LF Suggestions for SHORT Intermediate Level Writing Books - Supplementary Material

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

So I’m teaching 2 brothers that spend most of their Summers in Canada staying with family.
I’d say they’re upper-intermediate in terms of their English ability.
Their vocabularies aren’t that expansive for their age, but they’re quite capable of expressing themselves in detail with English (conversationally).

In any case, my boss explained to me that they’ve applied for an American school (in TW of course) for the past 2 years, and their applications have been rejected both times on the basis that their reading/writing abilities aren’t on par with their prospective classmates.
Looking at their journals, I’ve noticed that the most glaring weaknesses in their writing skills are verb conjugations and not maintaining the same tense from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph.

My boss has asked me to find a writing book outside of the curriculum that we teach in my school; something supplementary that will improve their chances of being accepted. Preferably this would be around ~50 pages and would give them some guidance and helpful exercises to improve their writing skills.

I’m a first-year teacher and am not familiar with any books that fit their needs.
Can anyone give me some recommendations?
Thanks :smiley:

2

I would go towards training them to edit their own work. The first line of defense, if their speaking is actually good, would be to have them read their own work out loud, either to themselves or to each other. See if they can identify these issues. If they can’t, choose one (maybe “staying in the same tense”) and remind them about it, then see if they can find those problems in their own writing.

Writing is different from speech in that there is time to use the “monitor” – rules and memorized stuff – and we can train students to use a mental checklist (or a real checklist if possible) to improve their written output.

Sorry don’t have any book suggestions, but this is what I would do to develop and “fix” writing at this level.

3

Is that a writing or a grammar problem?

For writing, you could look at “Write Right, from Paragraph to Essay” which is available at Caves.

For grammar I prefer using “Enter the World of Grammar” by HQ Mitchell.

4

I suppose it’s both, but they don’t generally make these mistakes (at least not to the same degree) in conversation.

We actually use “Enter the World of Grammar”.
Thank you very much for your suggestion on the writing book! I’ll check it out.