ESL WRITING: USING PARAGRAPHS
BULLETPOINTS:
Level: any;
Age: 7+;
Group size: any;
Aim: to write a story together and to learn how to use paragraphs;
Skill: writing;
Grammar: -;
Vocabulary: -;
Length: 60+ min;
Preparation time: none;
Material: 5-10 sheets with a story starter (see below), pens, scissors, paperclips.
PREMISE
If you teach in Italy, you might notice that Italian students don’t use paragraphs. In Italian they segment texts differently and they never use blank lines between two paragraphs. So this should be taught, since it is an important element of layout for any longer texts.
PROCEDURE
The activity is simple: put the students into small groups. If you have for example 12 students, divide them into two groups of 6, with bigger classes, divide them into smaller groups up to 10 students each. The students sit in circles and receive a sheet with one story starter each (every group member a different one, the same story starters are given to the groups). They are asked to add one more sentence to the story and pass it to the next student on their right. They get a new story and add one more sentence. After one round, every story will have minimum 6 sentences. If time allows, they can play another round with the same stories, but ask them that the last one has to finish the story.
Depending on the class level, you can work with simple stories in Simple Past (A1), add more narrative tenses, like past continuous (A2), past perfect (B1), while with higher levels (B2+) you can spice it up with idioms, phrasal verbs or reporting verbs.
I found these story starters from CREATIVE WRITING NOW excellent:
– He should have never let her into the apartment…
– It sounded like violin music, and it was coming from the basement…
– “It’s not what you think,” he said.
– I crouched behind the car, trying not to make a sound…
– There’s only one thing in the world I’m afraid of…
– They sat next to each other on the train, still pretending to be strangers…
– I knew he’d been there because he’d stubbed out his cigarette in the sink…
– “Don’t you dare come any closer…”
– She’d imagined this moment so many times, but she never expected…
– At first, I thought it was the cat, but it was…
– Inside the envelope was a four-leaf clover…
– There was only one way to keep her quiet, and it was going to cost us…
For lower levels use story starters like this:
– I opened the door and …
– That day was just a bad day the moment I woke up …
– ‘Why me?’ I asked myself …
– That cannot true …
– She is the best mother/father/teacher/friend, I knew …
– Why is … my favourite season? Because …
– It was dark and raining and I was driving home …
– Just a perfect day: the sun was shining and …
– When I grow up, I will definitely …
– Everybody liked him, but he had a secret: …
– Before I go to school/work, …
Give a max. 30 minutes for this exercise. Play some background music while the students are writing. Encourage the team members to help each other, but only in English.
Once the groups have finished the story, as the students to cut up the last story they have in their hands into sentences and hold them together with a paperclip. Ask one student in every group to collect the cut-up stories and swap it with another group’s spokesperson. The groups have to reconstruct the stories and divide them into paragraphs (on the floor or on the desks).
This will take up another 20 minutes.
The stories are now hopefully re-organized on the floor/desks, so the group which originally wrote the stories can check if they were reconstructed correctly. If they confirm the order of the sentences, they need to give a title to the story and read it out loud to the whole class. The class decide if they nominate this story for final award. They should choose 5 stories maximum for the award.
This should be done in 10 minutes.
The five stories should be then placed onto the teacher’s desk and analyzed for the paragraphs together. You can also do this putting the paper slips onto the board or wall and separate where a blank line should be. This way you can discuss with the class why we use paragraphs (to separate ideas).
Finally, students can vote which story was the best. This final step should take another 10 minutes.
Obviously, these time limits work perfectly with a medium group (12-15 students). If you have a big class, you need to rationalize timing.
If you have the fortune to work with a group in a multimedia room, in an online course or with laptops/tablets at hand, the whole lesson can be adapted to the screen, shared immediately on a platform, even in Zoom or any other video-chat program and read/analyzed in whole class.
N.B. If your students insert dialogues into their stories, please talk about punctuation. I found this MASTERCLASS for creative writers very useful.
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