Live from Japan!

Thought I would share a few essays from my second year students for this weeks Engrish Tuesday feature. I have been working on essay writing for the past few weeks with these students and I, overall, have been really happy with how it has gone.

During the first lesson they gathered ideas for their essays, brainstormed locations they wanted to travel and reasons why they wanted to travel there. In the second lesson I taught them about introductions, transitions and conclusions. They worked with my sample essay to identify the parts and then they wrote their own essays. After they wrote the essays I collected and marked them. I do not correct their English, instead I underline problem areas and mark them with a code (1=Punctuation, 2=Capital, 3=Plural, 9=Strange, etc.). During the third lesson the students work with an essay that I wrote which is littered with mistakes they commonly make, they must find the mistakes and correct them with their partner. Then, they get their own essays back and must spend time fixing their own mistakes.

It is a good lesson series in part because it really makes them think. Typically Japanese teachers correct all the mistakes on student essays and rarely, if ever, do they have the opportunity to reread their work and check it themselves. I think this is a valuable skill for a writer to have whether it is in a native language or a foreign one.

Anyways, here are two that I received this week that made me laugh out loud. I love that my students are testing some boundaries and they aren’t giving me the same old canned answers that they think I want to hear. If I hear another student say, “I want to go to America to practice my English,” I am going to SCREAM!

The most choice part of that essay:

Third, I want to dive from Niagara Falls. In other words, I want to die . . . Oh! It’s an American joke!

The most choice part of the second essay:

Second, there are many women who have dynamic busts and hips. I like them. I will be excited if I see them in close.