book review

Guided ParagraphWriting                                              

TC Jupp and John Milne.                        

Heinmann English Language Teaching,1972 

105 pages.                                       

 

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Review

This book is a course in teaching writing a continuous paragraph. It is based on the personal experience of the student. The book consists of three parts; each part contains six subjects differing in the simplicity of experience and topics.

The authors stated their plan of each section in their introduction. This plan is the guidelines for executing the course. Each section consists of the following:

1-     Oral practice: the students are encouraged to answer oral questions that lead to expressing themselves about a certain topic. This will be done in pairs or groups.

2-     Written exercises: the students here write down the answers of the question making a continuous paragraph.

3-     Sample Paragraph: Here the students put together the oral and written exercise in order to make a paragraph. Further training is undertaken here in rewriting the paragraph. Here the students’ attention is drawn to things such as: pronouns, reference, tense sequence and sentence connectors.

4-     Vocabulary Study: vocabulary training is very important in writing. However it must be tailored to the needs and level of the students.

5-     Student writing: the students here will write their own paragraphs without copying the sample paragraph, since the students paragraphs will express their own personal experiences.

6-     Consolidation: in this part students are encouraged to write more and more for practice.

The authors believe that they have tried to “present and practice the language in meaningful situations and give some real opportunity for the student to express himself.”

 

The course is helpful to the students learning English. It also teaches the student to be able to write a good paragraph using logical development of thoughts.

Looking through the book finds that the authors started from the simplest personal experiences to the more complicated ones. The first section trains the students to write about very simple happenings of their daily lives such as going to work or to school or to college. Then the goes on to write about the weekend. The third exercise is about what happened yesterday. In the first two exercises the student uses the present tense. Then in the third exercise he uses the past tense. In the proceeding exercises, more intricate topics are presented such as writing a personal letters and taking a hard to take decision.