Teaching Academic ESL Writing is a good book that is focusing on Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar fills.
Teaching academic ESL Writing
Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar fills an important gap in teacher professional preparation by focusing on the grammatical and lexical features that are essential for all ESL writing teachers and student-writers to know.
The fundamental assumption is that before students of English for academic purposes can begin to successfully produce academic writing, they must have the foundations of language in place–the language tools (grammar and vocabulary) they need to build a text.
This text offers a compendium of techniques for teaching writing, grammar, and lexis to second-language learners that will help teachers effectively target specific problem areas of students’ writing. Based on the findings of current research, including a large-scale study of close to 1,500 non-native speakers’ essays, this book works with several sets of simple rules that collectively can make a noticeable and important difference in the quality of ESL students’ writing.
The teaching strategies and techniques are based on a highly practical principle for efficiently and successfully maximizing learners’ language gains.
Part I provides the background for the text and a sample of course curriculum guidelines to meet the learning needs of second-language teachers of writing and second-language writers.
Parts II and III include the key elements of classroom teaching: what to teach and why, possible ways to teach the material in the classroom, common errors found in student prose and ways to teach students to avoid them, teaching activities and suggestions, and questions for discussion in a teacher-training course.
Appendices to chapters provide supplementary word and phrase lists, collocations, sentence chunks, and diagrams that teachers can use as needed.
The book is designed as a text for courses that prepare teachers to work with post-secondary EAP students and as a professional resource for teachers of students in EAP courses.
Teaching academic ESL Writing Content
Teaching academic ESL Writing is a course text for high intermediate and advanced academic studies of English as a second language. It explains terminology and methods for teaching students how to write academic material in their new language.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 establish some of the groundwork for the book. Chapter 1 presents the main assumptions of the book, which may seem fairly obvious, but are often overlooked in the teaching of L2 writing:
- Learning to write in an L2 is different from learning to write in an L1.
- teaching L2 writing the way L1 writing is taught is not effective.
- The knowledge-transforming type of writing expected in academic disciplines is different from personal experience narratives or conversational discourse and cannot be developed through conversational or interactional activities—whether written or spoken. On the contrary,
- extensive, thorough, and focused instruction in L2 academic vocabulary, grammar, and discourse is essential for developing L2 written proficiency.
More groundwork is covered in chapter 2, which discusses writing requirements in a university, characteristics of academic writing and academic text, as well as common writing tasks students need to perform in their mainstream studies in particular disciplines in the university.
Chapter 3 examines the importance of accuracy in academic writing and how to approach the teaching of NNS writing so that accuracy can be achieved.
