DEVELOPING THE SKILLS OF USING SOURCE MATERIALS IN WRITING ESSAYS

Abstract

This paper describes the way second year students in the Institute of Language Studies at Addis Ababa University are trained to use source materials in academic essays, a crucial problem in the advising of graduating students who need to write senior essays. Specifically, it describes materials and methods prepared and used by the author to teach students on the course Intermediate English.

Three major kinds of tasks have been designed to meet this challenge. In Listening and Reading to Notes tasks students generalize the gist and isolate relevant from irrelevant details on the basis of a purpose set. In Reconstructing Source Notes tasks students learn how to write source summaries with quotations. In the last kind of task, Research to Writing, students not only collect source facts on specific writing topics, but also learn to integrate them in their essays by attending to source relevance and support, mechanics and acknowledgement of sources.