Grading Rubric for Advanced Academic Writing

I get many requests from people to share the grading rubric that I use when I evaluate my student's 5-paragraph academic essays.  Here it is: Grading Rubric for Essays. My students don't speak English as a first language, so I simplified it with the hope that they can understand it.

The book I'm using for my classes is Great Writing 4: From Great Paragraphs to Great Essays, which is excellent as far as academic writing books go.

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ESL Textbook Reviews

One question that I often see tossed around on the Facebook groups related to language teaching is what textbook other teachers like.  I have a site called ESL Textbook Reviews that talks about my specific choices and I'll also list a few of them here. 

General 4 Skills Textbooks:



Academic Writing



Public Speaking and Presentations

Teaching Writing, minus the peer/teacher editing

I wrote last month about how my approach to teaching advanced level writing has veered away from the traditional endless cycles of peer and teacher editing and instead has focused on things like:

-self editing
-genre analysis
-awareness of common problems: verb choices, punctuation, etc.
-crafting quality thesis statements, hooks, topic sentences, etc.

A month ago, I thought things were going well and at this point, I've even more confident in it.  I've been informally asking students about how things are going in the class, whether it's really difficult, or not too bad.  The students have been telling me things like:

-at first it was so difficult, but now it's okay
-no one has ever taught me how to actually write an essay
-I've learned a lot
-the class in interesting
-I want more group projects (only from the weak students! What strong writer could possibly want this in a writing class?)
-I can analyze essays really easily now

Success?  Perhaps.  The majority of students (like 99%) can, at this point tell you about the basic structure of an essay in their sleep.  And the majority (maybe 95%) can produce a basic 5 paragraph essay with all the major elements.  If I had spent endless days focusing on sentence level grammar, vocab usage and peer editing, I don't think this would have been possible. 

The book I'm using for this Class is Great Essays 4 by Keith Folse:

"Great Essays" sample lesson plan and PPT

I must confess that I don't actually make "lesson-plans" because my PPTs are my lesson plans.  And, I will usually just write some additional notes in the book on the pages that we're covering to remind myself of things, give some extra examples, etc. 

Here is my Great Essays 4, Unit 3 Lesson Plan.  It's an introduction to Cause and Effect Essays.  A few things to note:

1. It's a lot of content, but I try to give the information in a way that is interactive and involves group work/discussion.  And minimizes the lecture time, which I think is actually quite ineffective and leads to sleeping students.

2. The PPTs are simple. 

3. Never give back midterm exams until the end of class!

4. Give the plan for the day at the beginning of class.

5. It's actually the PPTs for 2 classes.  I teach 2, 1.5 hour classes/week

Book Review: Great Essays 4: Keith Folse

Great Essays 4 is the most fabulous book that I've been using this semester to teach Advanced Composition to English Majors, who are mostly 3rd and 4th year students.  I was given this book to teach and didn't choose it myself, but thankfully, it's one of the best writing textbooks I have ever used, if not the best.  Why is it so good? 

Because it's kind of a hybrid between the process approach to teaching writing (focusing on brainstorming/selecting main points/editing, etc) and the product approach to teaching writing (using a model text upon which students should use to base their own essay upon).  It's like the authors have selected the best from each approach and combined them into one, easy to use and teach book. 

The first chapter is an introduction to essays in general, and then subsequent chapters cover a certain type of essay (narrative/comparison, etc) in detail.  There is always 3-4 example essays and some questions to help the students analyze it.  The questions are helpful at getting the students to notice the subtleties of the text, but not too detailed that it's burdensome.  I've found assigning the reading of an essay and answering the questions an excellent homework assignment.  Then, I put the students in groups of 3-4 and give them about 15 minutes to discuss their answers together. 

The second part of the chapter is more focused on the actual process of writing, with things like writing good hooks and thesis statements, brainstorming, or vocab focus.  And then finally at the end there are some topics for that kind of essay, as well as a timed writing assignment.  I've been using the essay topics for graded homework assignments and the timed writing as in-class practice. 

Weaknesses?  I'm not sure I love the vocab focus.  While I like the idea of it, it's just one of those things that I never use due to time constraints and I'm really not sure it's the most important thing to focus on.  I also don't love the peer editing, for reasons mentioned in this other post about teaching writing, and the book seems a bit heavy on this.  I'd MUCH rather have some stuff in there about self-editing, complete with checklists, etc.  It's actually a major weakness in my opinion.

Anyway, Great Essays 4: you can't go wrong if you teach very high level students who are at the point where they are ready to write academic, 5-paragraphs essays.  And if they're not quite there yet, check out something like Great Paragraphs.  I've also used this book and was quite happy with it.

Essay Writing and Student Autonomy

One definition of autonomy (from the source of all things good: Wikipedia) is: the ability to take charge of one's own learning.

I believe that the current model of teaching paragraph/essay writing in most unis in Korea (and perhaps around the world where English is taught as a second or foreign language....I don't really know) does nothing to foster student autonomy.  This model is basically that the student writes something and gives it to the teacher, probably with very little in the way of editing.  The teacher spends ridiculous amounts of time editing something that in some cases is barely understandable, gives it back to the student and they make the changes.  Repeat the cycle endlessly.  This cycle can also be done with peer-editing, of which I am not a big fan of either.  In this model, the learner essentially takes very little responsibility for turning out a quality product on their own because they know that the teacher or friend will just make the changes they need. 

However, this is 100% unlike real-life.  When students are taking an English proficiency test that involves writing, there is no teacher or friend sitting next to them, helping them along.  Nor would they have this at any job.  They would just be expected to turn out a decent email or whatever they would need to write. 

So my system?  I'm attempting to teach students to self-edit by giving them check-lists with things like, "Check all the verbs: correct tense?"  and "What is your thesis statement?  Is it stated or implied?"  And, I'm not totally unkind.  I'll read essays and give general feedback like, "Your hook is quite weak....what about changing it to something like....."  Yes, it's challenging.  No, I'm just not lazy.  I truly think it will be better for the students in the end, even if they are not so happy about it.  Students generally hate what is not easy for them, but spoon-feeding has really never been my style.