Introduction 2

Skill Enhancement
The instructor should help the students organize their notebooks by dividing them into sections: One for the new words, one for spelling rules, one for first drafts, one for final draft and so on. She can provide them with internet website with supplementary exercises that target their weaknesses. She should teach them time management and study skills and general learning strategies such as how to make an outline of a topic sentence and supporting details, a summary table, using graphic organizers, making a list of words related to a phonic rule and so on. To help the students improve their spelling, the instructor provides phonics instruction at the beginning of each class sessions for 10 minutes or so. A single phonics rule is taught per day with examples in the form of a table as in Tables 2 and 3 below to help the students generalize phoneme-grapheme correspondences and see similarities and differences among them. When the students take a few rules, the instructor can give a summary table that shows those similarities and differences in phoneme-grapheme correspondences as in Table 4. She draws the students’ attention to words they come across in subsequent chapters that f ollow the same rule and encourage them to make their own list of words that share a particular spelling rule Asking the students to word-process their paragraphs will also teach them to correct their spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes. The instructor can guide them in this process and explain how MS WORD does that.¹⁶
Writing Assessment
As for assessment, the instructor tests the students every other week. One week they write a paragraph, the following week, they complete tasks similar to those covered in class. These short quizzes help the students master specific tasks. Application questions should be given. The question formats should be varied from quiz to quiz. The students are asked to write about concrete topics related to their experiences. The test instruction should clearly specify what the students are required to do. The students should not use a dictionary during the test sessions. Quizzes must be always graded and returned to the students with comments on strengths and weaknesses. Words of encouragement should be given. The slightest improvement should be noted and commended. Answers should be discussed in class.