Tài liệu Developing writting skills 2 part 6 docx

50 get the reader’s attention. Unless you get the reader’s attention, the rest of the essay is wasted. Therefore, to write an interesting and effective introduction, first it is important to write a few sentences that draw the reader into the topic of your essay, and then present the argument through a thesis statement that contains the topic and the ideas to be developed. There are a number of different ways to grab your reader’s attention when writing an introductory paragraph. 1. You may want to tell a story. Stories are an interesting way to appeal to the reader’s curiosity. They should be brief and related to the main idea (the thesis statement). They can be your personal stories or something you read or heard about. 2. You could start by describing a situation or an incident. The reader can relate to situations or incidents that illustrate clearly your point of view. They serve as examples and help the reader recognize the problem more readily. 3. You might use facts and statistics. However, it is important to use facts or statistics that startle the reader because he or she does not expect this kind of information, and the facts or statistics must be from a credible source. 4. You could ask one or more questions. You may want the reader to think about possible answers or may want to answer those questions yourself. 5. You may want to use quotations. This is another way to attract your reader’s attention. Quoting someone famous, using a proverb, a favorite expression or a slogan is expressing your ideas through someone else’s voice. 6. You may challenge a widely held assumption or opinion or you may open with a paradox (an apparent contradiction). 51 7. No matter which approach you take, make sure that your introductory sentences are related to the thesis statement. It is not a good idea to have a great gap between these two parts. Therefore, having a transition sentence to connect the two parts is very useful; it brings them close together. In summary, an introduction prepares the reader for your essay, it gets his/her attention, and it states the topic of your essay and the direction it is going to take. Supplementary Reading: Hairston, M.: “Successful Writing”. Meriwether, N.: “Writing Essays. Strategies for Success”. 52 TEXT 1 Why So Late ? 1. Are you often late for school or work? 2. Psychologists say that lateness is rarely an accident. More likely it is connected to unconscious feelings about school or your job. You may be bored, and lateness is your way of expressing your resistance to wasting your time. Or, if you feel insecure because of poor achievement, lateness is your way of saying “no” to an unhappy situation. Then again, you may resent authority. You want to feel free, unhampered by rules, regulations, bells, time clocks, and ID cards. Any one of these could account for your tardiness. 3. There are as many alibis as there are explanations for chronic lateness to school or to work. Professor Susan Shnidman of Harvard Medical School has studied the problem for several years and in the course of her work has heard some imaginative excuses for lateness: “I took the garbage out. The door locked behind me. It took an hour to find the superintendent to open the door.” “My astrologer advised me not to get out of bed before noon today.” “We wall-papered our living room last night and I couldn’t find the front door.” “My brother has the measles. I had to deliver his newspapers this morning.” 53 4. Perhaps the most fanciful excuse Prof. Shnidman ever uncovered was, “A snow flake flew into my watch and slowed down the mechanism.” 5. In order to overcome frequent tardiness, psychologists advise the following: a) Be aware that it is an undesirable habit that may hurt those you love. b) Decide to change your ways. c) Keep a daily log of your activities. Analyze it to see where you could save time. d) Divide your tasks into “must do” and “not necessary to do at this time.” e) Set your watch ahead. Trick yourself into being on time. Explain what is meant by: 1. … if you feel insecure because of poor achievement, lateness is your way of saying “no” to an unhappy situation. 2. You want to feel free, unhampered by rules, regulations, bells, time clocks, and ID cards. 3. There are as many alibis as there are explanations for chronic lateness to school or to work. 4. Keep a daily log of your activities. QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION 1. Into how many parts can you divide the text? Why? 2. Is it effective to start an essay with a question? 3. How are paragraphs 2 and 3 connected? 4. Why do you think the author stresses/refers to the source he has taken examples for illustration? 5. Which alibi was the most/least reasonable? What other alibis can you think of as reasons or excuses for being late? 54 6. Do you agree with the psychologists who say that “lateness is rarely an accident? More likely it is connected with unconscious feeling about school or your job.” 7. Do you consider lateness an illness? If so, can it be cured? How? 8. Do you agree with the psychologists’ pieces of advice to overcome frequent tardiness? Which one, according to you, is the best? How else can you advise people not to be late? 9. When was the last time you were late for an appointment? What was the reason for it? Did you lie or tell the truth about it? Why? EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY Match the words in Column A with their definitions in Column B A B 1) chronic a) not safe, unprotected 2) unhampered b) registration of facts in a special notebook 3) insecure c) person who watches and directs (work) 4) alibi d) infectious disease marked by small red spots over the body 5) astrologer e) small, light, leaf-like piece 6) superintendent f) person studying the position of stars 7) measles g) continual, lasting for a long time 8) flake h) not aware of something 9) log i) a plea of having been elsewhere 10) unconscious j) free to move or act 55 YOUR TURN Do research work to write about any one of the following topics: 1. Smoking among girls/boys. Try to support your statements by some statistics gained from reliable and authoritative sources. 2. Using cribs during exams. Interview your peers to find out their attitude towards cribs or what kind of cribs they use. Include some interesting replies in your essay. 3. Tasting the food of other countries. Rely on your or your friends’ experience of foreign restaurants in Yerevan or abroad. Tips for Successful Writing The Body: Development The body of the essay, which is nearly always at least three paragraphs in length and is quite frequently longer, is the “meat” of the essay. It contains support for the thesis in the form of examples and/ or illustrations, statistics, details, and facts. The more support you provide, the better your paper will be. Generally, each paragraph in the body begins with a topic sentence that directly relates to the thesis. Because of this structure, it is easy to outline an essay, using the topic sentences as subheads under the thesis statement. As with the introduction, the body of the essay can be developed in several different ways. If your purpose is to explain an idea (expository writing) or to argue that an opinion or belief is correct (argumentative writing), you can choose from several methods to develop your ideas. Among these are narration and description, as well as the simple method called conclusion and support, which allows you to defend an opinion or explain an idea by 56 using concrete and specific details that relate to it directly. However, you may want to explain or to argue by choosing some other methods. Cause and Effect Cause and effect method analyzes the causes of a given situation and the circumstances that led to it, or it begins with the effects and works back to explain the cause or causes. Comparison-Contrast A comparison-contrast format is developed by showing the similarities and/or the differences in the people, places, or ideas presented. It is important to note that a paper of this type should be developed around a single point of comparison and have a single purpose. Illustration is developing an idea with examples. Classification is distinguishing between types or classes. It should be noted that many essays use a combination of several methods. The significant point is that you should be conscious of how you are writing your essay instead of writing without thinking. 57 TEXT 2 Classrooms of Babel 1 A record number of immigrant children pose new problems for schools 1. For picture day at New York’s PS 217, a neighborhood elementary school in Brooklyn, the notice to parents was translated into five languages. That was a nice gesture, but insufficient: more than 40 percent of the children are immigrants whose families speak any one of 26 languages, ranging from Armenian to Urdu. 2. At the Leroy D. Feinberg Elementary school in Miami, a science teacher starts a lesson by holding up an ice cube and asking “Is it hot?” The point here is vocabulary. Only after the students who 1 “Classrooms of Babel”, an article by Connie Leslie and Daniel Glick in Washington, and Jeanne Gordon in Los Angeles, is taken from Newsweek (February 18, 1991) 58 come from homes where English is not spoken learn the very basics will they move on to the question of just what an ice cube might be. 3. In small towns and big cities, children with names like Oswaldo, Suong, Boris or Ngam are swelling the rolls in U.S. public schools, sitting side by side with Dick and Jane. Immigration in the 1980s brought an estimated 9 million foreign-born people to the United States, slightly more than the great wave of 8.8 million immigrants that came between 1901 and 1910. As a consequence, at least 2 million children or 5 percent of the total kindergarten-through-12th- grade population have limited proficiency in English, according to a conservative estimate from the U.S. Department of Education. In seven states including Colorado, New Mexico, New York and Texas, 25 percent or more of the students are not native-English speakers. And all but a handful of states have at least 1,000 foreign-born youngsters. As a result, says Eugene Garcia, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, “there is no education topic of greater importance today.” 4. How to teach in a Tower of Babel? Since a 1974 Supreme Court decision, immigrant children have had the right to special help in public schools. But how much? And what kind? Many districts have responded by expanding the bilingual-education programs they’ve been using for the past two decades. In these classes, students are taught subjects like social studies, science and math in their native language on the theory that children must develop a firm foundation in their mother tongue before they can learn academic subjects in a new language. Proponents say that even with bilingual education it takes between four and seven years for a non-native to reach national norms on standardized tests of most subject material. 5. In most schools, it’s not economically feasible to hire bilingual teachers unless there are 20 or more students who speak the same language in the same grade. Even then, there aren’t many math, chemistry or biology teachers who can handle Vietnamese or Tagalog. In addition, critics like author and former Newton, Mass., teacher Rosalie Pedalino Porter argue that the typical bilingual programs for Spanish speakers used over the last decades haven’t worked. The clearest indication of the failure, she charges, is the high dropout rate for Hispanic children—35.8 percent compared with 14.9 percent for blacks and 12.7 percent for whites. 59 6. Some schools have found that immigrant parents can be a great resource, either as volunteers or hired aides. When members of New York’s PS 217 Parents Association noticed that non-English- speaking families rarely made any connection with the school, they won a $10, 000 grant and hired five mothers of immigrant students as outreach workers. One day each week, these women, who speak Urdu, Chinese, Russian, Haitian-Creole or Spanish, do everything from acting as interpreters at parent-teacher conferences to helping families find city services. 7. California is experimenting with “newcomer” schools that act as a one-year stop-over for foreign-born children before they move on to a neighborhood school. These centers mix children of all ages in a given classroom and offer comprehensive services such as immunizations and other health care. Bellagio Road Newcomer School for grades four through eight is one of two such schools in Los Angeles. While most classrooms are Spanish bilingual, other students are taught in English. Teaching assistants who speak a variety of languages help out with translating. Principal Juliette Thompson says the aim is to provide a nurturing atmosphere for a year while the children, many of whom carry psychological scars from living in war-torn countries like El Salvador, learn some fundamentals of English. The newcomer schools seem to be working well, but they don’t reach many kids. “Unfortunately,” says Laurie Olsen, a project director for an advocacy group, California Tomorrow, “the real norm is far less optimistic than what you see happening in newcomer schools.” 8. A method borrowed from Canada recognizes that the problem is not one-sided. Called “two-way immersion,” the program requires students to learn subject matter in both languages. Classes in the voluntary enrichment program encourage mixed groups of native speakers and English speakers to acquire new vocabulary. Public schools like PS 84 in Manhattan also use two-way immersion to attract upper-middle-class parents. Lawyer Holly Hartstone and her husband, a doctor, enrolled their 9-year-old son Adam in PS 84, where nine of the school’s 25 classes are involved in voluntary Spanish two-way immersion. When Adam grows up, his parents expect that he’ll live in a global community and need more than one language. These programs are catching on around the country. Two- . DISCUSSION 1. Into how many parts can you divide the text? Why? 2. Is it effective to start an essay with a question? 3. How are paragraphs 2 and 3 connected? 4 children are immigrants whose families speak any one of 26 languages, ranging from Armenian to Urdu. 2. At the Leroy D. Feinberg Elementary school in Miami,