Wednesday -25 November 2015
The Webinar was on line today: the presenter of the webminar was
Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat .
She is a teacher who is involved in teaching one-to-one and Business English and she has a blog and a website: these are the links which she gave us in the final slide of her presentation.
The webinar focussed on the process of writing and it was centred on the importance of focussing on the needs of the students and what they should be able to write in English, and in particular in Business English Writing.
We were asked to think about the best ways we would approach teaching Business English Writing and she suggested the following ideas:
- establish the objectives
- brainstorm the content
- select and reject
- prepare and outlines with points
- expand on the details
- keep to the plan
I feel that it is really important to teach how to write as quite often our students are not used to thinking before writing in English.Yet it is important to know what we want to write.
The second part of the webinar was on the organization of the text and she reminded us about the importance of a structure and how we connect sentences.
The focus was on sentence connectors and linking words.
Paragraph writing is important and she underlined also the importance of style in writing.
In particular, she suggested teaching how to use " positive words".
I have taught Business English writing and I am aware of the importance of good planning and good writing. I liked the slide in which she summarized the whole process of writing for our students:
Grammar mistakes are quite common and we do need to check how the students can manage and how to make them aware of the language differences
Finally,she underlined the importance of checking spelling and the use of punctuation.
The webinar was interesting and full of useful ideas about the best ways to approach teaching writing in Business English. We should all think before we write.
It takes time to devise new activities and we do need to plan them so that the students are aware of the differences between using English in writing and in speaking.
Currently,I am not teaching Business English Writing but these tips are useful for starting any activity that has to do with writing and how we can present ideas.
These are some useful references for further study that we have been given:
I checked online and found also some blogs and links about how to teach
http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/22099-vocabulary-list.pdf ( interesting for downloading vocabulary )
To the next webinar .......................
Great tips, many thanks for sharing. I have printed and will stick on the wall! I like this blog. Business english course
RispondiEliminaYou're welcome
Elimina