Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bish]

I am going to be teaching some of my High Schoolers a writing class from January. I have not really had much experience of writing and want to do as good a job as possible to help them be able to write reasonably well for the school newspaper.

I am wondering if anybody has any recommendations for writing textbooks, I have tried looking but not found a great deal and have not found anything particularly useful online.

If I was more experienced I would develop a curriculum myself but I don't think I can do that as of yet as I have not so much experience in teaching writing.

Any recommendations would be really appreciated!

[laoshihao]

I found that my high schoolers needed a refresher on basic sentence structuring. So I used a book called Great Sentences for Great Paragraphs. It seems simple, but most of the students made mistakes in the simplest parts of the sentence. They confused articles, had poor capitalization skills, didn't know how to properly use prepositions or conjunctions, etc. The book goes over this stuff step-by-step. My students found it helpful. I augmented it with powerpoint slides and other excercises I found that I could use with the lessons for each unit. I found the book at Kim & Johnson's off exit 5 in Gangnam Station in Seoul. There is a direct entrance from the subway level so you don't have to go up to the street.

[bish]

Thanks very much, that's what I need and then I can build it up afterwards. I have been asked to do it to help them with the newspaper but they need to go right back to basics. The school paper is not my concern for now. They need to learn the basics!

Thanks for your tip. Any more will be very much appreciated...

[storysinger81]

I love Writers INC. It's more like a reference book than the Korean style activity book that passes as a textbook, but it's great information for writers of all levels and summarizes the latest research about writing instruction in an easy-to-grasp format. I was given that book in seventh grade and used it throughout high school and college.

This year, I used it with an advanced writing class made up of students from the foreign language high school I teach who applied for the class. Although their level is way above your average ESL high school kid, we skipped a bunch of stuff about writing good sentences and paragraphs because they already got most of it. They loved this book.