One of the first text types ESL student have to master is an article. The tasks are usually very straightforward; they deal with the daily-life topics and do not expect deep subject knowledge on nay topic. The length of the text is not ambitious, neither is the word count. What many students find hard is… Read More Article writing for IGCSE ESL
One of the courses I teach is English General paper (Cambridge curriculum). The main point of the course is to provide our students with the skills to write academic essays and to read thoughtfully texts of different nature. All in all, it must be a prep course for the uni-level Academic writing classes. The coursebook… Read More What if we’ve been teaching essay writing all wrong?
Sooner or later each person in the academic community faces the word count restrictions. And almost always that number would seem to be significantly smaller than a reasonable one you (or any other peer) would come up with. The rule of the game is very simple: meet the requirements. Realizing that none of us can change… Read More Fighting the word count
Descriptions may be hard to deal with but they are enriching the writing so much that ignoring them is a crime against the reader’s perception and style. Cutting down on details will negatively affect not only the text perception but probably the final mark if it happens to be an exam writing. As a common… Read More Descriptive writing and our senses.
FToday I have finished reading a great book “Genre, Text, Grammar: Technologies for Teaching and Assessing Writing” written by Megan Watkins and Peter Knapp (2005). It suggests a very elegant way of teaching and assessing any kinds of texts from the genre position. As each genre has its specific features of texts, it can be a good… Read More How to assess writing (if all other systems seem to fail)
