Recently, I have developed a new strategy for level 1 students to write about a picture. The students are asked to separate their ideas into two paragraphs. The first paragraph is a description of the people in the picture (who is it, where are they from, what do they do for a living). The second paragraph is about what is happening in the picture at the moment. The attachments below have additional questions for students […]
Category: Writing: Beginning
Writing Practice Past Tense
I have found writing in steps leading up to the picture works well. This activity promotes students to use their imagination to create a story of the past. Directions: 1. I ask students to write about what they did before the went to class. I give an example on the board about what I did. I also present the PowerPoint with the initial questions. 2. Check examples and help with creativity. 3. Brainstorm with the […]
Practice for a Writing Test
<<Practice Midterm>>Â I used this handout to prepare students for the writing midterm in integrated skills level 3. We began by looking at the prompt together. We focused on noticing verb tenses used in the prompt and what verb tenses they should use responding to the prompt, with me annotating the prompt on the document camera (with students writing it out on the handout to help plan). We then talked about what a topic sentence […]
Editing Writing Practice
This writing practice is for high-beginning/low-intermediate (ESL 235- level 3 integrated skills). I used examples from the students own writing (either a recent test or writing homework) that I would type up to use with students’ permission. They were already used to correction symbols (which are introduced at the start of the class with the first homework assignments). I usually go over the first example with the class together, reading sentence by sentence and stopping […]
Beginning Writing Rubric
This is a rubric that I created for my beginning ESL class to use with their writing assignments. In that class, we were practicing writing a paragraph about a picture. Every time we learned new things, I would model how they could use it to expand their paragraphs. I used this rubric to give them feedback so they could see their strengths and areas for improvement. Below the rubric are examples to help explain each […]