Second Language
Writing: Theory and Practice
Fall
2012
Practicum
proposal
9859504 Lilian Hung
The purpose of the practicum:
Servicing as a writing tutor
to facilitate a teacher's writing skills and enhance a student's writing
proficiency by tutoring the student in a writing lesson once per week.
The setting:
I am here to promote the student’s writing
ability to help her get good grades on the JCEE exam. The
writing tutoring is held at 1:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon every Sunday in the student’s
house.
The
materials:
1. The main material used in the lesson isThe main techniques of English writing
(英文寫作的主要關鍵技巧) by 謝南玉,who is an English teacher in Taipei First Girls High School and it’s published in 2006. The
textbook introduces from basic sentence structure, sentences paragraphs to
different kinds of rhetorical patterns such as narrative essay, argumentative
essays and common correspondence.
2.
Some teacher-made handouts.
3.
Assignments.
The instructor:
Lilian
hung.
The background
of students:
The student is 17 years
old, who is in the third year of a senior high school. Since he is a 3-grader
in a senior high, he has learned English for over 10 years. His current English
proficiency, especially writing, is basic to intermediate. He is able to
produce short sentences and short paragraph, but with difficulty to write essay-length
composition. Moreover, the learner especially encounters writing a composition
without any coherence, and cohesion. That is, he writes without organized
content. Also, she sometimes encounters some ungrammatical sentences, such as
two verbs in a sentence. Therefore, he usually just gets low scores on his
writing exams. The EFL learner has few chances to expose to English environment
and his goal is obvious: to improve his writing skills and get higher score in
his JCEE exams. His motivation to improving writing is obvious and strong, no
matter the external or internal motivations.
The course will last for at most one year
after the student passes her JCEE exam. The
student needs to take a two-hour writing class per week. After each class, the
student are required to have some basic
exercise (would be shown on the appendix) at home, which could help her
improve her basic composition knowledge. My practicum record duration would
last for the following one and half months, which is from October 14th,
2012 to December 2th, 2012.
The activities in thispracticum:
1.
Week1:
Plot-test about writing.
2.
Week2:
Sentence structures and word choice(1): conjunctions, noun clauses, adjective clauses
3.
Week3:
Sentence structures (2): conjunctions and adverb clauses
4.
Week4:
The organization of a composition: Topic sentences
5.
Week5:
The organization of a composition: Supporting ideas and conclusion
6.
Week6:
The organization of a composition: Outline your ideas
7.
Week7:
Coherence and cohesion: the use of transition words
8.
Week8:
Narrative Essay
9.
Week9:
Descriptive Essay, picture description
10.
Week10:
Argumentative Essay
11.
Week11:
Comparison and contrast
12.
Week12:
Common Correspondence
13.
Week13: Write a summary
The rationale behind the writing
activities and writing course:
The senior high EFL student usually aims to
characterize the academic genres, standards, practices and academic
disciplines. Therefore, I should usually present classes based on the following
principles:
1.
Focus
on language structure: teach sentence structure, appropriate word choice, appropriate
use of transitions.
2.
Focus
on text functions.
3.
Focus
on content.
Problems or challenges that you may
encounter:
Extensive reading is an important factor while
learning English writing. However, because of time limit, it’s impossible for
me to spend much time requiring him to read during classes. All I can do is to
ask him read some articles as an assignment. Second, I seldom ask my tutor
student to finish a composition in my class time, because of time constrain
again. It would be hard for me to know if his improvement after classes because
of my instructions or just asking for help at home.
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