Page 133 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

NOUNS ANDTHE NOUN PHRASE 119
Also in writing practice, after students produce a paragraph or an essay, the teacher can underline nouns/words in the students' texts to be replaced with other words with similar meanings.
Editing and Finding Mistakes in Noun Forms and Uses
(a) Noticing and drawing attention
The first step in teaching students to edit their own text is to present one
written by someone else with several mistakes of the same or similar types:
"You got a mail." Technology can provide various ways for communicate. Most American have already visited WWW, but in my country, people still don't use technolo- gies often. With the technology development, we, people, can get more and more benefit.
We use technologies doesn't mean we abandon the traditional way to communicate with other people. I really enjoy to meet withfriends and havefun withfamily. But everybody is so busy today, technology provides a more convenient way for communication. Every- body have different way to communicate, and / believe technology make us having more communicate with other, it also makes our life more beautiful. (From a student essay on the influence of technology on communication.)
This text can be put on a transparency and the mistakes in it discussed in class. Alternatively, students can work on several similar texts in small groups and then present their findings to the class with explanations for each error they identified. In this case, the entire class may have additional opportunities for noticing and working with problematic nouns.
(b) When proofreading text for structural, morphological, or inflectional errors, most students begin reading their text from the beginning. In doing so, the reader almost immediately gets caught in the flow of the text and stops paying attention to errors in word/noun form. Furthermore, when students read their own text silently, they employ only one type of memory—visual. For students in ESL/EAP programs in English-speaking countries, aural memory (remembering how the word sounds) can provide an additional boost in mistake-hunting power:
• It is far more effective to start reading one's own text from the be- ginning of the last sentence to the end of this sentence. In this way the reader proofs the text by reading it backward, sentence by sen- tence, to avoid getting caught in the text flow.
• Then move up to the one before the last sentence and read to the end of this sentence.
• Then move up one sentence higher still (the third sentence from the end) and proofread it.
• The proofreading of text should be done aloud (but not necessarily loudly) while paying close attention to word forms.
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