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Productive and Receptive Skills in the ESL Classroom - Writing Skills - Engage Phase

 

So let's have a look now what might take place in a typical writing lesson and, again, we're going to use the format of a straight arrow ESA lesson. Our first stage is to the go to the engage stage and, if we think back to what we said before, what we need to do is try to generate interest. So, an example here could be we show a picture first of all taken from a newspaper or magazine and then we can ask the students some questions. From looking at the picture we can ask them if they can tell us what is actually happening now as shown by the picture. Then, we can generate a bit more interest by asking them to give us ideas about what they thought was happening before this picture took place and what happened after. So, here we're just trying to build up the idea of a sequence of events taking place. They can see the picture and that's the middle event but they've also got a picture in their mind now of what happened before or could have happened before, what happened in the picture and then what happened afterwards. So ,what we can then do is to move on to our study phase.


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

I now understand that there are four things that students need to do with new language; be exposed to it, understand its meaning, understand how it's constructed, and be able to practice and pronounce it. This unit also reinforced 'straight arrow' structured ESA, and 'patchwork' ESA, and 'boomerang' ESA. It showed how we can easily apply ESA methods to introduce new language.This unit was a good refresher course of much of the English grammar that I know innately, but may not have remembered the exact rules or terminology. For instance, the order in which you arrange adjectives in a sentence (size, age, color, material). It's important to be able to explain these rules to students who won't have the natural inclination to form sentences this way.



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