Lesson by a Chinese Student Learning English

I'm not good at writing, really. But it takes a lot of practice as my foreign teachers told us.

He told us not to only memorize vocabularies but to make use of them. He made us listened to songs and watched movies (some of which were really awful) :)

Then he would ask us what we saw or heard. Like the movie "Dragon Heart"

He then wrote what we say on the board, sometimes to a maximum of ten words at a time but it is always about five or six and explained the meaning to us.

Example: We would say

1) Flying animal, which is "Dragon" (we must add an adjective in front)
2) Arrow= He corrected it to "Bows and Arrows"
3) Arrow shoot in backside = "Arrow hit his backside/bottom/butt"
4) Riding horse= "Horseback riding"
5) Prince (add an adjective in front)

We were first told to make 3 sentences with each word, using Past/Present/future tenses

Then with these five words we were told to make a funny short story in our own words minimum 50 to maximum 100.

I will write something like this:
"One day, an Ugly Prince went horseback riding in the forest, then he saw a Majestic Dragon flying above him. The Ugly Prince took out his bow and arrow and shoots the dragon. Luckily, the arrow missed the Majestic Dragon, flew back and hit the Ugly Prince in his butt. The Ugly Prince started crying and rode his horse back to the castle looking for his mother."

He would then collect our homework, correct our mistakes and hand it back to us. Then we were told to rewrite it again.

He then ask us again about the movie and would add in more words, we again were told to make another story with all the words in including those given previously (200 WORDS) he kept on adding until we reached our 1000 words story. He always tells us to make funny stories.

About The Author

By: Anne Wang is an English student in China. Ann publishes articles and lessons at the http://www.eslteachersboard.com/ (free access to ESL resumes, jobs and materials). See more articles and lessons visiting: http://www.eslteachersboard.com/

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