Examine sentence arrangement

Very often, students write a series of sentences that are accurate grammatically if we look at each sentence in isolation; however, the sentences do not seem to “hang together” very well. One student, for example, wrote these three sentences:

(1) Our house had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. (2) A large garden was in front of the house. (3) My father had planted a lot of flowers in the garden.

A first step towards improving this piece of writing was to make the sentences fit together better:

(1) Our house had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. (2) In front of the house there was a large garden. (3) In the garden my father had planted a lot of flowers.

Students need to examine a text carefully to find out if the sentences hang together according to the basic principle that old information comes before new information in a sentence. In Sentence 2, the house is old information, as it was referred to previously in Sentence 1; a large garden is the new information. What students need here is a lot of practice in making choices within a text between sentences that convey the same meaning as individual sentences, but are arranged differently.

Examples

1) Give students a sentence, followed by two sentences-both with the same meaning-that could follow it. The students dis­cuss the alternatives and make a choice, explaining the reason for the choice:

When I arrived at the house, my mother was sitting in her rocking chair.

Choose which sentence follows:

This chair was given to my mother when I was born.

When I was born, someone gave my mother this chair.

Summarize

Summarizing provides students with valuable practice in search­ing for meaning and communicating that meaning. Faced with a reading passage, they have not only to find out what the main ideas are but also to be able to express them in their own words. This ability of the language learner to understand concepts, pro­cess them, and restate them in his own words is a major goal of the language-learning process.

Examples

1) Divide the class into six groups, each with about five students. Create an information gap by giving each group a different read­ing passage-a story or dialog-to work with. Each member of the group writes a summary of their passage for another group. The students within the group discuss their summaries and choose the best one to give to another group. Members of the group receiving the summary ask additional questions about the read­ing passage if they need clarification. Finally, members of the first group copy out the whole story and give it to the second group. After they have done this on a few occasions with pas­sages assigned by the teacher, they then summarize each other's writing. The challenge then is: Can the reader spot the writer’s main point? Is that main point clearly expressed? Is it as clear to the reader as it is to the writer?

2) Students read the following passage:

When the fire engine left the fire station on Hicks Street at 8:00 pm on Saturday, the fireman Bill Rosсое did not know that he would return a hero. Flames were leaping out of a first-floor window of the corner house on Livingston Street. Neighbors, police, and firemen stood outside on the sidewalk. Suddenly they all looked up and shouted as they heard a scream. A boy, about ten years old, appeared at a third-floor win­dow. It wouldn’t open. He was very frightened. Bill Roscoe dropped the hose, stepped forward, jumped, and grabbed the bottom rung of the metal fire escape ladder. Then he climbed up to the window, broke it, pulled the boy out of the window and carried him down the ladder. Both were safe, and the crowd cheered.

Then they turn the page over, and write a one-sentence sum­mary of the passage. They choose which of the following sentences best summarizes the passage and compare it with the sentence they wrote:

The writer talks about how dangerous a fire can be.

The writer warns families not to leave children alone in the house.

The writer describes the brave act of the fireman.

3) Students read a short newspaper article, such as the one above, and consider which parts of the article they would print if they were the newspaper editor and had space in the paper for only a few sentences. The students are thus being asked which parts express the main idea of the piece of writing.

Complete

When students examine a reading passage with parts (words, phrases, sentences, or larger chunks) missing, they have to con­sider a great many features of writing if they are to complete it. Obviously they have to consider meaning and the grammatical and syntactic fit of the part they add. In addition, they have to put themselves in the position of the writer and then tone, style, and organization become important. A piece of writing with an informal tone would not be likely to suddenly switch to a formal tone; a narrative would not usually develop into a philosophical argument. Completion exercises ask students to discern the orig­inal writer’s purpose, audience, and personal style and to pay attention to those in the completed version.

Examples

1) Give out the article about the fireman (which they were to summarize) but with the first or last sentence missing or both. The students write sen­tences which might be appropriate to complete the paragraph. They discuss and compare their choices.

2) Give students the entire paragraph about the fireman, and give them some additional information that the newspaper reporter now wants to add to the article. The students have to decide where they will fit the new information into the article and whether any changes need to be made in the wording.

The fireman swung his legs up and got his feet in place.

The crowds thought the house was empty, so they were quite calm.

3) Give the students a passage to read which stops at words like however, and so, or and then:

The sun was shining and there were no clouds in the sky when Jane left her house to go to the beach. How­ever, ...

The students discuss what might come next in the story and then they complete the story.

Speculate

Speculation involves thinking beyond the given text. Speculative questions open up opportunities for both discussion and writing. Look at the number of such questions that can be asked about the passage about the fireman. Why was the boy alone in the house? What does a fireman do every day? How would the boy describe the event in a letter to his grandmother? What letter would the owner of the house write to the insurance company? What precautions should everyone take to prevent fire at home? How would the boy describe the incident? Would you like to be a fireman/-woman? Why or why not? Many of these can be used as topics for discussion and writing. In addition to speculation beyond the given text, students can be given tasks that encourage them to speculate about the text itself, about its content, context, organization, and the writer’s choices of words and syntax.

Examples

1) Students read the article about the fireman and speculate about how the little boy’s mother, who was not at home when the fire occurred, might have reacted. They make a list of her reactions on the blackboard. Then they write a letter from the boy's mother to the fireman.

2) Prepare index cards with the following roles written on them: the fireman, the little boy, the owner of the building, a passer-by, a next-door neighbor.

Duplicate the roles as many times as necessary for the number of students in your class. Distribute one card to each student. The students form groups and discuss how the fire would have affected them in their role. Then they write a letter to the newspaper after the article about the fire appeared and they describe the fire in detail from the point of view of the person on their card.

React

Students can react to a reading assignment by discussing it, writing about it, or even by doing something active, like following directions

Examples

1) Use the passage about the fireman again, but solely as a stimulus for going beyond the subject matter of the passage. Students discuss a fire they have seen, make a list of things that could start a fire, make a poster for the school warning about fire, make a poster for a child’s room with three Don’t’s on it, or write about the first three objects they would save if their house were on fire. Other students guess the authors.

2) We can create situations in the classroom by asking students to write real instructions that other students will actually carry out.

Task 7. Find a reading passage in a textbook or magazine that would interest your students. Devise classroom activities and write instructions for students to do meaningful writing tasks that ask them:

- to examine cohesive links,

- to examine punctuation and grammar,

- to examine sentence arrangement,

- to summarize the passage,

- to speculate about the content of the text or speculate beyond the text,

- to react to the con­tent of the reading passage.

Do these activities involve working with the text or from the text? What kinds of prewriting activities would be useful? What do you think the students are supposed to learn from each of the activities?

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 853