Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Techniques in Teaching Writing by A. Raimes




Review by Kim Engbers - PC 11

This book is good for teaching ESL writing. The first chapter is a good review on how to teach ESL students to write in English. I found it useful because I have never taught writing before, much less ESL writing, and it was good to look back at this chapter mid-semester also.

The book is older but still very useful. It is a short read and a goof refresher for any teacher. The final chapter is how to edit student’s writing. I also found this useful because I found myself either wanting to totally re-write a student’s paper and therefore take away the student’s own creativity or just circle whole paragraphs and write “change this”. Either way I was not helping the student. The last chapter helped me find a structured way to respond to the students writing and give useful feedback.

The Writing Teacher's Book of Lists by G.R. Muschla



Review by Kim Engbers - PC11

This book is a great resource for a writing class. You can use the lists for writing prompts or to focus on vocabulary. The book is broken into seven sections for special activities, nonfiction writing, fiction writing, rules and checklists, special lists for students writers and special lists for teachers.

In each section there are lists such as synonyms or antonyms. There will be a list of words and then activities that can use those words or you can make your own activities. The student lists and teachers lists are for the writing process and how to publish your work. This is useful for teaching our students the writing process and how to properly quote resources.

I used this book for a mid-level and advanced writing class. I used some of the lists and the activity sheets for writing prompts. The students then used the writing and the vocabulary to write essays for my class. I really liked this book because it gave me options for activities and the lists of words are in one consolidated page for easy photocopying.