Teaching Writing – Thinking in Categories
This ESL activity helps students learn English writing by imaging and creating abstract categories as a tool for organizing information. Known as the Picture Word Inductive Model, this technique is used to help young learners with language development. I have adapted the process to make it suitable as an inquiry based writing exercise for ESL university students.
Flow
Remind students of the inquiry method structure (i.e. ask a question, collect evidence, identify a rule, make a conclusion)
Show an unusual picture. Pictures that work well with this exercise generally contain movement and something odd, unexpected or puzzling. Picture 1 of this image slide is a good example; the same image without text explaining the situation)
Ask students to brain storm a vocabulary list, perhaps 10-20 words.
Students organize words into groups, or categories.
Do a quick whole class check of vocabulary and category names.
Turn categories into pieces of evidence; the words then become details of the evidence.
Students write a short report about the picture. Begin with a question about the image, organize the evidence with good vocabulary, create a rule based to give the evidence some background or situation. Then make a conclusion which answers the initial question.
I give students 30 minutes to finish this exercise primarily because we have completed several inquiry based exercises. Adding a time limit encourages students focus their attention. Besides, I encourage writing students to adopt the mindset that an incomplete first draft is a good start, not a poor beginning.
Credit
This writing activity is based on a lesson described by Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski in an Edutopia article and an ASCD blog post
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