Page 189 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Writing activities can begin with a single letter of the alphabet and later develop into formal, lengthy texts. Try this list of activity types with your classes. They can all be done individually but those marked with an asterisk are also well suited to pair and group work.
✓ Advertisements*
✓ Application forms
✓ Articles
✓ Biographies
✓ Book/film reviews
✓ Composition (setting out an opinion or argu-
ment)
✓ CV
✓ Descriptions of a process or diagram
✓ Dictation. The students write down what the teacher reads aloud to practise their spelling and punctuation.
✓ Emails
✓ Formal and informal letters ✓ Instruction sheets*
✓ Memos
✓ Notices*. Students can prepare notices giving information for use in the classroom, for example about upcoming events.
✓ Poetry: Get students to write a short poem or limerick. You can provide a list of rhyming words to help them.
✓ Projects*: Students can do more extensive work over a period of weeks on one topic. They can use English to explore and explain something which interests them.
✓ Reports: After finding out information on a particular topic students can present this in a concise and formal way as though they were giving feedback to an employer.
✓ Stories
Choose the activities which your students are most likely to need in the future.
Sample writing activities
Students who speak Latin-based languages like French and Portuguese tend to favour words of Latin origin instead of more common words and phrases – ‘establish’ rather than’ set up’, for example. This makes them sound too formal at times, so you can work on that with them to sound more casual.
Writing Case Study
Many teachers work in UK during the summer months when youngsters from all over the world descend on language schools expecting to learn English
in six weeks and be thoroughly entertained in the process. Here is a lesson I used successfully in one such class.