Nick recently attended the Symposium held at the University of Waikato and ran a workshop on addressing the needs of employees who speak English as an additional language in a workplace literacy setting. We shared a number of lesson plans and classroom tasks designed to assist employees with the following aspects of report writing:
– Accuracy and sentence structure
– Accuracy with collocation (time and sequencing expressions)
– Using reporting verbs correctly (stated, asked, described, told etc.)
– Using key topic words precisely (focusing on words with both technical and everyday meanings)
– Focusing on formality (maintaining a consistent register)
– Referencing (being clear about which people / things you are reporting)
The feedback from the session was that native speakers adult literacy learners would actually benefit from the explicit focus on language demonstrated just as much as those who speak English as an additional language. We agree!
It was a great event and a good chance to network with other organisations in the sector. You can view the powerpoint slides for the workshop, along with slides from the other presentations here:
http://www.literacyandnumeracyforadults.com/resources/356622
Please get in touch if you would like to see materials.
The beautiful image of the Waikato River is reproduced with thanks to Yjeva. Click here to see the original on Yjeva’s Flickr photostream.
