Hello and welcome back to Charlie’s Lessons! Thank-you for coming back to read my latest blog post.
Today we are going to look at five excellent digital tools and hacks for teaching writing skills to ESL Students. These tools will help your ESL students to develop their all-important writing skills in absolutely no time.
A lot of ESL teachers find the writing part of the English teaching process very frustrating, as ESL students tend to regularly repeat their mistakes at first. In spite of your best efforts, your standard student might use the wrong word and the wrong tense, they probably also have not grasped how to put a paragraph together yet.
So, how do we correct this in a way where our students can really benefit from our input? Let’s look at my five favourite hacks.
1. Donald Murray’s ‘The craft of revision’ (2003)
“There will be no second draft without a first,” – Donald Murray
The famous Journalist and English teacher Donald Murray taught his students that writing is all about the process and not about the product. He explains that there are three stages in any writing activity for your students – 1) pre-drafting, 2) drafting and 3) writing.
When we are teaching students about writing in English, we need to give them the tools to assist them with the drafting and writing stages. But, you won’t be able to help them forever. So, as teachers, we simply need to allow our students to discover how to write correctly and independently.
So, we should never take a student’s first draft and correct the entire thing ourselves, as this does not enable the student to learn. Instead, I take the first attempt, apply a correction code to the text and give it back to the student to revise accordingly.
While this is not the easiest solution at first, over time your students will develop a much better understanding of the writing process and will make improvements. They need to understand the overall process and this is a great way to encourage that.
2. Road To Grammar’s Text Analyzer Tool
If your students are submitting their homework or classwork digitally, then they will benefit from using Road To Grammar’s Text Analyzer tool. All that they need to do is copy and paste their text into the box.
Road To Grammar then provides your students with a proficiency guide based on the complexity of language that they have used. It also generates a helpful vocabulary list. This identifies which words meet levels A1, A2, B1, etc. when compared with a list of 10,000 commonly used English words.
Based on the feedback provided, students can then exchange their choice of lower-level words for higher-level words. Results are more accurate for longer pieces of text that exceed 50 words.
3. English Vocabulary Profile Online (EVP)
Unlike the Road To Grammar Text Analyzer Tool, English Vocabulary Online can identify individual words and give us added insights. To use this function, we simply enter our chosen word into their search function and when we select Details and then Full View.
This creates a detailed list that includes:
- Different contexts in which the word can be used
- The level of the word (A1, A2, B1, etc)
- Dictionary examples of the word
- Learner examples
This can be very handy as it provides insights for both ourselves and our students when teaching or learning any new item of vocabulary.
4. Ozdic.com
Students tend to dislike the concept of collocation because it is not something that you can easily explain as a teacher like we can with grammar or punctuation rules. It also often won’t make any logical sense to a non-native English speaker. But, English is just the way it is!
Ozdic is an online dictionary that can assist English learners to write and speak in more authentic-sounding English. Students can input nouns to get a range of adjectives and prepositions that collocate with that noun. With this dictionary, students can begin to discover and learn which collocations are typical in English and which are not.
Teaching Writing Skills Bonus: Combining Tools 1 – 4 With Synonyms
Now, here’s how we can combine all four of these tools to mark our ESL students’ writing homework:
Step 1
Using a piece of homework submitted via Google Docs or similar, we can copy and paste the homework text into the Road To Grammar Text Analyzer tool. Let’s say that this gives a potential guide level of B1, but when looking at the right-hand text I can see that there are options associated with A1. So there is potential for improvement.
Step 2
We can replace one of the words such as ‘big’, which is an A1 word by searching for additional synonyms with higher ratings on Thesauraus.com. There are several different options, such as ‘large’, which is an A2 level word. Or, ‘huge’, which is B1 and therefore two levels higher.
Step 3
If we swap ‘big’ for ‘huge’ the number of B1 words has risen. Again, we can go back and swap out ‘good’ for another synonym, such as ‘exceptional’, which we can see from a search is B2.
Step 4
Using a correction code with this student’s work I would have marked the text: “put a table,” as a wrong word or ‘WW’. From there my student can use the Ozdic website to fine collocations with a table and search for the appropriate verb.
Step 5
When I analyse ‘lay’ using the English Vocabulary Profile Online, the phrase ‘lay the table’ is B1, so let’s change ‘put’ for ‘lay’. On the right-hand side, we can see that the score has gone up again.
Just by making those minor adjustments to my student’s work, we have already increased the level.
So, once we have taught our students how to use these three handy online tools effectively, they will be expert writers in no time! That is a Charlie’s Lessons Guarantee!
Once your students are used to using these tools, we can start to test them on their higher level vocabulary using tools such as Blooket, Kahoot or Quizizz
5. Collaborative Writing Task
My final teaching writing to ESL students idea is to have our students collaborate on a writing task to share their knowledge. Areas we can test include different grammatical structures, new vocabulary and ideas on organizing the writing itself.
To discover how to set up students to use collaborative tasks, check out my blog post on collaborative activities. This covers using digital tools such as Canva, Google Docs and much more.
I hope that you and your students find this helpful when it comes to developing their English writing skills. Let me know how you get on in the comments below. Remember to subscribe and thank-you for reading!