Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SeoulMan6]

I'm curious what textbooks you use for teaching writing to university students.

Any recommendations, good or bad?

[Dazed and Confused]

I like Step-by-Step Writing. There are 4 levels so you could use book 3 or 4 depending on the student's level.

[legalquestions]

Evergreen is the book name

[Intrepid]

Evergreen is good but might be too comprehensive and expensive for a 42 hour/semester uni writing class.
I used Mosaic I Writing to decent effect in uni classes. Some good exercises, some nice readings, short assignments, overall just about enough for the 14 weeks.

[WK2008]

Mosaic is probably a tier 2 text, IMO. It's not the best, but far from the worst. It's been a few months since I reviewed it, but I recall that it was heavy on the graphics and formatting, and a little short on substance.

You basically need to come to grips with what your students need right now. Do they have basic issues with sentence structure?

Can they format a proper paragraph? Most Koreans writers tend to treat English as if it's Korean, and so they skip spaces before open parens, and include extra spaces before commas, periods, and so on. At the start of their freshman year, many have difficulty remembering to capitalize the first word of a sentence, and/or they capitalize excessively. So formatting is often an issue.

What styles of writing do you intend to teach -- anything creative or descriptive?

To what degree do you intend to discuss the writing process, and how to overcome writer's block? You may want to discuss techniques like clustering/semantic webs/bubble-mapping (all the same thing), brainstorming, outlining, and so on.

Your choices in the above, and what you feel comfortable with teaching "from scratch" will help guide you in selecting a text, or even doing without. If you have a solid grip on teaching writing, and the ability to create your own materials, no text is really necessary, IMO.

For a basic composition class that needed to teach basic sentence structure, punctuation, basic editing skills, paragraph formatting, writing process techniques, descriptive note-taking and writing, focusing on your target audience, and the attitude and philosophy of writing, I chose First Steps in Academic Writing, by Ann Hogue, and I'm supplementing that with my own material, and that from courses I took in Ethnography, etc.