ONE of the most important steps in improving writing skills is expanding the use of more descriptive language when describing actions. Students tend to repeat verb usage like “He said...”“She told him...” and “She asked...”. The target of this activity is to make students more aware of the subtle variations, which they can employ by using more descriptive verbs such as “He insisted on...”and “She giggled...”.
Step 1: Write “say, laugh, eat, think, drink” on the blackboard and ask students to divide into small groups to think up as many synonyms for these verbs as they can.
Step 2: Once students have finished this exercise, pool the results together. Ask one student to take notes and photocopy the class results.
Step 3: Ask students to do the exercise below in groups, matching specific verbs to general meaning verbs.
* Exercise: matching specific verbs to general meaning verbs
General meaning verbs: tell / move / say / laugh / eat / drink / throw / run / move / hold / walk
Step 4: Once students have finished, compare answers as a class. Teacher’s acting abilities might be called on to explain the subtle differences between the verbs.
Step 5: Ask students to write simple stories about something that has recently happened to them. Instruct them to use simple verbs such as “say”“make”“tell” and “walk”.
Step 6: Put students into pairs and ask them to exchange their stories. Each student should elaborate the texts of the other student by using as many verbs previously studied as they can.
Step 7: Once students have finished, the class can have some fun reading the stories aloud.
THE focus of this activity is on developing students’ writing skills, but it’s also good for them to develop listening and reading skills.
Step 1: Ask students to draw the face of a person in the top right-hand corner of a piece of plain paper and to give the person a name. Then ask them to write five adjectives to describe the person’s appearance and five more adjectives to describe the person’s character on the top left-hand corner of the paper. When they’ve finished, ask them to write two things that the person likes doing and whom the person lives with.
Step 2: Dictate the following sentence to students: “It was a dark and stormy night and...”. Stop at this point and ask them to write down the name of the person they have drawn, followed by the word “was”.
Step 3: Ask them to complete the sentence from their imagination and add one more sentence.
Step 4: Once all the students have added a sentence to their stories, tell them to stop and pass the paper to the student on his/her right.
Step 5: Ask each student to read through the beginning of the story in his/her hand and then add one more sentence to it.
Step 6: Once they’ve finished, ask them once more to pass the paper to the one on his/her right. Continue to do this with each student adding a sentence to each story, gradually building up each story as the papers are passed around the class.
Step 7: Continue with this until you decide that the students are starting to lose interest or have written enough and then tell them to finish the story.
Step 8: Ask the students to read stories one by one and decide which is best or give each student a story and ask him/her to try to find and correct errors.
THE aim of this activity is to raise students’ awareness of the different syntactic, lexical and discourse patterns that they adopt when writing to various types of reader.
Step 1: Put various objects on your desk apart from the books you normally bring to class.
Step 2: Ask students to form pairs or groups of three.
Step 3: Give out task cards, on which you tell the students to which reader they need to write a paragraph describing the desk. The reader could be the following: one’s grandmother; a 4-year-old sister; the principal of the school; a scientist; a fellow student; the teacher...
Step 4: When they’ve finished writing, rearrange the class so that each reader type gets into a group.
Step 5: Ask students to summarize the types of words and expressions they used for the different readers. If it is a more analytical group, ask students to look at sentence structure (simple, complex, compound).
Step 6: When students get back to a whole class format, ask the following questions: “What words were used for the various readers for ...?”“How many simple sentences are there in the various paragraphs? How many more complex ones?”“How many (and what kind of) adjectives are there in the paragraphs?”
Step 7: Ask students to rewrite the paragraph based on the questions in the next lesson. The purpose is to make students aware of not only the process of writing (drafts) but also the fact that when they are more aware of their readers, they could manipulate the language they use for the purpose of writing.
* Variation
Ask students to write to the same reader but in different genres. For instance, they may write a poem or a narrative. Or, they could write for different purposes. For instance, the paragraph could be written for a furniture magazine in which you would like to put an advertisement about the desk.
It could be given as homework. Students need to describe their own desks that cannot be seen by the other students. The more precise and vivid the description is, the better for the others to imagine the desk.
第六步:让学生以班为单位回答如下问题:“What words were used for the various readers for ...?”“How many simple sentences are there in the various paragraphs?”“How many more complex ones?”“How many (and what kind of) adjectives are there in the paragraphs?”
