Teaching academic ESL writing part 8

Language Work Ongoing • expanding learners' academic vocabulary range at the rate of at least 10 to 15 chunks or words per day or 70 to 100 chunks or words per week mostly independent wo

Appendix to Chapter 3

The samples of course outlines and weekly plans and daily lesson plans pre-sented here are only examples based on realistic instructional goals

SAMPLE CURRICULUM GUIDELINES FOR A PRE-ACADEMIC

WRITING COURSE

Course Goals

To prepare for the demands of academic writing tasks on the students' guage skills, the course is designed to accomplish several main lan-guage-building and writing objectives The development of increased academic lexical repertoire, grammatical accuracy in sentence- and phrase-structure use, and fluency with written and formal academic dis-course organization are imperative for pre-academic learners at the high-intermediate and advanced proficiency levels

Language Work (Ongoing)

• expanding learners' academic vocabulary range at the rate of at

least 10 to 15 chunks (or words) per day or 70 to 100 chunks (or

words) per week (mostly independent work at home with follow-up

as-needed in-class contextual practice, word analyses, and review;

mandatory weekly quizzes)

• building a grammar-structure base at the rate of at least three to

five essential constructions per week, with as-needed in-class analy-sis and practice; a combination of work on sentence-stems, as well

as select discrete language elements (e.g., countable-uncountable

nouns and present and past tenses) leading to increased grammar

accuracy

• lexical and grammatical precision is cumulative with additional

in-dependent and in-class work as needed (as structures occur in

stu-dent writing)

• self-editing skills (cumulative)

Initial and Incremental Writing Assignments

(In tandem with major writing assignments and the relevant learning of lexis)

• daily summaries of readings (or sections of larger readings) and/or

paraphrase practice (assigned daily as homework for 2 to 3 weeks,

15 to 20 total)

TEACHING LANGUAGE FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING 59

• information synthesis from several or long readings (assigned daily

as homework for 2 to 3 weeks, 15 to 20 total)

• writing assignments marked and returned daily

Writing Skills and Discourse-Level Work (Ongoing)

• information synthesis/analysis—from multiple readings on the same topic/issue for each written assignment

• readings assigned as independent work with a follow-up in-class discussion as needed; ideally readings including book length (2-3 weeks per book) on a single and specific topic continue throughout

the course

• organizing information in a thesis-driven coherent academic dis-course structure—ongoing

Reading Strategies and Tactics

Remedial and as needed (2-6 hours per course) In many cases, reading as-signments in three regular university courses combined (a full-time student load) consist of 150 to 300 pages of academic reading per week

Major Writing Assignments

Seven to 12 (depending on the course length) major writing assignments are based on two drafts (one per week) at the outset and single/final drafts only in the second half of the course Thus, the first two to three writing as-signments require two drafts (one per week), and five to seven subsequent assignments require students to submit a single draft Within this structure, the teacher has the flexibility to encourage additional and preliminary drafts that are not graded if students choose to submit them However, pre-liminary drafts require the teacher to give prepre-liminary drafts a quick turn around to allow students to take advantage of the teacher's comments

The length of major assignments should range from 750 to 1,500 words each (three to six typed double-spaced pages) Lexical and grammatical ac-curacy, issues of academic register and audience, and self-editing skills are dealt with in each writing task

In addition to developing students' language base, the curriculum em-phasizes the ability to extract and arrange information from sources to ad-dress a particular writing topic, assignment purpose, and audience

Course Materials

versity course material): sociology of dating, microeconomics, consumer behavior, and psychology of learning, memory, intelligence, or motivation Topics to avoid: personal matters and beliefs, experience narratives, reli-gion, and politics All topics of major written assignments have to be cleared with the instructor if they are chosen by each individual student

Discussion of content topics is a necessary prewriting activity for most writing tasks, as students are usually guided in selecting appropriate and manageable topics, narrowing the thesis, and choosing convincing sup-porting information Content from readings can serve as a base for writing assignments and tasks, as well as reading-based in-class writing to prompts and/or expanded essay questions (15-30 minutes per week in the second half of the course)

Course Duration

The class meets for 50 or 70 hours per term (quarters or semesters), and, in all likelihood, it may be the last (or second to last) formal ESL writing class the majority of the students will ever take

ATTENDANT WRITING CONCEPTS AND SKILLS

(REMEDIAL, AS NEEDED)

High-Intermediate Proficiency Level or Review at Advanced Level

A number of features of academic discourse and text in English represent cul-turally bound concepts that are not shared in non-Anglo-American discourse traditions (including continental European) Thus, these features may seem particularly foreign and difficult to understand or relate to for a majority of L2 writers socialized in different cultures For this reason, the concepts and written discourse constructs that underlie the production of academic dis-course in English often require additional and repeated teaching

Language Work (As Needed)

• Academic register and audience

• Lexical and syntactic accuracy, increased sentence complexity and

clause use, and noun and verb inflections

• Unity (rhetorical purpose: explication and/or persuasion),

cohe-sion of paragraphs and ideas, and logical connectors

• Avoiding lexical and discourse-level redundancy (concept of

re-dundancy)

TEACHING LANGUAGE FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING 61

Discourse-Level Work

• Upfront thesis statement (that incorporates parts of or references

to topic sentences as rhetorical supports)

• Information synthesis, extracting information from sources

• Academic argumentation and argument development

• The notion of plagiarism, restatement, and paraphrase

• Contextual relevance of information; one paragraph—one idea

discussed and supported

• Introductory paragraph, closing sentence/paragraph (conclusions

are optional)

• Body paragraphs: hierarchy/organization and structure or

sup-port, relevance and detail

TLFeBOOK

SENTENCES AND THEIR PARTS:

LEXIS AND GRAMMAR

The chapters in Part II cover the core information that NNSs need to be taught about English sentence and text construction Chapter 4 introduces the regularities of English sentences and their elements—sentence slots—that can be taught to and used by students to efficiently improve their writing Chapters 5 through 9 delve into the major components that fill the slots in sentences, how they are used, and how they can be effectively taught to NNS students Chapters 5 and 6 cover nouns, noun phrases, and pronouns Chapters 7 and 8 discuss verb tenses and voice, and lexical classes and func-tions of verbs Chapter 9 describes the types and funcfunc-tions of adjectives and adverbs, as well as adjective and adverb phrases, in academic writing

TLFeBOOK

Sentences, Phrases,

and Text Construction

OVERVIEW

• Rigid and mobile sentence elements

• The order of elements in the noun phrase

• The order of elements in the verb phrase

• Transitive and intransitive verbs

• Compound sentences

• Common errors in sentence construction

In English the structure of a basic sentence is relatively easy to teach because English has rigid word order (e.g., the subject is followed by a verb, which is followed by an object) Although many variations of this skeletal structure are possible, the additions also adhere to somewhat inflexible patterns For example, a prepositional phrase cannot perform the function of a subject: Only noun phrases can function as a subject, and a verb must be present in

every sentence for it to be grammatical For example, the structure *For most students go to the U.S to study is incorrect because a prepositional phrase

occu-pies the subject position

The simplest approach to teaching the basic sentence structure can take advantage of the relative rigidity in English sentence structure.1 An exam-ple of a basic sentence structure can consist of an optional adverb/preposi-tional phrase, subject noun (phrase), a verb, and an object if the main verb is transitive (requires a direct object) The essential sentence elements and

'in his teaching of composition courses, Kenneth L Pike originally developed the idea in the 1950s and 1960s His tagmemics theory was based on the principle that grammatical units are simultaneously marked for two features: the slot that they occupy relative to other units

their positions relative to one another are sometimes called slots, and in

many sentences some slots can be empty (e.g., the object slot is not filled if the verb is intransitive—does not require an object) However, in English sentences, for example, the verb slot is never empty because verbs are re-quired for all sentences to be grammatical, and the subject slot can be empty

only in the case of imperatives (commands), (e.g., 0 dose the door).

It is important to note that an approach to teaching sentence- and phrase-structure systems of English does not place a great deal of emphasis

on conveying a particular meaning Rather, the regularities and rigid order

of sentence and phrase elements deals with syntactic accuracy as discussed

in detail in chapter 3 Also as mentioned, for academically bound L2 learn-ers, a reasonable degree of grammatical accuracy represents a factor of cru-cial importance in their academic, professional, and socru-cial opportunities (Celce-Murcia, 1991; Celce-Murcia & Hilles, 1988; R Ellis, 1990, 1994; Fries, 1945; Hammerly, 1991; Schmidt, 1994)

RIGID AND MOBILE SENTENCE ELEMENTS

In general, the breakdown of a sentence into ordered and sequential slots

is based on three fundamental principles The first principle states that

sentence units occur not in isolation, but in relationship to other sentence elements (e.g., in most sentences [other than questions], the subject pre-cedes the verb

A Minimal Sentence Sentence Slots Subject

Particles

Commercials

Computer technology

The temperature

Verb Predicate

expand, proliferate.

evolves, rises.

According to the second principle, the contexts in which sentence

ele-ments occur determine the variation among them (e.g., singular subject

nouns require singular verbs or transitive verbs [e.g., construct, develop, make]

require the presence of objects that follow them) On the other hand, prepo-sitional phrases are slippery elements, and they can occur in various slots—at the beginnings or ends of sentences and/or following a subject or

an object noun phrase

SENTENCES, PHRASES, AND TEXT CONSTRUCTION 67

Sentence structures are always dynamic, but variations among them fol-low predictable patterns that should be explained to students

• Subject or object slots can be filled by all sorts of words or phrases that

belong in the class of nouns/pronouns—for example,

• proper and common nouns (e.g., John, Smith, desk)

• countable and uncountable nouns (e.g., pens, equipment)

• abstract and concrete nouns (e.g., happiness, a cloud) or gerunds (e.g., reading, writing)

• compound noun phrases (e.g., vegetable soup, a grammar book)

• pronouns (e.g., /, we, they, one)

• sets of parallel nouns (e.g., pens, pencils, and papers; flowers and trees)

Noun phrases include all their attendant elements (e.g., articles,

posses-sives, quantifiers, and numerals—a book, (0 article) information, their book,

most of the book(s), three books).

In fact, subject and object slots are usually filled by a noun phrase rather than a single-word noun because in real language use single-word nouns are relatively rare (i.e., proper, uncountable, and abstract nouns represent a ma-jority of all cases) To explain the noun phrase elements to students, the sim-plest way to proceed is to practice identifying the main noun and all its pieces

(e.g., vegetable soup/the blue book—does the word vegetable describe the soup'? the word blue describe the book? do these two words go together; most of the

book—do the words most, of, and the refer to the book? do all these words go

to-gether?) Similar techniques for identifying elements and their order in the verb phrase and the prepositional phrase are discussed later in this chapter

An important and simple technique for identifying entire noun phrases,

as well as their elements, and the singular versus plural properties of sub-jects is to replace phrases with pronouns For example,

Marie Curie studied the chemistry and medical uses of radium.

She studied the chemistry and medical uses of radium.

Mary Peters and John Smith are planning to attend the conference.

[ 1 + 1 ] They are planning to attend the conference.

The E-commerce seminar and the technology presentation start at 9 am on Saturdays.

They start at 9 am on Saturdays The idea to develop a new type of packaging appealed to store managers.

/£ appealed to store managers.