Are you having difficulties in engaging your students? Are you worried that your average students will not learn how to improve academic writing skills? Having difficulty in teaching academic writing skills? Worry not, we are here to help you. Here are a few techniques that you can use to pique the interest of your students and help them acquire important academic writing skills.
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Know your audience
One of the main rules of teaching is to know your audience. Given the generation gap between students and the teachers, it is of utmost importance that you know what your students need. Teaching students to write becomes even more difficult if you can’t connect with them.
You need to keep in touch with changing undergraduate culture. Once you know what makes them “tick,” you will be better able to convey your knowledge to them and help them know how to improve academic writing.
It is not about making them more like you. It is about understanding how they grasp knowledge so that you can use those ways to help them. Create a learning environment to which the students can connect.
Take the help of the online roster
It is always good to connect the names of your students with their faces. Gone are the days when students used to wear name tags. Use the online enrollment system of your college to know your students better. Look at their past experiences, their opinions, and values, and any other information available regarding them available to you. This will help you know them better. Once you know them better, you will be able to help them in a better way. This will make you better at teaching students to write.
Use the local student culture
Get in touch with the local student culture. See how a simple “hello, Los Angeles!” can make the crowd go crazy in concerts? Use a similar technique to your students. Once you make them comfortable and they have a sense of belonging, you will be able to help them better. Read the local student newspaper. Dine in the student dining commons so that you can know what the students experience outside of those 3 hours they spend in your class.
Use online resources and tools
Gone are the days when you had to leave the comfort of your home and go to a library to learn something. You can acquire knowledge right for the safety of your home via the internet. Encourage your students to use various online resources and tools that will help them know how to improve academic writing skills.
This will make teaching academic writing easier for you. Be it editing apps, websites that check for plagiarism free or essay writing services, or websites that check your readability score, give them a free hand and see them learn rapidly. Check plagiarism in the work of your students yourself so that you’d know who is writing on their own and who is copying from the internet.
There is plagiarism checker free software from PapersOwl that you can use. Let your students know that you’d be doing a plagiarism check so that they’d know that they have to be original when writing.
Share your stories
It is not only about you getting to know the students. It is about revealing yourself to them. Make them understand who you are and what makes you who you are. Don’t be afraid of going out of your comfort zone. Once the students empathize with you, they would gladly listen to you when you explain the various techniques about academic writing to them.
Let them write about their interests
If you let your students write about things they are interested in, they will be able to perform better compared to when they are writing about things that they have no interest in. Your goal is simple: to engage them in academic writing.
The topic doesn’t matter as long as your students learn the ways and methods to perfect their writing. Teaching students to write isn’t very hard as long as you put in all of your efforts. Use their latest fixations to teach them the necessary skills.
Teaching Academic writing can be tough when it comes to average students. And if your students are not engaged and interested in the lesson, it becomes even more difficult. Therefore, it is essential for the teacher to adjust and adapt the teaching ways to increase the level of interest that the students show. Use the above-mentioned techniques to garner interest in your average students towards academic writing.
Happy Teaching, People!