Use
of a Process-Writing inspired approach to prepare and motivate
students to write a discursive composition, with particular
attention to generating, selecting, ordering and organising
ideas: effective use of linking devices: and paragraph planning
- by Nicola Holmes
Lesson
Plan to accompany the article - 1
Level:
4 - Upper Intermediate
Timetable
Fit and General Rationale
This
class has been attenging Chester School in Madrid twice a
week on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for just over two
months. There are ten students, eight of whom work at the
Spanish Mint and many of whom have been studying at Chester
for some time. Most of the students are highly motivated and
enthusiastic about learning English, although their general
level is perhaps slightly low for an Upper Intermediate group
and levels of attendance can vary, especially around Bank
Holidays.
Over
the past couple of weeks we have been working on Unit 4 of
Headway Upper Intermediate and have reviewed countable and
uncountable nouns and expressions of quantity and discussed
various themes related to money and setting up one's own business.
After this class there is one more lesson before the end of
term exam, so students will possibility need a little longer
than a week to produce their first draft of the discursive
composition prepared in this class and may not hand these
in until January.
This
is the first time I have focused directly on writing in class
and I feel that it is important to help the students improve
their writing skills in particular and their general ability
to express and defend their opinions in English. Several of
the students have already produced some interesting written
homework but would hopefully benefit from the activities in
this class. One student in particular, Jesus, has expressed
a desire to do more writing in class, as he needs to write
discursive compositions for his end of school/university entrance
exam in English.
The
students have already had two discursive-type homework assignments,
one in the first month, discussing the advantages and disadvantages
of tourism, and another, in the last class, looking at the
advantages and disadvantages of being self-employed. Perhaps
unfairly, I did not give them adequate preparation for these
tasks, other than vocabulary input and discussion of their
ideas in class. I hope to make up for this in this lesson
and to provide them with a greater awareness of how to tackle
this type of task in future assignments.
The
students have also already undertaken two writing tasks where
they were responding to a genuine request and writing for
a specific audience and purpose, once at the beginning of
the course when they responded to a letter of introduction
I had sent them, writing back to me with information about
themselves, and another time responding to my request for
a reaction to comments I had written about each student's
progress in the first month of the course. Although I have
usually given students possibly too much feedback on grammar,
vocabulary and structure in their written work, I have also
always tried to respond to the content of their writing. I
am hoping that this will have raised their awareness of writing
in English being more than an artificial activity to practise
grammar and vocabulary.
I
have attempted to follow a process-driven approach in this
class, both to help the students to learn to express themselves
more effectively in writing and to focus them more on the
content and organisation of what they are writing than on
the nitty gritty of grammar and sentence structure. I have
tried to incorporate a variety of techniques for generating,
selecting and ordering ideas, as well as possible procedures
for paragraph-planning and drafting. I hope to carry the process
a stage further after receiving the students' first drafts,
by conducting a peer-conferencing session and writing a second
draft before sending all the compositions off to Yvonne's
students for them to read and return their comments as to
whether they feel that British people are as materialistic
as Spanish people.
I
have tried to create an authentic readership, motivation and
reason for writing by involving my friend Yvonne and her students
in the process, and I hope that my students will respond to
the opportunity to write for a native-speaker audience that
is interested first and foremost in their ideas, not in their
grammatical accuracy.
I
have tried to keep the theme of the composition as simple
as possible. As we are coming up to Christmas, a discussion
of materialism would appear to be quite topical, and I am
hoping that it is a topic that all of the students will have
an opinion on. It is also a subject that can be explored to
a varying degree of complexity, allowing for students to express
ideas as simple or as complex as they wish. The theme of materialism
also links to the topic of making money recently discussed
in class, along with other recently discussed issues such
as poverty and the problem of begging.
I
have also tried to provide some concrete language input in
the class in the introduction of some basic linkers of concession,
addition, cause/effect and conclusion. I feel that these students
have reached a level at which they need to start using linking
devices, especially in their writing, but I have deliberately
limited the number of linkers introduced to avoid overload,
and have tried to present them clearly in the context of written
opinions.
To
part 2 of the lesson plan
To Nicola's
article
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