This month we are looking at the composition of articles and how they are taught to ESOL students.
An article often appears as an exam question for their assessment. Students have been taught to plan and draft their ideas. One particular challenge for ESOL learners is the tone and style when usually a question will be asked to write a lively article. This is much easier for native speakers to complete and master. They built on these skills by looking at various examples and identifying errors in style and tone to build up a bank of set expressions they could use in the future writings. In addition, the students worked on a number of activities to improve their other article skills for example, paragraph organisation, ways to start an article to to engage the reader using rhetorical questions and also ending the article in a suitable way.
We’ve looked at several different articles over the months with different topics such as occupations and the media. Here are a sample of articles that the students in the Level 1 class have written with some feedback from their teacher. We are pleased with the progress they are making.
