It’s been a big first week at work. I am teaching a different course this term for the first time since 2003. Yes. That’s right. You heard me. 2003. It’s the academic writing subject that is part of our program. The aim is teach our students to write, research, reference and produce an essay on their own in 12 weeks. We began this week with personal, creative and free writing. We talked about the relationship between language, writing, knowledge, power and learning. We started our daily spelling tests to improve our vocabulary. Most fun of all we started to examine sentence structure with the simple sentence. As one who went to school when we were taught about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, clauses, pronouns etc it is a challenge to translate this into the flashy new functional grammar with its attributes and circumstances. It’s a challenge for the students as well because I think it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the understanding of how English works. I can see how it is useful, but I think you have to be schooled in traditional grammar first before you can chuck the functional grammar into the mix. So that is what I attempted to do…in three two hour tutorials. By the end of the week we were all able to find verbs, identify tense, and have some understanding of subject and objects and whether they were nouns or pronouns. We also read a number of interesting readings about the process of writing, and worked on pre-writing strategies (brainstorming and clustering etc). Then on Friday the students wrote a cinquain about winter. For some it was the first time they had ever written a poem and they couldn’t really believe that it might be that easy. So apart from waking at 4am every morning and running through my lesson plan it was a challenging and exciting week of teaching for me. Next week…compound sentences and academic paragraphs, together with some notetaking and paraphrasing from newspaper articles.