Textual Awareness

We started by reading this short biographical text about Brad Pitt (download the Word file here), by the far the best actor in the world when it comes to playing characters who look like Brad Pitt. Anyway, the tasks were simple...

First, having read the text, guess - without looking at it - the number of paragraphs (very easy I know), sentences (more difficult), and words. The point is just to think about structures of English sentences and paragraphs.

Secondly, with the text covered, we used the simple prompts to re-write the whole biography. Comparing the reconstruction with the original text allowed us to look for areas of English writing we needed to spend more time thinking about.

New Writing Course

The course starts with a NEEDS ANALYSIS session. We discussed how well we all write a variety of different text types in our first languages. There seemed to be a class consensus that the texts we write well tend to be the ones that we have read a lot of, and which we have practice of having written. The philosophy of this course, therefore, is to improve our writing skills by focussing on text types, analysing the way they work, and then trying to produce and improve upon our own written texts. The students all wrote down which text types they would most like to be able to write well in English. A list of the types of text we discussed are listed here.