Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yu_Bum_suk]

So today I find out that my proposal to do a high school writing course has been approved. It will start sometime next week - I haven't been told when. It will be one day a week, not two as I requested. It will be 60-90 minutes long. The students will be higher-level grade 1s and 2s, capable of taking a class where English is the language of instruction but with no experience writing anything substantial in English at all, basically.

I have a lot of ideas but would love to hear yours. My objective is to get them capable of writing a simple English essay and having a better idea how to come up with a grammatical sentence.

Has anyone done this sort of thing before?

Does anyone have good suggestions for textbooks?

What ideas in terms of topics and teaching methods have worked best for you?


Thanks so much in advance for any help anyone can offer.

[PRagic]

How about we work in reverse: You share you completed syllabus for a class, and we'll all follow through with our own additional ideas. Putting a class together is what we are paid for, after all.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[ttompatz]

[Woland]

It sounds like you want to be teaching them expository writing. I would focus on the five-paragraph essay format. Not because I love it or think that it is a format that lends itself to good writing, but because it is a format that will prove to be of use to your students in the future, especially on tests like TOEFL and TOEIC. In addition, I think there are a number of things you can teach very clearly within the five-paragraph format, like signposting and paragraphing, that are transferable to other types of writing, especially academic writing.

ttompatz is right about the importance of presenting models and having students look at them, critique them and compare them to their own work. I would add that you need to choose what they should focus their attention on in reading model essays. Especially if you want them to notice aspects of genre or grammmar or essay structure, you'll need to draw their attention to that. Otherwise, they'll read for meaning (like normal people) and miss these things.

For example, to teach paragraphing, I would give students a model essay with a clear paragrpah structure (or a five paragraph essay with the five paragraphs clearly defined), have them read it and talk about the content. Once that is out of the way, then draw their attention to the organization and paragraph structure have them talk about why they think the writer changed paragraphs when they did. You can use this a basis for talking about paragraph structure and essay structure. Set them to write with this in mind.

Then, on another day, shortly thereafter, give them a good essay, but one which you have broken down to individual sentences, each on a separate line (but still in order) and ask them to work alone on regrouuping the sentences into paragraphs. Then, put them in pairs to check each other's work and reach agreement on what the paragraph structure should be. Put pairs together and so on until the whole class is in agreement on what the structure should be. Have them explain their reasons for the paragraphing. Then show them the original. Hopefully, there will be some differences so they can talk about them and about why they think the writer organized things the way they did. You can talk about how in some cases there are options and what they came up with and what the writer came up with aren't matters of absolute right or wrong, but simply following different choices up. Then have them look at their own writing and if they want to make any changes in what they've written in terms of paragraphing before handing it in to you.

Final follow up, choose one especially good essay that a student has written and prepare a handout or an overhead of it, and ask that student to talk about the decisions that went into the structure they created.

This kind of idea for using models and having students work through them in different ways can be applied to a lot of other areas (like misuse of the passive - please teach them not to do this, please!) in a writing class.

Good luck! I'm sure these students will look back in the future and recognize what a bonus they got in this writing class.

EDIT: Fixed typos and missing words; I am a bad typist.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Great ideas, Ttompatz and Woland. Some of those things had already occured to me but you gave me other really good things to think about.

[Scott in Incheon]

Although I agree with all the advice given about writing essays. I think it might be better to introduce them to paragraph writing first. You can still use all the advice given just a smaller scale. Introduce them to different types of paragraphs, so that they know when to use the different types.

When they can write a good paragraph, then move towards the writing of the five paragraph essay. There some good links on the net for this and if I was at work I would link them.

I start out my writing classes with a little thesaurus work and the idea of picking powerful accurate words. Using the word 'interesting' as an example I give them 17 other words that mean interesting.

Then we work on combining sentences together and creating different types of sentences.

Each of these are short classes as I always stress that we are in a wrting class not a grammar class.

Then we start work on paragraphs...usually I choose the narrative format first. I stress the rule of three a lot....three ideas to support your topic and three bits of evidence/examples/extra info to support each those ideas. This idea of three sets the foundation for the five paragraph essay and gives some structure to their writing.

I am not sure about texts for your students...I don't think they need them. But you could look at Paragraph Essentials for some good ideas about paragraph writing. The text is definitely aimed at older students but you could take the ideas and simplify them for your students.

Rather than a text, I would work with handout about each style of paragraph.

Also you should focus on the writing process...giving students the idea of prewriting, first drafts, revising, editing...and then proofreading...

I always stress to my education students the importance encouraging students as much as you can when they write. Encouragement in the margins and some suggestions for better writing and then at the end of the paper some overall ways to improve their writing.

I also tell my students to only mark pre-determined grammar points for each paper. No one wants to get back a paper full of red marks. Just pick one thing and work on it. Then choose something else for the next paper.

I have some other things for differnt types of writing..happy to pass them along but it would be easier to do over the phone....pm me if you want and I can share some other lesson plans with you

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[Novernae]

All the writing classes we've done have been essay classes. If that's where you're headed I could send you the process we've been using. I'm too tired to explain it tonight, but let me know if you're interested and I can send you the files. They are basically an introduction to the standard 4-5 paragraph essay (intro/body/conclusion) with heavy emphasis on the thesis statement and topic sentences to force them to properly structure their essays. We've taught it quite successfully to advanced middle and elementary students. Our students (after a month of intensives of one 40 minute class a day) are writing much better essays than any of the American 'contest' winners to be found on-line (which are pathetic but that's another topic for another thread).

[Hotpants]

I also wouldn't give the students essay writing tasks until they can write a good paragraph. Any errors they make in a paragraph will only be repeated ad infinitum throughout the whole essay making it a pain for you to correct.

I would recommend 'Great Paragraphs' by HoughtonMifflin publishers. It has paragraph writing taken from different approaches - a personal narrative, a descriptive narrative, a dramatic narrative etc. It builds up each exercise nicely, and should be of suitable content if your high school students can already write approximate sentences.

I would also consider the idea of including a diary - perhaps as a homework assignment which is semi-checked. I made up my own English diary book for students which have topic prompts heading each page, such as 'Things that annoyed me today,' or 'My dream birthday present' etc.

[Woland]

No disrespect to Hotpants, but I have to make the argument against the idea that you need to teach students how to write a good paragraph before moving on to longer texts.

This is essentially a bottom-up approach to teaching writing. Taken to its extreme (and I've seen this done in Turkey), students have to write good sentences before they can move on to the paragraph. This approach to teaching writing seems to me to be based on a number of false premises.

The first of these is that a bottom up approach will lead to fewer mistakes when students write longer texts. But I would argue that any improvement is the result of time and practice and not the approach itself. In other words, allowing students to write longer texts over an equal amount of time with proper instruction will result in equivalent quality. I also don't think it requires that much more time on the teacher's part to deal with these problems, if the teaching of grammar in writing is approached reasonably (see below). I would also argue that other types of mistakes, having to do with discourse structure and genre persist longer in a bottom up approach.

A second false assumption of bottom up approaches is that the smaller units are building blocks of the larger ones. That is, that a paragraph is compilation of good sentences, that an essay is a collection of paragraphs put together. I would argue just the opposite, that what the paragraphs are is determined in the context of the larger text, that what the grammar of any sentence should be is more determined by choices related to its discourse context than anything else. In short, a top down approach is needed to effectively teach writing.

This doesn't mean giving up on teaching grammar or paragraph structure, but instead locating that teaching in the discourse of larger texts.

A third reason for not teaching the paragraph is that it is an excessively artificial exercise in a number of ways. First, the paragraph structure that students are taught (topic sentence, supporting sentences, concluding sentence) doesn't really match with the structure of real paragraphs in real texts consistently. It is really a five paragraph essay structure in miniature that they are being taught. Why not teach them the real thing?

Second, in the real world, people don't write paragraphs. It is almost purely an ESL instructional genre, existing nowhere else. And if we recognize that essays are not made up of such paragraphs strung together, then teaching it becomes more purposeless. In the real world, people write essays, which is a real genre, at least in academic contexts. And, as I noted above, the paragraphing of those essays seems largely determined by decisions made within the context of the larger text, not at the level of the paragraph itself (if the formula were so easy, we wouldn't have to spend so much time on it).

If you start on essays, will students write good ones right away? Probably not. At the beginning they may not produce paragraphs, their sentencces will be full of ungrammaticalities, they'll have trouble with coherence. They'll even still be making mistakes at the end, as they would in the other approach. But all this stuff are things to work on, to teach. And the students would have been challenged more by a more complex task in the process, and that is arguably good for them.

To get to my second point, I'm not saying don't teach grammar, but rather locate the grammar you teach in the larger structure of the texts you have students look at and that they produce. Don't try to teach everything because you can't. Pick out grammar points that students have trouble with consistently, that affect comprehension, and work from their problems to solutions.

It is a different way of teaching than what you might be used to, and I'm not saying the switch will be easy, but my experience has been that the students not only get better at the grammar and paragraph type stuff, but also master genre better and tend to enjoy writing more in this approach.

PS I offer this challenge to anyone. Explain the paragraph structure of what I've written here in terms of a traditional bottom up analysis and traditional teaching of the structure of individual paragraphs. It doesn't fit, but I don't think this is a bad argument overall.

EDIT: Fixed typos; everybody needs to revise!

[Novernae]

Thank you Woland! Those were nearly my points exactly (but being overtired from marking way too many essays I didn't even attempt to put them into words).

While students have to have at least a certain proficiency in grammar to begin writing longer texts, meaning at least a basic understanding of what a sentence is, it is not absolutely necessary to have perfect grammar to begin writing longer texts. Different grammar issues emerge that are specific to writing that tend to lean towards style more than simple grammar. Sentences which may be gramatically perfect in isolation might not fit in a longer text, making them incorrect. To try to teach this in isolation would be confusing. Also, grammar (generally) is another class. We sholdn't focus on teaching them grammar as they can learn that elsewhere. If a common mistake comes up, clarify it, but the focus of any writing class should be on the writing itself

Effective writing is about the structure and organisation of the overall piece. An essay is an argument, or at least an attempt to convince the reader of something. More than learning grammatical sentences, students have to be taught to reason and think through ideas in a logical and creative way. They must learn the individual components in the context of the longer piece so they can see how they fit together and work towards furthering their goal of convincing you of their opinion.

I have to admit that before I came to Korea I had no idea that there was a standard 5 paragraph essay format. I thought it must be an ESL thing until I reasearched it and found that it was standard in the US. I'm glad I wasn't taught to write that way, though I can see the advantages of a simple formula that doesn't require much effort to teach. Unfortunately I can also see the results in the essay competitions that are rampant through the US that reward substandard, ineffective writing. By taking that structure, but molding it to what I learned to be good writing, I feel I have successfully taught my students a way to write essays that will be both effective for their language tests (follows the toefl rules which are based on the US system), while teaching them effective writing and reasoning skills that will be useful to them if they ever choose a career or path of study that will require high quality reasoning and organisational skills.

Anyway, thanks for bringing all of this up.


PS I do disagree on one point though. A properly written body paragraph should consist of a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. This does not apply to the introduction and conclusion necessarily though, so you are correct in that it does not apply accross the board. Also, a topic sentence and a thesis statement are vastly different elements, though for some reason many university graduates somehow don't see this and teach the two as being interchangeable. grrrrr...

[Hotpants]

Depends what we're talking about here - academic writing or writing for other functions. I think the writing teacher needs to decide what should be the outcome aims of the class and plan a structured course geared towards that.

I feel that if a student can organize a paragraph well, it helps immensely to develop a logical argument for a given topic and avoid unnecessary content that doesn't strengthen or support the point. I wish I had known about topic sentences when I was at college. (Ok, so someone'll point out that I'm not using topic sentences to write this post...)

Top down or bottom up. Perhaps doesn't matter if you have sound teaching methodology to support your approach and can actually 'teach' writing skills. Also, many of us don't have courses long enough to be able to effectively cover all the points required for a satisfactory full scale essay.

If a native speaker is to teach a writing class over a local Korean teacher, you need to think about the main point which Korean teachers may not be able to address - the different thinking approach to what makes suitable content for the writing topic. Many Korean students simply translate their essay from Korean to English when writing. It's a whole cultural philosophy difference which I find potentially too hard to overcome if I let my students submit several page essays from the word go. It's important for the Korean students to learn the different approach to writing and therein lies the value of their foreign English teacher teaching them writing.

[Novernae]

Hotpants,
I don't think what you're saying is oposite to what I'm saying. I would never expect my students to hand in full essays from the get go. That takes a lot of background work. The only place I think we really differ is in the idea of a paragraph being taught in context.

[Woland]