| A Study on How to Teach English Writing in College English Class |
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Younghun Shin |
| 대학생의 영어 글쓰기 능력 향상을 위한 교양영어수업 연구 |
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신영헌 |
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| Abstract |
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This article aims to introduce how to teach an effective freshman English course that focuses on improving the writing skills of freshmen students at the university level. Lots of freshman English courses attempt to incorporate all four English skills: writing, reading, listening, and speaking. English writing education, however, is often marginalized due to students’ lack of fundamental writing skills necessary to succeed in an English writing course and because of too much time and energy spent by English instructors making student corrections and revisions. This paper introduces some class activities which help improve students’ writing skills. The main body of this article is composed of two parts. First, it introduces some ways to enhance students’ writing abilities through various class activities. For example, group proofreading competitions provide students with the opportunity to revise and correct texts closely, through which they learn and check basic English grammar structures and sentence patterns. Then, they are asked to retranslate some Korean sentences into English which enables them to practice their sentence making skills. Also, writing a manuscript for a three-minute speech gives them the opportunity to carry out a free writing assignment. Furthermore, writing comments about other students’ speeches gives them an opportunity to perform a guided writing activity. Those three class activities correspond to controlled, free and guided writing respectively. Second, the latter part of the body shows the survey results responded by almost fifty freshman students taking a mandatory reading/writingoriented English course. The results of the survey suggest that though most participants consider speaking ability as the most important among the four skills in learning English, they still believe they need to improve their writing skills. In addition, a significant number of the students believed that the various writing activities during classes helped them improve their English writing skills. |
| Key Words:
general English class, writing skills, group proofreading, controlled writing, guided writing, free writing |
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