TESL Malaysia » writing

ASPIRE Model for Academic Writing

Chuah Kee Man — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:18:35 +0000

Writing academic essays can be rather difficult as it requires some necessary “skills” in ensuring a piece of work remains “academic”. I would like to share a simple model (or guide) that would help you write academically. Of course, this is not “the” model that would transform you into a proficient academic writer overnight. It still takes a lot of practices to be good in academic writing. Reading more academic articles would also help.

ASPIRE for academic writing

Academic Voice
Scholarly Citations
Precise Descriptions
In-depth Elaborations
Reduce clichés/redundancies
Effective Structure

Details on this can be obtained in the following slideshow:

You can also download the slides from My SlideShare Page

Why Creative Writing is as Important as Math

TESLMalaysia Admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:12:52 +0000

In the halls of high schools across the world, math, science, and engineering courses are given a clear emphasis over the humanities and liberal arts. While these programs need large budgets to stay competitive, school administrators often overlook the learning management system for creative writing courses as a somewhat useless waste of class space.

With English becoming the predominant method of communicating business terms in every country, most TESL programs are focused on getting the basics in and letting the students find the best ways to use the language. While it is important to learn the fundamentals, students also need to learn how to think in English in an abstract manner. With its rigid rules, verb tenses, idioms, exceptions, and immense vocabulary, communicating in English in a human way is a difficult concept for foreign speakers to grasp.

In the US, a non-profit center called 826 is opening locations across the country in mostly Latino neighborhoods. Because their parents can’t speak English well, they can send their children to the centers in order to get creative tutoring and help with homework. These centers stress the importance of viewing creative writing as an expression of feelings and try to distance themselves from traditional tutoring services.

The idea of teaching English in Malaysia is not up for debate anymore, but is a staunch reality that needs to be better implemented. By learning more of the core concepts and getting a feel for the depth of the knowledge, future generations will fare much better in all fields. According to an opinion article on New Straits Times, English should be seen as an upward mobility and development tool which gives access to greater things.

While it may be easy to learn and practice in the maths and sciences with a rudimentary and structured understanding of English, it will be harder for professionals to communicate ideas with English speaking co-workers and give presentations with fluidity. Learning how to think creatively will also give students the skills needed to explore ideas off the beaten path; a major skill the big tech companies are looking for in new hires.

If college graduates reach the workplace without knowing how to express themselves, they could face stagnant wages, a lack of promotion opportunities, and even a lack of respect from coworkers. Those who can take the English language and manipulate its inner workings will be the ones to succeed in an extremely competitive job market.

Worksheet on Guided Writing – The Benefits of The Internet

Chuah Kee Man — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 04:45:23 +0000

Process writing approach can be a good way to help beginners in producing an essay. It gives students a systematic structure in organising their ideas. This is a simple worksheet that shows how the process writing approach is used in teaching students guided writing. The topic for the worksheet is The Benefits of The Internet. Teachers can modify it to fit other scopes or topics. The key is to give students proper scaffolding before allowing them to write independently. Repetition of this approach (with different topics) would help students to at least learn how to organise their points and elaborations properly. Teachers should guide them in terms of language accuracy as well.

Of course, hopefully your students do not attempt what Calvin is doing as shown in the comic strip below. Haha.

The Worksheet

You can download the worksheet here.

Genre-based Approach to Teaching Writing

Chuah Kee Man — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 09:59:41 +0000

The approach to genre, influenced by the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1978), emerged out of literacy research in primary schools in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Researchers noticed that children did a lot of personal and narrative but very little factual and expository writing. The emphasis on personal creativity in narrative writing somehow creates a problem of ego-centrism and hinders the exposure to other forms of writing, and therefore other ways of engaging with knowledge.

As such, the genre-based Approach was introduced to remedy the problem by engaging students to wider functional range of texts. In this approach, a set of staged genres or ‘text types’ is explicitly taught in a four-phase pedagogy involving field building, modelling, joint negotiation and independent construction. Texts used during the modelling phase are designed to exemplify the main linguistic forms of knowledge required for effective participation in school subjects (Derewianka, 1996).

Language Principles of Genre-Based Approach

The main language principles of the genre-based approach are (Halliday, 1994):

[list type="clip"] [li]

language is a system of sound and signs for making meaning (Whole-language).[/li]

[li]language and learning are not only individual but essentially social.[/li]

[li]language purposes and text types are socio-culturally determined the structures of language are the way they are because of the meanings they have evolved to construct[/li][/list]

The first principle views language as a system of resources for negotiating meanings or the semiotic system. In other words, the genre-base approach to language or better known as the functional model of language emphasises on meaning and how meaning is constructed through the use of language.

The second principle highlights the view that language learning is essentially social. It views that language learning is an interactive process whereby meanings are constantly constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed through negotiation with the so-called ‘meaning experts’ (teachers or care-givers). The process of learning happens through regular scaffolding by the experts in order to facilitate the learners in doing what they could not do (Cullip, 1999).

The third principle focuses on the concept of “genre”, as proposed by Martin (1992), as a great device for examining the purposes of different disciplines and the realisation of these purposes in words and grammar (lexicogrammar), as noted in principle four. Genre may be conceptualised as an evolved institutional text-type that is staged towards a purpose.

The Rationale of Implementing Genre-based Approach

The main rationale of using the genre-based approach is its strengths in teaching writings particularly in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. It matches modern classroom practice based on the Whole-language view whereby the main focus is on meaning and how language operates at the text level in order to obtain the meaning. Thus, it is strongly against the traditional phonemic view of language in which meaning is said to be found in isolation at the level of the individual words or sentences. As such, the idea of implementing the genre-based approach in teaching writing serves as a good step in cultivating a new way of improving students’ writing skills.

The Cycle of Genre-based Approach

The pedagogical model of genre-based approach is specially designed to provide a framework for instructors and not as a prescriptive sequence of teaching steps that teachers must follow. The flexibility of the pedagogy allows teachers to decide which stage that should be emphasised on (Martin, 1992).

The first stage in the curriculum cycle is the “Field Knowledge” or “Field Building” stage. The main idea of this stage is to build up control of the field or topic and building up the spoken language to enable students to talk about the topic. A range of activities that could provide input of information and opportunities for students to talk about the topic would be included at this step. This also includes a focus on extensive reading on the particular topic. The grammatical features and vocabulary at this stage are also emphasised depending on the students’ needs.

In the second stage, “Modelling”, the explicit focus will be on the genre that the students will be writing. In this stage, models of the genre will be presented to the students to be analysed. The main emphasis here will be on the purpose of the text, generic structure, language features, tenor and mode. In brief, this stage is giving the students optimum exposures on the fixed genre, which allows them to familiarise with the text type.

The third stage of the curriculum cycle is the “Joint Construction”. Here, the teacher serves as a facilitator in helping the students to construct a model of the genre. The overall knowledge of the field, content and text organisation are drawn on by the teacher. This helps students to practice what they have learned but with limited guide by the teacher. Constant scaffolding will be given by the teacher in order to trigger students to utilise the knowledge that they have had.

Finally, the fourth stage is the “Independent Construction” stage whereby students would be required to write texts independently. After getting all the required exposures in the previous stages, students should be able to produce their own end-product by choosing their own topic, drafting, editing and getting the feedback from the teacher or peers. The main objective of this stage is to reflect what they have learned earlier and putting all their ideas into written form, and thus produce a well-structured essay (Martin, 1992).

Do check out Writing Fun by Jenny Eather. She has done a great job using Flash to facilitate the teaching of writing based on genre based approach.

[toggle state="closed" title="References"] [li]Cullip, P. F. (1999). Scaffolding literacy learning: Vygotsky in the Classroom. The English Teacher, xxviii: 1-11.[/li]

[li]Derewianka, B. (1991). Exploring How Texts Work. Newtown, New South Wales: Primary English Teaching Association.[/li]

[li]Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.[/li]

[li]Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn). London: Routledge. [/li]

[li]Martin, J.R. (1992). English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.[/li]

[/toggle]

Useful Websites on Teaching ESL Writing

TESLMalaysia Admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:13:23 +0000

Occasionally, ESL teachers would spend considerable time browsing through the internet, hunting for materials or worksheets for their classes. Some would spend hours digging for materials but to no avail. Here are some useful websites that might just help you out.

ESL Galaxy Writing Exercises

ESL Galaxy provides a good collection of ESL worksheets and exercises for writing sorted according to students’ level. You can download the available worksheets and modify it to match your needs.

Using English Dot Com

UsingEnglish.com is a popular website offering lesson plans and worksheets for teachers. Here you can see a list of lesson plans, which can be adapted for Malaysian context.

ESL Gold Writing Zone

ESL Gold offers step-by-step guide to ESL writing based on student’s level. Not that comprehensive but it still contains several activities that are good to build up student’s writing ability.

About.COM Teaching Beginners

This website offers good activities meant for beginning ESL learners. Activities are simple and easy to be executed in class.

Purdue OWL Writing Lab

Another popular website that must be visited and explored. Purdue OWL provides resources for ESL instructors and students. Mainly suitable for intermediate and advanced students.

If you have other websites to share, please post it in the comment sections. It’s good to share!

Lesson Plan: Teaching Argumentative Essay

TESLMalaysia Admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:34:10 +0000

A Form 4 lesson plan on the the teaching of argumentative essay. It gives ideas to teachers on how to use common daily topics like “Tuition: Good or Bad?” to expose students to the concept of argumentative essay.

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Useful Verbs and Adjectives List for Writing

TESLMalaysia Admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:58:25 +0000

This is a compilation of useful verbs and adjectives that can be given to your ESL students in helping them to describe. You can also create activities based on the words list.

[download#9#image]

Form 4 – Introducing Descriptive Writing

TESLMalaysia Admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:24:01 +0000

This is a simple lesson on descriptive writing, which is in fact an introductory lesson. It teaches students the very basic of describing. Language items emphasised here are adjectives and adverbs.

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