Goals of the Activity

This is a consciousness raising activity to raise students awareness of how to support paragraphs. It has four parts.
Part one, Reading- here students read examples from authentic texts of the four common ways to support opinions in paragraphs; 1) an example 2) an explanation 3) an expert opinion 4) a statistic.
Part Two Reading and Labeling – here students read four more examples from authentic texts and try to label them under the four supports 1) an example 2) an explanation 3) an expert opinion 4) a statistic.
Part Three Reading and Analyzing- here students read an example paragraph and discourse analyze it for the four supports 1) an example 2) an explanation 3) an expert opinion 4) a statistic.
Part Four Read and Compare – here students compare the paragraphs they have written, based around the same topic, with the example paragraph in three. How can they improve their paragraphs based around the four supports and the patterns offered in the example paragraphs?

Potential Problems with the Activity

It is important to point out to students that the distinction between the different types of supports can be blurred, (e.g. statistic can easily be used to give an example). The activity is just designed to raise awareness of the need to support opinions and offer some tools for doing so.

student pages

teachers pages

If you are extending the Chindogu (new product) activity, these handouts might help. One is a general reading passage about the Chindogu phenomonon. The second handout incorporates the pictures that are already available but provides a set pallette for creating a product name and description of 5 of the pictures.

Chindogu Reading Passage (adapted from Wikipedia)

Chindogu Reading Task Sheet

Some teachers are asking their students to generate mind maps based on the readings we are covering in the Spring semester.

I made this mind map based on the reading ‘Reconsider the purpose of study’. Though not a wonderful example, it does get the idea across!

Reading Mind Map

Letter: ‘Reconsider the purpose of study”

These files are to be used as preparation for the EAP timed writing activity “Changes in your hometown”. There are 2 files to download here:

1. A sample student essay with 2 outlining activities.

2. Hometown Changes Mind Map

…in which students practice their reading comprehension by matching the texts to the correct picture while learning about some ever-popular inventions that never made it to mass production.

chindogu matching

This is a very bare bones way of explaining the structure of an essay. There are many ways to use these materials, but a suggested plan is:

1 Hand out this worksheet and quickly go over it. (This is the corrected version!)
structure of an essay v2.pdf
2 Hand out this model ‘New Product’ essay, and get the students to identify the various ‘parts’ of the essay.

New Product Model Essay.pdf

3 Hand out these worksheets to help the students plan their own new product essay.

Planning your essay.pdf

This is a re-written and simplified version of the Structure of an Essay reading passage used for the 2004 and 2005 EAP course. I’ve simplified the language, but also made it a bit more prescriptive, focusing exclusively on how to write in the five-paragraph essay format. I’ve included a separate worksheet to supplement the reading, and a quiz to be given a week later. I plan to make a Moodle-based practice quiz to supplement it.

The Structure of an Essay - Reading

Structure of Essay Activity Worksheet (JS).doc

Structure of an Essay - Quiz

These web resources may vanish by this time next year, but in the meantime it might be fun to link to them from your Moodle course.

history of useless inventions
http://www.designboom.com/history/useless.html

Video
Chindogu Celebrating Weird Inventions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-0Xgx7GiYs

2 Within each group, each student chooses one invention.

3 Quickly read about the invention, and remember as much as they can.

4 Mixed-groups: exchanging information about the inventions they just read about.

Early days with Moodle, but this shows how I how wrote a lesson plan above the web page link. Click on this image to see how I included this resource into my Moodle course.

In the first class you may experience problems getting the ‘umbrella holder’ text to your students, in order for them to paste it into Criterion.

To streamline this process I have put the relevant document online in a way that allows for direct copying and pasting from the document online. There is no need to download it first.

Just direct your students to this site:

http://randomhawk.com/eap/

Something for the first EAP lesson - here is the original “Get to know” sheet that Jim made with questions in the 3rd-person (eg: Does he/she?) …

Get to know (3rd person)

And here’s the same sheet slightly modified so that the questions are in the 2nd-person (eg: Do you? Are you?)…

Get to know (2nd person)

Another EAP work in progress…

This is a corpus-based consciousness-raising activity that focuses on the words “percent” and “percentage”. The activity contains a concordance listing for these two words followed by questions which encourage students to identify different patterns in their usage. At the end of the activity there is an opportunity for students to produce sentences using these patterns.

CR Activity - percent

Most of the instances in the concordance listing (20 out of 29) come from two readings in the “Reasons for attending college” topic of the spring term:
- “Why women delay college”
- “Poll: Students growing more self-centered”

I hope to knock out a few more activities like this on other AWL vocabulary items that come up in the spring term readings…

This is something I started working on last year, and is still very much a work in progress… might get it finished in the next year or two!

Academic vocabulary in the article “Reconsider purpose of study” is listed in the following document, together with the number of occurrences and the immediate co-text.

AWL - Reconsider purpose of study

I’m planning to make this the focus of my vocabulary teaching in the spring term. It would also be easy to knock up gap fill activities from this listing.

Hopefully I’ll be able to compile similar lists for the other readings in the “Reasons for attending college” topic before too long, and then I’ll move on to other topics.

This can used by students for taking notes about one of the speakers on Simon Hunter’s ‘Talking About Books’ presentation at:

http://www.futurehunt.com/

Talking About Books worksheet

This is a worksheet to guide students how to write the introduction (and to a lesser extent, the conclusion) of the Compare and Contrast essay.

How to write the C&C introduction

Please click the link to download the file.

This is Simon Hunter’s original work, but I added a section to the end in which students practice writing sentences comparing 3 characters.

the worksheet

Here is the QuickTime version of Dan’s PowerPoint file.

download me! (zipped .mov file)

Here is a PDF of the presentation.

Live link to movie online at: http://randomhawk.com/brain/ali2/

This contains a matching activity for vocab that describes personality as well as a an exercise to describe things that people may or may not have in common. Useful input for the Compare and Contrast essay.

Click here to download the Vocab for Character Activity

This is a Mind Map for students to write about a character from any novel. It requires students to describe characteristics and provide exaamples from the book.

Mind Map for Characters for EAP

I’ve used word cards with my EAP students this term instead of vocabulary notebooks. We’ve used the cards for in-class practice with partners or small groups quizzing each other.

Having completed Part 1 of the book, it seems like a good time to review. I’ve compiled most of the student-selected words and the target words from Simon C’s cloze exercises to make a vocabulary list which could be used in several ways. This list is divided using Lextutor’s Vocabulary Profiler.

Download the Holes Part 1 Vocabulary Checklist

The list is lengthy, with one hundred words, but you might choose to only use the first 50 words on the front page.

Here are the directions:

Quiz your partner. Read each word and ask if they: remember seeing the word; can give a Japanese meaning for the word; or, can use the word in English.
Mark the words R/J/U for REMEMBER, JAPANESE MEANING, and USE.
Mark your own answers as well. Take turns every 4 or 5 words.

***Some words are not real English words, so think carefully.***

The fake words are:
• reckle
• flenge
• attionate
• trenture
• extond
• kouret
• nofflate
• rowte
• unbremle

Thanks to Jim and Simon C for feedback on this.

A follow up to the handout on suffixes in Alibrandi (thanks for the comment, Ted). Same format, but this one’s on prefixes. It may seem out of sequence to present suffixes THEN prefixes (after all, prefixes come at the beginning of a word), but I would point out that words with suffixes are easy to classify according to part of speech (e.g., words w/ -tion are nouns, words w/ -ly are adverbs, etc.), while words with the same prefix can be different parts of speech (e.g., international, internationally). I don’t know if this makes them harder to learn, but you can’t really organize them to the same extent…

Word parts II (ali)