Alexey Konobeiev, PhD
Teaching essay writing to EFL students in 7 quick steps
A frequent format in teaching writing is an essay. Not only are essays needed for such
international exams as TOEFL, FCE, CAE and CPE, but also the structure of the essay often lies
in the basis of other types of written and oral speech, such as presentations, reports, newspaper
articles, books and others (McCall, 1998). That’s why mastering essay writing can become a
key to mastering other types of discourse.
However, it must be noted that EFL learners seem to have much trouble trying to master
the rigid rhetoric structure of the English essay, which “will not appear by itself” (Tribble, 1995).
It can be explained by the fact that, although most European learners of English have been taught
to use the Aristotlean tripartite rhetoric structure of introduction, body and conclusion, the
patterns of ideas development can vary greatly due to national and local cultural norms, as
research in contrastive rhetoric shows. The rigid linear logic is more typical of the English
language than, say, of Russian, where various deviations from linearity are widely accepted, or
of many oriental languages with their circumferential logic and a large number of caveats. Thus
the question arises of how essay writing can be taught quickly and effectively to EFL students
from various cultural backgrounds.
In this paper we will present 7 stages of teaching essay writing to EFL students, which
have proved to be effective in terms of helping students to overcome cultural mismatch problems
in the writing class that we teach at Tambov State University.
One of the major problems that arise in class in the beginning of the course is that a lot of
students seem to have little or no awareness of the tripartite structure of essays. Thus, about 80 %
of students replace introduction by phrases like “I would like/am going to tell about…”, and
approximately 70 % of essays end abruptly without any conclusion. Very often the body of the
essay is reduced to a mere enumeration of facts, as a rule without any illustrating details.
Whereas “native speakers have a feeling of the number of words and level of detalisation
required when writing an essay” (Hamp-Lyons, 1995), EFL students have no such feeling, that
is, they need to be taught to illustrate and write in detail. In other words, it is necessary to teach
rhetoric structure and the required degree of detalisation from the very beginning of the writing
course.
As described above, rhetoric structure of an essay consists of 3 parts – the introduction,
the body and the conclusion. Each of the parts has its own communicative aims and functions.
The aim of the introduction is to attract the readers’ attention. In the introduction the author
states a thesis (tells his/her attitude towards the topic of the essay) and shows how s/he is going
to prove it.
In the body the thesis is developed, the author proves that his/her opinion is grounded and
correct.
In the conclusion the author restates his/her opinion, and states that it is correct due to the
facts contained in the body.
So, the first stage of essay writing will be formulating a thesis statement. A thesis
statement is a declarative sentence, which expresses the author’s attitude to the topic of the essay
and is a part of the introduction. At this stage students receive the task “say in one sentence what
you think about this”. Thus, for example, if the topic is “Cats as pets”, then there may be such
possible variations of the thesis statement, as “Cats make good pets” or “I believe that cats are
not the best pets”. At this stage it is important to stress that a thesis statement must express a
personal opinion which, however, should be general enough to be of interest to the reader, who
may either agree or disagree with this opinion.
The second stage will be working out the introduction. The aim of the introduction is to
attract the readers’ attention. There are two commonly used types of introduction, the “funnel”
introduction, and the narrative hook. In the first one the author first broadly outlines the topic,
and then narrows it down to the thesis. In our case it may look something like this: : “Many
people have pets. Any domestic animal can be used as a pet with more or less success. I think
that cats make very good pets”. To enable students to work out such an introduction, they can be
asked such questions, as “What do most people think about pets? Are cats popular as pets?”.
Another popular type of introduction is the narrative hook. Its primary aim is to grip the readers’
interest. This aim can be reached in the following ways:
1. the author tells an anecdote that illustrates the thesis;
2. the author uses a quotation, that illustrates the thesis;
3. the author makes a debatable statement, which leads on to the thesis;
4. the author gives sensational facts or statistics;
5. the author defines an unusual term, central to the topic of the essay;
6. the author relates a real life event;
7. if the topic of the essay is sensational or thought-provokin in itself, it can also be used as
a narrative hook (after McCall 1998)
In our case it may look like this: “Rudyard Kipling once wrote a tale about a cat. In this
tale he described a cat that would never become domestic, no matter how hard people tried to
tame it but I think that cats make good pets”.
Whatever the type of the introduction is, each clearly expresses the author’s opinion that cats
make good pets, and also shows that the author is going to prove this viewpoint, presenting
arguments in its favour.
The third stage of essay writing will be collecting and ordering of arguments and facts.
The information can be collected and arranged through a brainstorming activity, e.g.:
Neat
Useful
Cats as pets
Clean their fur
catch mice
Know where their toilet is
can heal
Do not smell
create comfort
Valuable
Good companions
Expensive breeds
like to be caressed
Sleep in your lap
Love you back
Through treeing, that is:
Cats as pets
neat
clean fur
useful
know
no
their
smell
toilet
love you back
catch mice
create
comfort
good companions
sleep in your lap
in your lap
like to be caressed
can heal
through grouping:
love you
clean fur
companions
neat
like to be caressed
know their toilet
heal you
create comfort useful
catch mice
or in other ways. Research shows that the choice of the method of information arrangement
doesn’t matter much as long as students can collect and arrange information at all.
Once the necessary information has been collected, it should be logically organized. The
possible principles of organization can be most important to least important, general-particular,
chronology (for narrative essays), size, top-down, bottom-up, center to edges, edges to center
(for descriptive essays), problem-solution, cause-effect, compare-contrast and so on. To teach
students to logically organize information, we usually make them go through a series of training
exercises, in which they are asked to arrange given information according to a certain logical
order.
The fourth stage is creation of the essay skeleton. Now that information has been
collected and organized, each central idea is broadened into a sentence, e.g: neat  Cats are very
neat. Good companions Cats make good companions, etc.
Then these sentences are arranged
according to the chosen order and form a sketch of the body of the essay, for example:
Cats are neat.
Cats are useful.
Cats make good companions.
These sentences become, in fact, topic sentences, that is, the ideas, which will be the
basis of the paragraphs of the future essay.
At the fifth stage students are asked to develop each of the topic sentences into a
paragraph. To help them do it, one can use questions like “Why are cats useful?” and then ask
them to illustrate the topic sentence with examples. Such a paragraph may look something like
this:
“Cats are usually very useful. Many cats catch mice. I once had a cat who caught mice even in
the street and would bring them in as a report of her work. Cats are also said to be able to heal
people. Once a cat lies down on an aching arm, or leg, or stomach, its warmth works like a
medicine and pain quickly goes away. My cat would always come and lie down on my stomach
and stay there until I felt better.”
Thus, our skeleton is developed into the body, which is developed and illustrated with
examples. The next task is to write a conclusion.
At the sixth stage, when the thesis has already been proved, the author repeats the main
idea, slightly paraphrasing it, for example: “So, cats are probably the best pets. They can heal
you, they keep your home safe from rodents, they never create problems with hygiene, and,
what’s more, they always return your love doublefold. That’s why I am so fond of cats.” We
teach our students to write appropriate conclusions through such exercises, as making the
students choose the best conclusion to the given essay, making them write a proper conclusion to
the given essay and, finally, dedicating some part of the lesson to a detailed discussion of
strengths and weaknesses of their own essays.
Now that the essay is almost ready, it has to be checked to make sure that the ideas are
logically connected and really prove the thesis. This work may be done in pairs, followed by
peer evaluation. To make sure that the essay is cohesive, students are asked to use in it such
linking words, as “also, moreover, what’s more, another good/bad point is…” etc. The words can
be pre-written in a list on the blackboard or chosen through a brainstorming activity. This
seventh stage, that of editing, is the final one. At this stage students may be given a proofreading
chart, for example:
1. Are all the main points controlled by the thesis?
2. Can the reader see how sentences support the thesis?
3. Are all the main points in the best order?
4. Is one main point finished before another is taken up?
5. Is the meaning of sentences clear?
6. Do the sentences hang together?
7. Is spelling correct?
8. Is punctuation correct?
As a follow-up activity, students may practice the use of some cohesive devices or other
grammar and discourse aspects that they have problems with.
This succession of stages helps students to master structured essay writing over a
relatively brief period of time. These stages can be used for teaching EFL students with different
levels of English, with variations made in grammar and topic choice.
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