One of my favourite assignments to give my higher level EAL students is a Personal Narrative Essay. It’s such a wonderful way to practice a number of language acquisition skills, as well as give the students the opportunity to share something about themselves. Plus, I (as the teacher) learn a lot about them, which helps in fostering relationships and getting to know my students.
The assignment involves getting students to write about a personal experience that was important to them – something that really sticks in their minds. A lot of students choose to write about when they first came to Canada, or their first day of school. However, I’ve had students write about a number of different topics, including vacations they really enjoyed, family, pets, joining sports teams, losing parents, depression and teenage challenges, even a scary ride at the fair.
I tell the students to bring their experience to life, draw in the reader and help the reader feel how they did. We work on good paragraph and essay structure, including using a ‘hook’ and thesis statement in the introduction, clear body paragraphs and a conclusion. We read sample essays and dissect them. We answer questions about the essays we read, notice the author’s purpose, structure, techniques, tone and so forth, and discuss how reading helps with writing. Then, I give the students a graphic organizer to lead them through the writing process and start them off. I also make it part of the assignment to include imagery (the five senses) and descriptive adjectives to really bring the narrative to life. I challenge them to use the thesaurus and try learning new adjectives to include in their essay. (Note: I tell the students that I will not take off marks if they use a new adjective incorrectly, but rather give them marks for their attempt and use any mistakes as a learning opportunity of how to use that word correctly.)
Students learn the following language skills:
- paragraph structure (which at this point they should already know)
- essay structure
- narrative techniques
- vocabulary building
- grammar, punctuation and spelling (through editing and conferencing)
Finally, I have the students make their personal narratives look like they’re in a magazine. We look at examples of articles in magazines and note such things as font, pictures, formatting, borders, colour, making quotes stand out, photo captions and so forth. Then, I give the students creative licence to use one of the following to “publish” their narratives: Microsoft Word, Power Point, Canva, Emaze, Piktochart.
I provide a lot of class time to work with the students and teach mini lessons throughout, slowly introducing different parts and expectations of the assignment.
Marking
I always provide the students with a rubric of my expectations. For this assignment my rubric criteria includes: essay structure, use of language, interest and effort, grammar, spelling and punctuation and formatting.
I spend a lot of time correcting the essays, not only looking at the mechanics of the essay and my rubric criteria, but also making some personal comments and notes to the students about what they wrote about. Because they are sharing personal experiences and we spent a lot of time working on this assignment, I want to honour their efforts and give a lot of feedback as well as acknowledge them and what they’ve written. (I talk briefly about this assignment in my blog post on EAL and Making Connections.)
Furthermore, I conference with each student and go through my comments, the rubric and just spend some time talking about their essay and the personal experience they chose to write about.
Through this assignment, I have learned so much about my students that has helped me to better understand them and get to know them. It also helps build my knowledge bank of some of the experiences of new immigrants in coming to Canada and starting a new life here.
On Teaching English 