Kitakyushu JALT:

Focus on Content: Materials and Techniques for Teaching Beginning Academic Writing

Date: Saturday, June 9th, 2007 Time: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Speaker: Cindy Daugherty, Seinan Gakuin University

Description:
This presentation starts with the contention that ESL textbooks for academic writing do not offer adequate instruction on paragraph development; rather they focus more on paragraph types. As a result, for many students, English academic writing is a style that emphasizes form over substance. While no one would argue that form is unimportant, it is of little value unless it is used to communicate original content. To unite the two, students need to combine knowledge of form with engaging material to write about. The material must be easy enough to understand, but also complex enough to allow for choices, both about the topic of the paragraph and the information that can be contained within it. The use of movies and graded readers as material for practicing the academic writing skills of summarizing and supporting a topic sentence with explanation and examples will be discussed in this presentation.

Cindy Daugherty teaches at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, where she serves as the faculty sponsor for the E.S.S. Club.

Organization: Kitakyushu Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Kitakyushu JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 1,000 yen

Venue: Kitakyushu International Conference Center, room 31 (a 5-minute walk from the Kokura train station for shinkansen, JR train)

Location: Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

Contact Kitakyushu JALT

Website: hosted.jalt.org/chapters/kq/