This is a reading assessment based on Reading Apprenticeship ideas. I’ve added a longer writing task to make it a more effective assessment in reading/writing classes. Laura TalleyESL and English Instructor at Yuba College and Butte College <<https://lctalley.wordpress.com/>>
Category: Writing: High Beginning/Low Intermediate
Genre Based Writing
At the CATESOL conference, there was a new technique for teaching writing that has spread to classrooms. Sometimes I feel like language teaching trends can be a lot like fashion or diet trends. Once one style is popular, just wait a decade until the opposite (bell- bottoms versus skinny jeans or low fat versus Keto) comes into play. Since I started teaching, about a decade ago, I’ve been vigorously implementing techniques for my students to […]
Showing versus Telling – Building Support
This lesson illustrates to students how to write “telling” versus “showing” paragraphs. That is, student are shown the difference between a paragraph that merely states reasons rather than develops them through explanation, examples, or specific details. The lesson proceeds as follows after discussing components of a paragraph from previous lessons: Project on the screen the first model of a “telling” paragraph. Read the paragraph aloud and then ask students to complete the comprehension questions following. […]
Sentence Structures – Five basic
This lesson entails familiarizing our students with some of the basic sentence structures in English – especially where word order is concerned. See handout attached to begin and later expand this lesson to other English structures. The lesson entails beginning with the basic subject-verb structure and ending with subject-verb-noun structure shown on the handout. The instructor writes the first structure and ask students from the various language-groups represented in the class to come to the […]
Summary Writing
Summary writing is challenging at best for native speakers let along English language learners who often resort to copying huge amounts of text from the original source feeling they can’t paraphrase due to their lack of vocabulary. Last semester and again now this semester actively, I started a new practice of asking students to focus on using the ten survival words in their summary and limiting the number of sentences they could use. This has […]
Practice for a Writing Test
<<Practice Midterm>> 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 […]