ERIC Number: ED031693
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1969-Mar
Pages: 12
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Discover and Transform: A Method of Teaching Writing to Foreign Students.
Arapoff, Nancy
In the last decade an unprecedented number of college-level foreign students have appeared in the United States, competing with native speakers in schools where the only medium of instruction is English. All students at American universities have to do three kinds of sophisticated writing--summarizing in notes, writing exam essays, and writing term papers. The skill of writing, perhaps the most important on the university level, is the one in which foreign students show the least competence or training. It seems erroneous to expect these students to learn to write by learning to produce grammatically correct sentences when native speakers don't seem to learn that way. For the native speaker to become a native writer, he must begin with reading rather than with listening. Data on the differences between spoken and written English, most discernable on the level of discourse, are essential for adequate materials for teaching writing. In the "discover and transform" method of teaching writing described in this paper, the students first read and compare two written models similar in content but different in form. They then analyze the models so they can understand what grammatical and semantic rules operate to transform the first model into the second. Illustrations are from the author's forthcoming "Read, Understand, Write," Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Spring 1970. (AMM)
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Note: Paper given at the Third Annual TESOL Convention, Chicago, Illinois, March 5-8, 1969.