Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Atassi]

Hello all! This thread is meant to address where we left off in another different thread: http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/korea/viewtopic.php?t=65792&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
The discussion led to a different topic: what is important in writing instruction. When asked to provide sources for further reading, I realized that I probably need more info about the teaching situation. Although a lot of what I know comes from research articles from peer-edited journals, I can recommend one book: "Making It Happen: From Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching" by Patricia A. Richard-Amato. This book has the best mix of theory, application, discussion, case studies, and practical activities and recommendations for language teachers that I have yet seen in a textbook of it's kind. It's used in several universities throughout the world now (including here in S Korea), and is honestly the only SLA text that I enjoyed reading from cover-to-cover. Chapter 13 has a wealth of ideas on teaching writing and promoting literacy development.

Since there is at least some interest in the topic, I was hoping that some others on this forum would chime in with their ideas and experiences. What do you believe is important when teaching writing? How positive are the results your students end up with? I don't mean positive as in just being able to create correct sentences according to your grammar instruction. I mean how well are they able to communicate ideas? How well-developed are any essays or other writings that they work on?

I'll start off. In my experience, whereas a native speaker may have to revise a writing several times, a language student will need several more revisions to write a paper equally well. I still experiment with different methods (as we all may be doing), and I personally find the following ideas and methods may have the most potential for future language teaching:

- peer-editing (currently most interesting to me)
- writing strategies (many need this I think)
- focus on process (writing and rewriting multiple drafts being essential)
- focus on organization of ideas, content and on meaning (and grammar only for that purpose)
- final touches only being done for the final draft (as students easily lose focus when revising)

I also find it interesting that students in research studies fail in the long term to develop writing proficiency when their teachers employ surface-level error feedback. It took students' attention away from other types of feedback in the studies, which kept them from becoming better writers.

What experiences have you all had with your own classes and students? Any ideas are welcome, and I am especially interested in hearing about peer-editing in the classroom...

Cheers

[marcus]

Why is peer-editing interesting to you at the moment?

I find that some of the more advanced students can give feedback as to whether they felt some sentences were written well or not, but that it's generally a matter of the blind leading the blind. Many of the edits often turn out to be incorrect. There's also the risk that students might pick up the bad habits of other students.

[gang ah jee]

[Atassi]

Marcus wrote:

[noguri]

The class I'm teaching has about 20 university students, it is called Elementary English Composition.

It's my first time to teach composition.

I'm focusing on paragraph writing but I hope by the end of the semester to get them writing multi-paragraph pieces.

The textbook I'm using has a very clear description of the writing process, that's why I chose it. But it turns out that all of the example essays in it are from ESL students in the U.S. They are writing in the voice of Latinos immigrants in the USA, with a very working-class kind of aspiration that doesn't appeal to Korean university students. I shouldn't have chosen this book! Every sample paragraph in it is "Jorge writes, 'Now I'm a busboy, but by taking ESL classes and community college courses, I hope I can become a land surveyor...'"

The textbook also emphasizes peer review but I've thrown out that idea for this semester. I think I might introduce that in a class that is more advanced than elementary level.

I'm supplementing the book with material from the Barron's series books, Painless Writing and Painless Grammar. The goal of using these books is to work on sentence structure.

I also picked up an SAT writing book that has some very simple and succinct hints about sentence structure and paragraph structure.

[Atassi]

Noguri, do the writing assignments come straight from the book, or are the students allowed to choose a topic? I think the book you chose can maybe be a good introduction to Hispanic immigrant culture, but I understand that your students may just not be interested.

I understand that your course is titled "Elementary English Composition", but I don't know their actual level from that. How is their oral proficiency? I only ask this as I figure that, although the students are "low-level" writers, they may be able to transfer what they know pretty quickly to any writing task with practice.

Oh, and are your students from the same major?

Thanks for telling us your thoughts, and for telling us about your course.

[noguri]

No, the writing assignments in the book are culturally inappropriate for Korean university students in my opinion. So, I manufactured the writing assignments myself. But, I don't let the students choose their topic, I feel that they can do that in a more advanced course. In this basic course I would like them to write on the SAME topic. Is this sound reasoning?

It seems like my students' oral skills with English are not so great overall. Nevertheless, I sense a lot of determination to improve. The students seem to be motivated.

I did try to probe their level by giving an assignment in which they had to write seven sentences. They managed to write them, subject, verb and object! That was a relief!

Then I had them do a freewriting exercise, a comparison/contrast of their high school friends and their university friends.

Some of these freewriting samples seem very promising. I am encouraged. I asked them to examine the keywords in their freewriting and try to formulate a topic sentence.

In today's class I talked about how we'll create a paragraph structure and revise it.

This didn't go over too well, because they don't understand that freewriting is just the beginning and we will be re-writing and revising many times before it will be finished. They think the freewriting is the paragraph.

I was explaining how to write a topic sentence based on the keywords in the freewriting and this seemed to overwhelm them.

I think that in the next class I'll try to assuage their confusion by using a handout I got from Cubanlord's webpage. It's called "how to write a paragraph" and it illustrates how one develops a topic sentence from a set of semantically related words.

[Atassi]

[Hanson]

Here is a thread that was going a few weeks ago on the very same topic. ScottinIncheon, Woland and a few others wrote at length about teaching writing. You may want to resurrect it, or copy and paste here for discussion.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/korea/viewtopic.php?t=64937&highlight=

There should be more threads like this on Dave's - good posts.

[Atassi]