TeachingEnglish
teaching academic writing
Submitted by martoma on 17 December, 2008 - 07:22
If you were to teach an academic writing class for language learners who are planning to study in American or British universities, what would be your top 5 classroom teaching priorities?
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Writing involves going through some stages. If you want your students to be good at writing, you can teach them the writing process
Amir Abbass Ravayee
Five things that I would do in the class are:
1. Students should be suggested how to select appropriate dictionaries to consult, e.g. American or British dictionaries, academic or concise ones etc.
2. Students should be also suggested to use the MS word spell checking if typing.
3. First draft can be organized as a bullet format and anything that comes up in mind should be jotted down. Then, more detailed can be added later.
4. Writing in pair or a small group might help some students who don't like writing learn more and better.
5. Students should be suggested how to research and evaluate information from the Internet before putting in the writing piece.
Adapt classroom discourses and assignments types which enable them to respond the questions holistically instead of referring to textual limits only, through this they themselves will find a change in their writing projects.
It is essential to exposed them with pronunciation and presentation skills, familiarity with the potential country's cultural and societal norms boost their confidence and enthuse them to be participatory in the classes.
I had found that students who go overseas for studies, lack critical and analytical skills, ability to question text and people's ideas is generally weak in them, thus harness this ability as an attitude is very essential to do with them.
regards
Rozina Jumani
High School experience is that most HS students need to use academic writing as a tool to achieve high marks in SATs , IELTS or TOEFL. This is a very specific skill, where all the essay-producing processes have to be pushed through within a time frame of 25 - 30 minutes. I find it useful to practice the brainstorming, organising, writing and editing in a longer period, steadily shortening the time in the weeks before the relevant exam. I would be interested to hear of other ideas.
Dear Angela,
I would intend to take you to another tangent, the problem that we are confronting in our ESL classes that despite students’ successful attempts at SAT, IELTS, TOFEL etc students are not well versed in academic writing.
Academic writing to me provides a critical and reflective thinking framework where writer formulates his/her ideas using thesis and antithesis approach. These days students’ writings are not well-thought.
I intend to seek other ESL teachers’ comments on how to nurture the academic writing skills apart from brainstorming, organizing, editing etc.
Rozina Jumani
Really usefull strategies. I would like to know the types of writing with explanations, for example, narrative writing, what does it mean? and so on..
Dear Emely
One writes only to meet the purpose, it is important to be familiar with the intent, and once it is clear then only response depends on what to write. There are various types of writing formal, informal, variety of essays such as narrative, descriptive, argumentative, comparative etc.
I would encourage you to log on to British Englsih web portal and explore what exactly you intend to learn.
good luck
RJ
In a lot of academic writing textbooks, the subject is presented as being about following the same structure (normally intro, pros, cons, conclusion, with all the fiddly bits inbetween). This 'one size fits all' essay style is limited and more suitable for middle school than it is for university. Or, they focus only on IELTS or TOEFL style essays, which might help get students in to University, but might not help them much when they're there.
However, this isn't realistic - in a lot of university departments the expected essay writing structures are very different from this (an analytical philosophy essay, for example, often goes intro - brief explication of a complex thesis - brief explication of a complex reply [no conclusion]). Also, as you rightly say, a lot of academic writing is in completely different styles (reports, narratives, book reviews) and these, too, will differ from department to department.
In my opinion, the key to success in teaching academic writing is to foster the ability to find and follow guidelines. Give ss different guidelines for how each assignment should be written (you can find a lot of these on various university websites, or write them yourself) and encourage them to read the guidelines and write accordingly. Penalise themheavily if they don't follow the guidelines. This is always my main priority teaching academic writing: re-enforcing the message that when they get to thier university of choice, they will be expected to find, read and follow set writing guidelines and that success will often depend on thier ability to do so, and letting students practice doing this.