These unseen details are important, but showing your students the meat and potatoes first will help them look at sentences with a better trained eye. With the verb and noun in plain view , you can gradually introduce those unseen, often overlooked spices and herbs that make the sentence a real sentence, the final product.
Eventually introducing the importance and usage of capital letters, punctuation, periods, question marks, quotations and other sentence spices will allow them to see how it all works. Presenting all this new sentence structure information to your students can be a simple and fun process. Using examples in your presentation, along with practice, will allow your students to start seeing and developing sentences.
Start writing a sentence on the board. Once constructed and in view, deconstruct it, together. Analyze the reasons behind, for example, the adjective being placed in front of the noun or the verb behind. Dive deep into the punctuation and let them see the ins and outs before having them practice forming sentences on their own. Implement communication within sentence lessons so they can get some speaking practice while learning to write.
No student, young or old, wants to hear the material and then sit in silence writing. After they get the hang of creating sentences, you can mix things up by presenting them with challenging questions or asking for longer sentences with more detail and depth.
Once your students have a solid understanding of how to create proper sentences, you can move them into paragraphs. It may be a good idea to separate sentence construction and paragraph building into two or three separate lessons. Make sure they have a very good handle on sentences before moving forward.
In most paragraphs, the topic sentence is at the beginning, summing up what the paragraph will cover. Following that are the supporting sentences, covering the thoughts and ideas that hold the topic sentence in place, giving it validity and weight.
Explain the structure of a paragraph to your students and let them see a visual of this structure on the board or in a handout. You can then give them examples of a topic sentence and a few supporting sentences before letting them give their own paragraph-building a shot. Good visuals and easy-to-understand directions will go a long way in this crucial area of ESL writing lessons. You can also touch on some key linking words we use to combine two sentences together. Here are some examples your students will be able to easily learn and understand:.
Incorporating communicative learning into your ESL writing lesson will foster creativity and confidence in your students. Letting your students openly discuss the writing topic with you and their classmates is a great warm-up activity. A great communicative technique is to break up the class into groups or pairs, depending on size, and let them work out some of the writing topic details together.
Brainstorming is one of the most important aspects within writing and your students can build on their writing through discussion.
You can also allow some class time for presentations on what each pair or group has come up with. This can lead to a collective brainstorming as students share their thoughts and ideas with everyone. An exciting presentation of writing topics will lead to a cascade of enthusiasm with eager students ready to write at the drop of a hat.
Furthermore, making them part of the process will teach them to choose topics for themselves and open up future ideas and possibilities for writing. A good teaching tactic to make sure your students are ready to move into the production activity is to check in with them from time to time.
Your practice writing activities are also great for this. When everyone is ready, confident and ready to start writing with little guidance, you can than introduce the pro-action writing activity. Remember, this is your students time to shine, so give them all the information they need to be successful. Delivering clear and concise instructions about the ESL writing activity is very important.
You can review the structure needed to complete the task, passing out a handout or writing the outline instructions on the board. Reviewing the structure is essential and will lead to less frustration as your students begin crafting their amazing writing work.
Once all key aspects of the activity has been delivered, with a short question and answer session on what is expected, let them loose.
This is your time to roam the room and feel good, watching your students go for it, using the methods and information you presented earlier. Be available for any questions or problems that may arise, you will be their editor and muse in many ways during the duration of the activity.
These little tidbits of information have revolutionized the human experience, sharing thoughts that would otherwise be just that: Tweets can be an effective tool in ESL writing activities for many reasons. Chances are good that your students are familiar with tweets. You can also start a classroom Twitter profile, allowing your students to send their new English tweets out into the world.
Tweets are great for starting off small , limiting your students to characters or less. The best part of all this? The structure behind tweets is almost nonexistent, so your students can get extra creative. Students will comprehend the activity without any strict structural or stylistic information. Plus, tweets allow students to explore more casual writing and fun topics. A tweet can discuss movies, TV shows and more topics in popular culture. A great example of a tweeting ESL writing activity is to use something related to their everyday lives.
This is great for some communicative practice as well. Each tweeting space will give a different tweet topic. Remind them that they have characters to produce a short message about the movie subject. For example, one subject can be about the main actor, so your students will write a tweet about the actor, how he looks, his attitude or what he might have been doing in the movie trailer.
Your students will be more than excited to see their words on the Internet for all to read. Emails have become the backbone of our world.
Not many people today send real letters, written or otherwise. Emails are the main source of communication between people around the world. You can utilize an email writing activity to help your students build confidence and get more comfortable with writing in English. There are also other scary elements to emails for your students, like proper language, structure and format.
Structuring an email can be just as daunting as writing it, so spending some time discussing and looking at examples of email structures is essential. Once your students have a good grasp on structure, introduce them to some elements of formal and informal email writing. Remember that the focus of the lesson is on actual writing and not discussing wordplay. One great email writing activity can be thick with writing and communicative skills.
Pair your students up and give them an outline for a specific email topic. This will lead to an informal email exchange between two people. During this time, you can float around the room and make sure everyone is focused on the task at hand. Past Tense - Simple introduction to past tense verbs. Error Correction Worksheet - Identify and correct the mistakes in the paragraph. That's all of the worksheets and lessons above, plus tons more! Each book has about 60 pages of worksheets, including writing assignments, sentence patterns, transitions, sample essays, and an Answer Key!
These books are great supplements for both larger writing classes and one-on-one classes! Download this entire book instantly!
Simply click "Check out with Paypal" above, and you will be redirected to Paypal, where you can pay securely with either a Paypal account or credit card you do NOT need a Paypal account. As soon as your payment is submitted, you will receive an automated email containing the download link. Make sure to check you junk mail folder, as spam filters occasionally mark these automated emails as junk mail. ESL Writing Exercise - Semi-colons - Introduction to this often baffling piece of punctuation, with a review exercise.
Although - Explanation of how to use these similar transition words, with several sample sentences. Although - Review worksheet to practice using "despite" and "although" correctly.
Because of - Explanation of how to use these similar transition words correctly, with several sample sentences.
Writing a Formal Paragraph: These worksheets are all included in our e-textbook Write Right: Transitions. Download this book, including all of the intermediate/advanced worksheets on the left, as well as several additional worksheets, review exercises, and essay assignments for intermediate/advanced ESL students!
Writing for ESL Many ESL learners have excellent educations, training, and skills in their native countries. However, their dreams of success elude them in English-speaking .
ESL writing classes require a balance of long composition activities and short tasks that don’t need to be read or marked by the teacher. To that end, here are a few drills that can help students learn to improve sentence accuracy and style. Online MA in TESOL! Writing. A Collaborative Approach to Writing; A Real-Life ESL Test; Anatomical Aliens; Apples & Oranges; Articles by Nancy Sommers; Billionaire beggar widow has 16 kids and 12 dogs.
Writing exercises This section of the ESL site contains many exercises for learners to practice the various aspects of written English, including spelling and punctuation. There are a number of texts to correct or complete, and suggestions on how to improve all the writing . Writing exercises for ESL Learners. This section of the ESL site contains many exercises for beginning learners to practice various types of writing or writing task.