TPRS

I’m starting to get into a rhythm. I definitely need writing exercises and reading exercises for my students. They need these in order to review the vocabulary and structures they’ve learned in the stories we do in class, and also to re-inforce (to re-expose them to) those vocab and structures. I don’t have time at [...]

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Timed writing

Blaine Ray wrote, Having [students] do time writings without editing is an excellent way to assess fluency. I’ve been having my students write for 5 minutes almost every class, usually at the beginning, sometimes at the end. Sometimes I set the topic, but most times I left them free to write whatever they wanted. I [...]

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Academic Writing Part 2

Image via Wikipedia This is a follow-up to my previous entry on this subject. If you are looking for a website to help you teach academic writing to university students (whether EFL students or native-English-speaking students), I recommend those by Gavin Budge (Writing for the Reader), and by Andy Gillett: Academic Writing. As many of [...]

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Fluency in writing – what is it? How do you “teach” it?

Fluency in writing? What does that mean? How do you teach it? Some problems I face teaching writing at university here in Japan are a) a big spread of ability amongst students (some cannot put a sentence together, indeed have no idea what a “sentence” is, while others are nearly fluent) b) (partly a result [...]

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