Thursday, September 29, 2005

EFL - Shaking her pen defiantly,...

Writing. I've been doing a lot of it with my classes this month. Three writing classes in fact, and the marking's been unenviable. However, a few interesting ideas have come out of this.

쓰기. 이번월 수업들에 이걸 많이 했다. 사실, 쓰기 수업 3개 있으므로 채점이 부럽지 않았다. 그렇지만 몇몇의 좋은 생각이 일어났다.

Sporting the slogan "where getting your daily writing 'fix' is considered much more important than fixing your writing", I find the site Writing Fix a great source of inspiration for creative writing, whether it's personal or for the classroom.

The most successful activity so far has been the writing storms. Taking a simple starting phrase, students have just 3 minutes to write the next section of the story. After they've written 3 or 4 of these, you might like to ask them to choose their favourite and expand on it for home work. Some example starters follow. I find the best way to catch imaginations in this activity right from the word go is to present an unfinished sentence, rather than simply a title or full first sentence.

On the highway between the two towns,...
Among the crowd of onlookers,...
Next to the button on his shirt,...

Hurrying away and looking directly at no-one,...
Stretching his neck to see better,...
Looking towards the vast horizon,...

After the search party had checked the field,...
As soon as the bell stopped ringing,...
Until the plane touched down,...

Bringing in pictures as prompts works well, but I find Korean learners need a fair amount of practice of creative thinking before this is tried.

Used as a warmer (or even in the last few minutes of class), this fast activity reinvigorates, keeps them on their toes and keeps those creative juices flowing!

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Also, I adore the section on 'persuasive voice': the art of using intelligent reasoning, facts and feelings to convince someone to do something. However, they're not of the banal "Convince your boss to give you a raise" variety. Clicking the sentence generator yields such gems as "Convince your brother to grow a beard", "Convince a space alien to join a dance troupe" and "Convince your teacher to buy you an elephant".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Adam, I like your Writing Storm ideas and Persuasive Voice ones, and there are some lovely starter ideas, too. I may try some of these with my Year 6 class and let you know how they go.