American English Webinar 4.4,Building your Toolkit: Steps and Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing

It was another wet Wednesday night in Kota Bharu. UNITARKB was the site of the gathering. Prospect, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary teachers were present for the webinar. The title was Building your Toolkit: Steps and Strategies for Teaching Academic Writing.  Teachers found it helpful. It was not based on the standard 5 paragraph essay, but focused more on the process of writing. Coherency, cohesiveness, results, process, rubrics and peer to peer feedback were some of the titles covered.  Teachers particularly liked the 2 tasks for organization.

The first task would be a sentence scramble of paragraph. You cut out the sentences of paragraph and students have to arrange it in order. The other task was to improve topic sentences. Students would be given paragraphs and would have to fill in the topic sentences. I was fond of the idea to use an 8 pint system for grading, but only comment on 2-3 points per draft. This gives the student a manageable amount of areas to work on. If you grade the first draft on all 8 points, students will become overwhelmed and discouraged. When grading papers, the most important is content, organization and grammar.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrn_j1BC7x0