Top 5 Activities for ESL Writing Lessons | Teaching ESL writing

If you’re teaching writing and are looking for some of the best ESL writing activities, then you’re in the right place. Keep on watching for everything you need to know about teaching English writing, including the best ESL writing activities. ------- Check out my book 49 ESL Writing Activities and Games here: https://amzn.to/48sVVLD • Check out this blog post for more ESL Writing Activities, Games, Worksheets & Lesson Plans: https://www.eslactivity.org/esl-writing/ • Want more writing activities? Watch this video by @etacude https://youtu.be/Yr1MG5z0g5o?si=QVSvSQpvcoxq9hSK • Watch my Free writing time activity here: https://youtu.be/ELBRVblvhS4 ------ https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #teachingenglishwithjackie #teachingenglish #writing -------------------------------------------------------- Transcript for TEFL writing activities: Hi everybody, these are my top five activities for ESL writing lesson plans. Number one is journaling. So journaling is a really nice activity to encourage fluency in writing. So many writing activities that you would see in a textbook or kind of other just ideas focus on accuracy. However, writing fluency is important too because you don't want to be writing too too slowly, some speed is necessary. For example, you wouldn't want to spend like two or three hours working on a little quick email at work. Your boss would be very angry at you. So writing speed is also important. Journaling, you can do this in class, but I generally prefer to do it outside of class. The second writing activity is postcards. This is kind of a fun activity if you can get your hands on some blank postcards and you can often find them for very cheap kind of in tourist areas, maybe in the Bargain Bin or something. And then I put students into groups of two or three and they would take a postcard and then whatever picture is on the postcard, like maybe Los Angeles or Vancouver, or whatever, they can look up what the weather's like and kind of some tourist attractions and then they can choose to write to someone that they know. Maybe they could write to their teacher. My vacation has been great. We've been eating lots of food. We went to this one restaurant. We went to this place then we saw... The third activity for ESL writing lessons is Dictogloss. This is a higher level activity and I would find or I would write a passage related to the target grammar or vocabulary and then I put students into pairs. And they each have a pen and paper. I would read out the passage at a faster than normal pace for the level of the students. They would take some brief notes and then when they're done, they would compare with their partner and they try to recreate what I had just read. I read it out one more time, again at a faster pace and students do the same. They take more notes and try to kind of like fill in the blanks with the things that they missed and then they compare with their partner. And then at the end, they compare what they have with the original version. The fourth ESL writing activity is a resume or cover letter. This is especially useful if you teach adults or say like university students, even high school students. They will often need an English resume or cover letter for jobs, so if you can do that in your class, you can really be helping them for their future. I would show students some templates, they can read some examples, and then I'd kind of give them a template to work from and they could kind of craft their own resume and cover letter. I'd often get them to do this for homework and then they would bring it to class. They'd kind of get into groups, they'd see what other people had written and then I would give some feedback. And then I would get them to submit their final copy for grading. Something very important in writing is proofreading and editing. Students often don't know how to do this. Even native English speakers often don't know how to do this. I like to give my students a checklist and get them to do this with their own piece of writing. For example, look for capital letters, look for punctuation, check for subject verb agreement, check that each paragraph has like kind of a topic sentence or a main point, that kind of thing. Timestamp for Writing Lessons: 0:00 Intro 0:11 Journaling 1:10 Postcards 2:01 Dictogloss 2:41 Resume/Cover letter 3:38 Proofreading and editing 4:14 Outro Tags: esl writer, in class writing exercises, ESL writing lesson, writing lesson, esl writing lessons, writing for esl students, writing esl, free write activity, esl writing ideas, writing activities high school, esl writing lessons, esl writing, esl writing activities for beginners, esol writing exercises, esl writing, writing activities for high school, esl writing exercises, english writing practice