need for articles/prepositions/connecting words, etc.
Other constraints to try:
Alphabetical - Initial letters follow alphabetical order. Ex. A beautiful child doesn't ever forget grandma.
Chain - The final letter of the first word becomes the initial letter of the following word. Ex. As she eats salad, does she ever remember Robert?
Final Letters - This is generally the hardest, but they have to use words with the same final letter to compose sentences. Ex. Did dad bleed red blood?
Word Size - Use words that all contain the same number of letters. Ex. 4-letter words - They left from here with mom's bike.
I use these as warm-up activities and emphasize their importance because they have to think in English to write them, i.e. it takes the translation process out of their writing. If you need more ideas for structured sentence-writing, PM me and I'll dig up the article where I first gleaned this idea, it seems like there were 12 or 13 different suggested ideas.

Another activity I've used successfully comes from newspaper headlines. Cut out a bunch of headlines and separate the words. I can't remember how many I used, but I filled an A4 page with them. Each pair got a copy. I explained how newspaper headlines were very simplified English with most of the connecting words removed. Articles, prepositions, linking verbs, conjunctions, adverbs, and pronouns are used very sparingly. I have them compose sentences using the words on the page as their adjectives, nouns, and verbs--the students have to come up with the correct linking words to make them grammatically correct. They can only use a word one time, then mark it off the list. I let them change the form of the required words only enough to make the grammar correct. Again, you can pick some of the pairs to write example sentences on the board.

Maybe the best advice I can give you is to lower your expectations for what you'll be able to accomplish. Students believe "After the foreign teacher corrects my writing, I'll be able to write perfect English!" I try to squelch that idea as it puts too much pressure on me to correct every mistake and explain the reason they can't use a certain preposition with a certain verb. Good luck with your class!

[Hotpants]

I'm just thinking about the final lines of the previous poster. I get so many students who repeat the same mistakes in writing over and over no matter how much we labor over a particular point. I spend so much time on adding 's' to verbs, or maintaining past tense, for example. There are various reasons why students do so - number one cause is just handing in an essay for the sake of handing in, regardless of quality of essay. They also think 'ah, yeah, my teach'll correct it for me.' (I most commonly just highlight points of errors and tell the students to correct them by themselves or write down a list of errors on the board for class correction - and they all spot the errors straight away then...why couldn't they have realized it while composing their damn essays??) I think I'm quite polite to students who are like this as I don't see any point at getting angry in front of them, although behind the facade, I kind of feel like I'm wasting some of my efforts. Especially as it takes most of the weekend to go through all the students' writing assignments. Does anyone have similar sentiments? Have you ever managed to revolutionize Korean students' written sentence capabilities in what may only be a semester long course? My courses are also non-credit, which doesn't help my student's motivation.

[Unreal]

Update:

I finished my 3 classes this week, a total of 10 hours and everything went very well from my perspective.

First day:
I introduced myself, where I'm from, where I teach, how long I've been in Korea, etc. so they could get to know me a bit andfeel more comfortable with me.

Then we did an ice breaker where I put the students into groups of 4 and each group had to get to know each other a little and fill out the following sentences:

One of us______
Two of us______
Three of us_____
All of us_____
None of us_____

This worked out well and I found this idea at:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/talk/questions/breakers.shtml

I actually had a second ice breaker that was more individual than group based but when I got there, I realized that there was no space in my classroom to mingle as it was jam-packed full of desks, so I skipped the second ice breaker.

Then I gave a talk about different prewriting tools that can be used to generate ideas for essays (brainstorming, freewriting, mapping, idea charts, etc.)

The students then did individual freewriting for 10 minutes after which we did group brainstorming about inventions (I used the idea that Hotpants provided earlier in this thread). Then each group did a short presentation on what ideas they came up with. This was a lot of fun. One group invented glasses that could see other people's feelings. The men were having a lot of fun with this idea but preferred that they were x-ray glasses. To this, one woman responded with "Men are wolves!"

The way the classroom was set up, working in groups of four worked perfectly so I did the same thing for next few classes:
1.) Introduce a topic and talk about it for 10-15 minutes
2.) Hand out a lined paper to each group and then have them practice together (this often took the remaining 35 minutes of class)
3.) Students present their group's work (20-25) minutes for 9 groups

The topics covered were: prewriting, developing thesis statements, drafting and writing the body, and writing conclusions.

It took seven class hours to cover all of this. After they got a grasp of the materials in groups, then I was ready to spring their individual essays on them (for grades) on the third day. They would do the same process as before (prewriting, thesis statement, drafting, conclusion) but individually, then exchange each completed step of the writing process with a partner who would then tell them if their writing was clear and on-track.

At the moment they are about half way through the process. I will collect and grade 4 papers:
5 marks for prewriting (I want to see that they came up with a lot of ideas before starting to write so I want to see quantity over quality).
5 marks for the process which includes 2 papers: a first draft (to build the argument structure) and a revision (to fill in any holes and improve flow) which then gets edited (spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc).
10 marks for the final essay.

I think the students had difficulty understanding me at first and I was told that I spoke too softly at times but by the third day they felt comfortable and asked lots of questions so I was able to make clear anything they still didn't quite understand. I have 2 more classes in the middle of August but with the way everything went this week, I'm confident that things will go smoothly.

The resources I used for my course material can be found at:

http://www.wonderfulwritingskillsunhandbook.com/

as well as in these books:
Essay Writing Step-by-Step (Newsweek Education Program, published by Kaplan)...this is a great book that I've used for the basis of a couple courses already, although too hard to use by itself for ESL students

Coles Notes: How to get an "A" in Senior English Essays (Coles Publishing)

After the first day one of my students told me that my class was the first one (they'd already been in classes for a week before I met them) that he wasn't able to fall asleep in. That was a nice comment but I think it really shows how using groups gets people active and involved. I tried not to do anything for more than 25 minutes so that they didn't tire of doing the same thing for too long.

Thank you to everyone who provided comments, especially Hotpants and matthews_world, whose ideas I used in my class. My next class isn't for two weeks but I'll update this again when I'm completely finished.