Being someone who regularly teaches Exam skills, teaching writing plays a key part in my normal week.  One of the main things I always try and do is focus students on key features of genre.  These are things we often take for granted, so as well as vocab and grammar, I look a lot at what makes up register encouraging students to ‘notice’ the key features, such as genre specific vocab, sentence length, objective or subjective.  It’s easy to forget that what we know and expect of a text might not for the student necessarily be the same, so it is often worth highlighting these things.  This lesson also goes into paragraph structure and touches on theme and rheme (the topic and the comment made about it).

The aim is to give students the opportunity to produce a piece of writing that will have some interesting lexis, some grammatical range and cohesion.

For copyright reasons I wrote the review as I didn’t want ‘Time Out’ to kill me!

Level:  Upper-intermediate and above

Time: 1.5-2hrs + homework

Aims:

• To examine language used in restaurant reviews
• To build learner autonomy
• To teach genre specific high level adjectives
• To prepare students for a piece of writing

Outcome:

• The students will be prepared to write a restaurant review

Age group: Adults – especially FCE / CAE / CPE

Procedure

• Discussion of restaurants / favourite foods / favourite flavours
• Language focus: Vocab – working it out from the context / Grammar participle clauses
• Pronunciation focus: matching the script to the new lexis
• Writing: planning / cohesion
• Practice: Writing a review

 Materials

• Material A: Detailed Plan
• Appendix A and B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D