Advanced Academic Writing: Approaches and Ideas

 
Lewis Richards  
   
Notes from the Language Show seminar, 21/10/11  
First of all, thanks to everyone who came to the seminar. It was great to meet so
many people who are interested this area of teaching, and to get some feedback on
the ideas in the talk.  
Feel free to send me an email if you’d like to comment on anything in the
presentation, or to share ideas. My email address is: [email protected]  
As I mentioned at the end of the talk, a lot of the ideas in the talk are in my IELTS
book, ‘IELTS Advantage Writing Skills’, which aims to help students get 6.5-7.0+ in
the writing – take a look if you like. There are some sample pages to look at on the
Delta publishing website:  
http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/exam-materials/ielts-advantage-writing-skills    
Or join our facebook page:  
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ielts-Advantage-Writing-Skills/191126747604338    
   

 
   
Seminar Notes:  
Discussion:  
• Do you teach academic writing? Who do you teach, and what type of
writing?
• What problems or difficulties do you come across when teaching
academic writing?
• What techniques and activities can help make academic writing more
interesting for students and teachers?
To address the second point, about difficulties, there are three main issues which I
think we all have to deal with when we teach academic writing:  
1. A lot of the material is pretty dry.

2. Motivation in class can be a problem. Although the students

have the overall motivation of needing to pass the exam to get into
university, since the material (e.g. writing about graphs) is not always
very exciting, students often are not as enthusiastic about studying
academic writing as they are about general English, which is generally
seen as being more fun.

3. Students have always studied general English, from when they

started learning English as kids, right up to the moment they join an
IELTS course. Therefore the material in academic writing classes is
totally different from anything they have encountered before.
   
Over the last ten years I’ve come up with a few ideas and activities which make the
teaching of academic writing a bit more interesting for me and my students. Below is
a summary of the ideas from the presentation:  
1. Personalise

Here’s a typical IELTS task 1 graph:  

The bar chart below shows the percentage of men and women who said they
enjoyed a range of leisure activities in the UK, in the year 2008.
Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make
comparisons where relevant.

[Chart]    
It’s hard to summon up much enthusiasm for either studying or teaching this kind of
graph, but personalising it before you write about it helps to get students interested.  
For example, get students to discuss the topic of the graph:  
1. Do you do any of these hobbies?  
2. Are there any of these hobbies that you aren’t interested in?  
3. Which of these hobbies are the most popular in your country?  
4. Tell your partner about something you do in your free time which
isn’t in this graph.  
   
Or get the students to rank each of the hobbies, and then talk about how they feel
about them:  
   
Choose between 1 and 5 for each hobby.  
1= I’m not interested in it  
5= I’m really interested in it  
   
Another option is to get your students to make up their own graphs. This is much
more motivating and interesting than writing about the graph above. Here’s an
example from my IELTS class - I asked them to be honest, and make up a graph
based on their real hobbies, and this is what they came up with:  
   
These pie charts highlight the main hobbies of the men and women in Lewis’
IELTS class in October 2010.    
   
[Chart]    
   
Making up their own graph meant that the class was really into writing about it. I love
the idea of ‘complaining’ and ‘doing nothing’ being hobbies!  
   
2. Look out for interesting material
I’m always on the lookout for articles and graphs that might be good to use in my
IELTS classes. ‘The Week’ is a great source of material, and newspapers have lots
of stories which can be used in lessons.  
Here’s a genuine graph I found in the Guardian a few years ago. It obviously
depends on who you are teaching, but with a group of adults this has always been
great fun. It works well if you ask the students to predict which countries are at the
top and bottom of the list (and apologise to them in advance if you have any
Japanese students in your class!).  
Frequency of sex, number of times a year.  
Source: 2004 Global Sex Survey  
[Chart]    
   
3. Tailor the grammar to academic writing
In the first couple of years I was teaching IELTS, I was always really surprised to see
students who were, for example, in an upper-intermediate general English class,
writing essays with basic grammar mistakes in them. I couldn’t work out
why students whose level of grammar was so high could keep making errors in
essays with tenses or grammar items they had studied lots of times before.
After a while, I realized that the problem was a lack of tailored grammar exercises,
exercises specifically designed to train students in how to apply grammar items
directly into writing.  
Let me give you an example. I’ve got in front of me a (really good) upper-
intermediate course book, and the grammar on these two pages is relative clauses.
The students are given a typical pair of sentences, and asked to talk about the
difference between them:  
My brother, who is a doctor, lives in New York.  
   
My brother who is a doctor lives in New York.  
You’ve probably seen, and taught this kind of thing before. It’s designed, obviously,
to elicit the idea that the first sentence contains some extra information (‘My brother
lives in New York’ is the main idea of the sentence, and the fact that he is a doctor is
additional information about him), and the second sentence defines which brother I’m
talking about (it implies I have more than one brother, and you would expect the next
sentence to be something like ‘However, my brother who is a teacher lives in
London’). Now, nothing wrong with this, but how do students go from knowing this to
producing good relative clauses in an essay?  
How to tailor grammar to academic writing?  
1. Decide exactly in what way we use this grammar in writing.  
2. Make exercises with examples of the kind of language you will want your students
to write in their essays.  
So, with relative clauses, it seems to me that one of the most common types of
sentence used in IELTS writing is the type which contains a relative clause at the
end, to give more information or a comment on the main idea. For example:  
• The most important museums are free to enter in the UK, which is a
good idea, because it allows everyone to have access to culture.

• If you run your own business, you can make the decisions about the
company yourself, which means that you are in control of your
working life.

   
And when I started to think about which verbs are commonly-used with the relative
clause, I came up with these:  
   
means, enables people to, allows people to, gives people a chance to,..makes it
possible/easy/difficult to., prevents/stops people from.., encourages people to.  
   
   
   
Here’s an exercise, based on this – try it for yourself:  
   
Complete these sentences with a relative clause, using one of the verbs
above:  
   
1. In many countries, governments give scholarships to students from
low-income families, which makes it possible for poorer students to
go to university.  
   
2. House prices tend to be very expensive in big cities, which…  

3. The
government is going to cut the price of public transport next year,
which…  
 4. A
lot of people who own their own businesses work extremely long
hours, which…  

   
I’ve done this exercise lots of times with IELTS classes, and overnight students come
back with essays with this type of sentence in. It’s very satisfying for us as teachers,
and a very effective way of helping students to improve their written grammar.  
My answers were:  
2 which means that it is hard for young people to get onto the property ladder.  
3. which will encourage more people to leave their cars at home.  
4. which means that they often don’t have much time to spend with their families.  
   
   
4.Write your own texts  
   
There is a lot of good IELTS material on the market, but I often it’s really useful to
write my own texts to use in class.  
   
Why?  
• You can choose the language you put in the texts.
• You can make a variety of text types (e.g. chat rooms, newspaper
articles, interviews)
• Once you’ve written a text, you can re-use it as many times as you
like
   
You can design your text to either be a springboard for work on grammar, for
example by including lots of examples of grammar in context, or use your text to
teach lexis for an essay. This is what I tend to do with my texts the most.  
   
Let’s look at an example. Recently my students had to write an essay on this topic:  
   
   
Many countries face rising crime, and many people believe that sending
criminals to prison is the best way to reduce crime.[Soft  Break]  [Soft  Break]Do you
agree that prison is the best punishment for criminals?  
   
   
A very typical essay question, and getting students to come up with ideas and
arguments on this topic is fairly easy. What is more difficult is getting them to use
good lexis, probably because most course books deal with crime vocabulary in
exercises where students learn things like different word forms about crime (e.g. to
rob/a robber/robbery, etc.)  
   
So I made up an interview with someone who believed that prison worked, and used
it to introduce some chunks of language. Have a look at this text, and decide what
lexis you would want your students to learn from it:  
   
   
“I think the problem with society these days is that the sentences given out to
criminals are too lenient. When I was a child, capital punishment was legal, and I
think it was a deterrent to potential criminals. People were scared to break the law,
because they knew the punishment would be severe. But these days, people get really
soft punishments, like community service, which don’t deter anyone from committing
crime. The best way with criminals is to lock them up in prison, and throw away the
key. There are too many dangerous criminals in our society. Putting them behind
bars would definitely reduce the crime rate.”  
Joan Smith, 68  
Highlighted in red are my choices. What is also great about teaching lexis for an
essay through a text is that, of course, all the vocabulary is learned in context, in
chunks.  
   
“I think the problem with society these days is that the sentences given out to
criminals are too lenient. When I was a child, capital punishment was legal, and I
think it was a deterrent to potential criminals. People were scared to break the law,
because they knew the punishment would be severe. But these days, people get
really soft punishments, like community service, which don’t deter anyone from
committing crime. The best way with criminals is to lock them up in prison,
and throw away the key. There are too many dangerous criminals in our
society. Putting them behind bars would definitely reduce the crime rate.”  
   
You can then do some vocabulary practice exercises, like these below:  
   
   
1. I think many punishments are not strict enough.

I think many punishments are too l_______________

2. Prison stops people from committing crime.

Prison is a d_______________ to p________________ criminals.

3. Sending more criminals to prison would reduce the crime

rate.

P______________ criminals b____________ bars would reduce the crime rate.

[Answers: lenient/a deterrent to potential criminals/Putting criminals behind bars]

   
To make the text more interactive, you can write two short texts with opposing
arguments in (i.e. the one above with the arguments in favour of prison, and then one
with the arguments against), and do a jigsaw reading, where students read only one
text each, and have to explain what they read to each other.  
Here’s a paragraph with the opposing view to the text above:  
   
“I’m glad that Britain doesn’t have such strict punishments for criminals as in the
past. I think capital punishment, for example, is violent and primitive, and should not
be used in a modern society. Also, I don’t think capital punishment doesn’t stop
criminals – most criminals don’t think about the consequences of their actions when
they break the law. Another thing is that generally speaking, the people who commit
crimes come from difficult backgrounds – either they are unemployed, or they have
some family problem, which make them commit crime in desperation. Rather than
sending them to jail, where they will spend time with other criminals, I think we
should use other types of punishments, like community service, where they can
contribute something to society. Also, we should help them with some education and
training, so they can find employment.”  
   
Steve Guardian, 32  
   
Chatroom texts  
   
A really nice (and easy) way to make up a text is to get your friends to help you. Ask
your friends, on facebook, to write in one short paragraph their views on an essay
topic (e.g. ‘Is prison the best punishment for criminals?’)  
   
You can then put a selection of their paragraphs together into a text. It involves very
little work on the teacher’s part, but produces a great range of ideas and lexis.
Here’s an example, taken from unit 3 of my book, on crime:  
   
   

 
   
   
   
   
   
   
Paragraph Reformulation  
   
In my experience, a big problem for students is knowing how to organise and flesh
out their ideas into paragraphs. It may be because writing styles and conventions
differ from country to country, or simply a case of not knowing what is expected in an
English academic essay.  
   
Again and again I find students don’t explain and develop their ideas sufficiently.
One way to deal with this is to do some reformulation of a student’s essay.  
   
Here’s a paragraph, containing two arguments, from a student of mine. The English
is excellent, but the ideas are not fully-developed. What I do is type up the
paragraph, and then ask the students in pairs to see how the paragraph could
be improved As a class, we discuss what is missing from the paragraph, and then I
ask the students to turn this into two, better-developed, paragraphs.  
   
   
Topic: The pros and cons of living with your parents as an adult.  
   
Some people argue that it is good to live with your parents as long as you can
because you can take care of them, and as a result the family is much closer. Not
only that, children who live at home have less responsibilities and this results in them
having more free time for themselves.[Soft  Break]  [Soft  Break]55 words  
   
   
Once the students have re-written it, I then show them my version, and get them to
notice how I’ve developed the ideas (e.g. with examples, linking words, results, and
so on).  
    
Take a look:  
   
   
Some people argue that it is good to live with your parents as long as you can
because you can take care of them. In many cases, parents need help with the
household jobs, such as doing the shopping, cleaning the house or repairing things
in the house. In Spain, for instance, it is common for people in their twenties to live
at home, which means that parents get support from their children. As a result, the
family is generally much closer than in other countries where children move out
early.  
   
71 words  
   
   
   
Not only that, children who live at home have less responsibilities. Living alone
means that you have to deal with a range of tasks, such as shopping, paying bills
and so on, but if you live with your parents they tend to take care of these
things. The result is that children who live at home can concentrate on their studies
or on developing their career, which will give them more opportunities to be
successful in the future.  
   
74 words  
   
   
   
   
Error Correction  
There are many ways to correct students’ work, but one I like is to turn it into a
betting game. After students hand in an essay, I pick out ten sentences with key
errors in, and type them up, highlighting the part of the sentence which needs to be
corrected.  
In teams, students then have to correct each sentence, and bet between 1 and 10
points on their correction. So if they correct a sentence and feel absolutely sure
about their correction, they can bet 10 points on it. If they are less sure, they bet
fewer points, with a minimum of 1 for each sentence.  
If they are right, they keep the points for each sentence, but if they are wrong they
lose all the points. Therefore with 10 sentences to correct, the maximum points
is 100, and the minimum -100.  
It turns a fairly dry exercise into a competitive twenty minutes of fun. Here’s an
example with five sentences: bet on each one if you like:  
1. If there is problems about the house, usually parents solve these
matters.  
   
2. For example, if you are young and you want to buy a house, it would
rather live at home and save up money than to pay rent.  
   
3. Almost people are independent from their parents when they get old.  
   
4. Renting a house or flat is not an easy task for most family.  
   
5. I’m agree with all arguments, but it is a personal choice, and I prefer
to live alone  
Answers: 1. are 2. it would be better to 3. Most 4. families 5. I agree.  
   
Number two has more than one possible answer, which gives the teacher the
opportunity to feed in other options (‘it is preferable to’/’it makes more financial sense
to’, etc).  
   
   
Model Answers  
   
My view is that if you’re going to write an academic essay or report in a foreign
language, you at some point need to see a model of what is required. However, I
only use model answers after students have had a go at the essay first. I also try to
use the model answer in a variety of ways to improve students’ grammar,
lexis, cohesion and coherence.  
   
Here’s a model answer from unit 5 of IELTS Advantage, on this problem/solution
essay:  
   
‘People who live in big cities face a range of problems in their daily life. What are the
main problems people in cities face, and how can these problems be tackled?’  
   
Have a look at the model answer, and think about what you would do with it.  
   
   
   
   
   
   

 
   
Suggestions:  
   
1. Find and underline the topic sentences in the model answer.

2. Circle all the linking words and discuss with a partner what
they do.

3. Write down my essay plan for me. What were my main points,
and supporting ideas? This works well if you make a grid for students
to complete:

Main idea Supporting ideas

• People forced to commute
High property prices
• Example – London
• Solution – build more cheap houses
 4. Find synonyms in the model answer.

5. Check the meanings of lexical items from the model answer in

a dictionary.

6. Scan the model and complete the collocations:

1. build _____________ houses [answer ‘affordable’]

2. ______________ ticket prices [answer ‘slash’]
   
7. Writedown 10 key items from a paragraph of the model answer.
Cover the model, and try to re-write the paragraph exactly as it is in the
model.  
   
For example, from paragraph 2 of the model:  
   
Biggest – property prices – average salary – commute – London – prohibitive –
cost – solve – government – housing.  
   
Cover the model, and turn this into a full paragraph.  
   
   
Make your own listenings  
   
To make a piece of writing more fun, and take it off the page, it’s really nice to make
a recording to introduce some ideas and/or language. One way of doing it is to turn
the task into an improvised chat with a colleague. You can add in a bit of humour to
liven it up a bit.  
   
For instance, writing about a process. Here’s a typical question:  
   

 
   
The key language here is the linking phrases to join up the stages (‘subsequently’,
‘following this’, etc), and passives. So I recorded a chat with a colleague where we
discuss the process of making tea, and ask the students to write down all the linking
words and passives as they listen.  
   
Here’s a snippet from the conversation, to give you an idea:  
   
A: Mmm, this tea’s lovely. I wonder how it’s grown.  
B: You don’t know how it’s grown?  
A: No, no idea.  
B: Well, I’m really interested in the production of tea. Shall I tell you about it?  
A: Yes, that would be great.  
B: Well, tea is grown in India and China..  
A: Really?  
B: Yes..and in the first stage, tea seeds are sown by the farmer, and then the sun
shines, which causes the plants to grow..  
A: Wow..  
B: Yes, and then once the plants have grown, they are picked and put into boxes…  
   
And so on. The students at the end will hopefully have a page of notes with the
linking phrases (‘in the first stage’, ‘and then’) and the passives (‘tea is
grown’…’once the plants have grown’). They can they have a go at writing an
answer to the process question.  
   
   
I hope these ideas are useful, and I’d to hear any feedback or hear your ideas.
Please email me if you’d like to.  
   
Lewis Richards  
23/10/11