Teaching Academic ESL Writing

This text offers a compendium of techniques for teaching writing, grammar and lexis to second-language learners that will help teachers target specific problem areas of students' writing. It works with simple rules that collectively can make a difference in the quality of ESL students' writing.

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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.