Helping Students Write

Helping ESL students write really isn't much different from helping native speakers of English--the hard parts are the ideas and organization. I find that grammar tends to more or less fall in place if the ideas are sound and the organization meaningful. In this semester, I had promised to write my own blog for every blog written by students in this class. Although it may seem like I failed that promise, readers of these student blogs will see in their writing a thread of style that is clearly mine, as well as the students. To help students write, I must spend time with them visualizing situations and recalling facts. These things are critical to good writing because they provide the substantive detail that makes reading of a blog so worthwhile. Students who merely express their oppinion with substantive support, or who adopt "chatty" styles of writing bore their readers. All of my ESL students have in their lives wonderfully rich details from which they can draw upon to express themselves. I try to elicit such detail and then help them learn by example the idiomatic English phrasing to describe it. As a result, students learn to express experiences via the English language more fully, and show their readers opinion worth reading. Naturally, the same process works well for native speakers too, as even college students frequently haven't had enough experience to see how writing works.