Recently I've come across Tricia Hedge's book Writing. It's a book of writing activities that follows different stages of writing. I found it very useful especially in terms of giving controlled writing practice to Ss. I've noticed that coursebooks often contrive writing in two or three stages. At the same time, coming from my students' feedback, writing is one of the most difficult tasks for them. One of the reason being a multiple tasks you need to perform while creating a text: getting ideas, organising, drafting, proofreading and so on. Anyways, there are plenty of activities in the mentioned book and I recommend it to everyone with the same concerns as me.
The book also inspired me to create my own activity which I will briefly describe.
This week we've been studying biographies, we had an interesting text about Matt Damon and couple of more exercises to study the genre. However, I felt it was too early to give my students writing biography for homework. Last year, one student copied information from wikipedia and, frankly, I was afraid it would happen again. So on the second lesson I decided to revise what we have learnt about biographies and teach them how we can use information from the Internet.
1. Ask Ss to brainstorm (or remember in my case) the typical parts of the biography in groups or pairs (Birth place, Achievements etc). Give them couple of minutes and hold a feedback session after.
2. Write up all the categories on the board. We used an empty desk and sticky notes.
3. Show a picture of a famous person of your choice (e.g Mark Zuckerberg). Elicit any kind of information Ss may know about him/her. If you get some good answers, ask Ss which category it belongs to. Put it on the sticky note and place it next to the category.
4. Explain that Ss are going to read pieces of text from the article about this person. They have to find information related to the categories on the board. I intentionally chose a more difficult text (wikipedia article), to make the task less straightforward and train Ss deduction and scanning skills. You need one article for a class, cut it in a pieces and give out to Ss.
5. Ss read the texts and find relevant information. They put it on sticky notes and connect it to the right category.
6. After given time, take away the texts and hold a feedback session as to whether the content matches the category. If some categories are without information, just erase them.
7. In pairs Ss decide in which order they will put this information in the biography.
8. Give Ss a certain amount of time and necessary guidance. For example, I wanted them to use time-sequencing words (we practiced them at the previous lesson) and a variety of past tenses.
9. Ss work together to write their version of the biography based on the information on the board.
10. Ss exchange texts and check it for accuracy and logical content. After that they can discuss the corrections they proposed.
For homework, Ss write the biography of a chosen celebrity following the guidelines from the lesson
The book also inspired me to create my own activity which I will briefly describe.
This week we've been studying biographies, we had an interesting text about Matt Damon and couple of more exercises to study the genre. However, I felt it was too early to give my students writing biography for homework. Last year, one student copied information from wikipedia and, frankly, I was afraid it would happen again. So on the second lesson I decided to revise what we have learnt about biographies and teach them how we can use information from the Internet.
2. Write up all the categories on the board. We used an empty desk and sticky notes.
3. Show a picture of a famous person of your choice (e.g Mark Zuckerberg). Elicit any kind of information Ss may know about him/her. If you get some good answers, ask Ss which category it belongs to. Put it on the sticky note and place it next to the category.
4. Explain that Ss are going to read pieces of text from the article about this person. They have to find information related to the categories on the board. I intentionally chose a more difficult text (wikipedia article), to make the task less straightforward and train Ss deduction and scanning skills. You need one article for a class, cut it in a pieces and give out to Ss.
5. Ss read the texts and find relevant information. They put it on sticky notes and connect it to the right category.
6. After given time, take away the texts and hold a feedback session as to whether the content matches the category. If some categories are without information, just erase them.
7. In pairs Ss decide in which order they will put this information in the biography.
8. Give Ss a certain amount of time and necessary guidance. For example, I wanted them to use time-sequencing words (we practiced them at the previous lesson) and a variety of past tenses.
9. Ss work together to write their version of the biography based on the information on the board.
10. Ss exchange texts and check it for accuracy and logical content. After that they can discuss the corrections they proposed.
For homework, Ss write the biography of a chosen celebrity following the guidelines from the lesson
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