Most ESL students (and their parents) lay an inordinate amount of emphasis on conversational skills and gloss over the need to learn how to write. It’s true that conversational skills are the most important ones to teach. If immersed in an English speaking environment, students pick up conversational skills sooner or later (which is why I don’t think using L1 during lessons is a smart move). But once the student is past the stage of grappling for words, it becomes quite important to focus on writing skills.
Since English is a non-phonetic language, there is often no correlation between the way words are written and spelled. And if you thought that’s the hardest bit to learn about writing well, think again. With the multitude of writing style sheets floating around in this world, it can be incredibly hard for students to even realize what they’re up against when they embark out on ‘Project Write Well’.
ESL students are overwhelmed enough by the enigmatic English grammar. When it comes to writing, I think the simplest rules help them the most. Not everyone is going to make a great writer but sticking to some simple rules can really help in taking students’ writing to the next level. At the bottom of this post, you will find a downloadable pdf copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, the famous little bible of English.. I strongly recommend using this in ESL classrooms during writing lessons, more on this book in a later post.
For the intermediate and advanced ESL students, who are already on their way to writing paragraphs and essays, the simple 5W and H rule works superbly.
But what about children and elementary level ESL students. It can be a drab job, isn’t it, to strike every capitalized letter in a sentence for one student, and find another allergic to capitals. The comma, period, semi-colon and colon can also be as frustrating as the rules of grammar itself!
Here are some really basic tools to begin teaching writing with to the really elementary students. It’s useful to put these up on a chart paper, prominently, in the classroom, and involve students in useful games where they earn points for good writing practices.
These are the rules..
SCRIPT
The English alphabet has 26 letters, each of which has an upper case and lower case form. English is written from left to right.
CAPITALIZATION
Only the first letter of the first word of a sentence is capitalized. Proper nouns, and the pronoun, ‘I’ are also capitalized.
PUNCTUATION
Sentences always end with a period. A comma signifies a momentary pause.
SPELLING
You gotta work on this baby. Ain’t gonna be easy, because English ain’t no phonetic language!
PARAGRAPHS
Multiple sentences make one paragraph. Each paragraph conveys a single idea.
ACCENTS
English uses accents and stress marks only for words imported from other languages, esp. French.
For many more wonderful tips on good writing practices, download the famous little bible of English, Strunk and White’s
I found this pdf booklet here: http://bit.ly/D9Q3N
You can buy this book online at Amazon
