I met with my Japanese student, Yasuko, to work on
techniques for writing. She was
discouraged because she had taken the TOEFL exam the previous week, but didn’t
feel that she had done well due to the writing section. Additionally, she had just completed
her writing class for the day, also, with the same difficulty of writing for 30
minutes on a topic. She lamented
that her vocabulary was not strong enough. I do not perceive a vocabulary deficiency with Yasuko when
we have conversation time. I
started by suggesting to her that when confronted with a writing exercise, even
timed, she begin with brainstorming who, what, where, why, when, and how on a
piece of scrap paper in bullet format.
Then, transfer the bullet items into an outline form of the opening
paragraph, body and closing paragraph, before she begins writing. She continued to indicate that she
“couldn’t think” and that she felt that she used the same words over and over
in her writing. I encouraged her
to use this method to begin her writings, but more importantly, she just needed
to start practicing timed writings on her own. I suggested she use the practice TOEFL books for topics. She should start her practice at one
hour and reduce it by five minutes every practice time until she can
successfully complete a full writing at 30 minutes. I proposed that she start
first by using “comfortable” topics, or ones that she felt that she had
adequate vocabulary to complete. Then, she could advance to topics that
required more vocabulary and knowledge, and subsequently to topics that she had
to “choose” impromptu. My other
student, Joyce from Taiwan, also joined us. She, too, encouraged Yasuko to practice on her own time to
become better at the timed writings.
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