Digital Essay Writing: Word Choice

This is a digital writing activity that I use with my adult ESL students who are preparing for the IELTS and TOEFL IBT exam and who need practice with word choice and sentence structure in essay writing. The essay topic is about two environmental issues: global warming and deforestation. Students are given a structure to plan their essay and I help them brainstorm related vocabulary words. I give them a step-by-step process for writing their essay and constructing their paragraphs.

I can imagine this activity would work for high school ESL students, but I've never tried it. The goal of this lesson is to help students learn how to paraphrase. I use a two-step strategy: 1) word choice. Students are presented with a number of "drag and drop" activities to substitute words in the sentence with a variety of synonyms, which is fun and interactive. 2) sentence structure. Students learn to put the second clause of the sentence first, playing with paraphrasing ideas through sentence structure.

*There are audio instructions on every slide so students can do this independently

*There are transition words to help students use more transitional language in their paragraphs