Essay Writing for Adolescents with Language and Learning Difficulties: Practical Strategies for English Teachers

Essay Writing for Adolescents with Language and Learning Difficulties is a step-by-step guide for educators to teach secondary students with language difficulties how to write an English essay and, more importantly, how to do this on their own.

Essay writing is one of the most difficult skills that secondary school students need to develop, though there are limited resources available to support these students and their teachers. Based on research into language disorders in adolescence and language processing, the strategies in this book are easy to apply and represent a scaffolded and sequenced approach to teaching essay writing.

The book's structure encourages students' skills and confidence to be developed gradually, each chapter building on the last, beginning with the early stages of text analysis and progressing through to writing a complete essay. While written with students with language difficulties in mind, the strategies in this book are applicable to teaching all secondary school students.

• provides teachers with easy to implement strategies based on research in speech pathology and education.
• addresses the needs of adolescents learning to write essays in a structured and accessible way.
• provides relevant strategies that can be integrated into existing lesson plans and curriculum tasks.

Written by a speech pathologist with over a decade’s experience working in secondary schools, this book is an essential resource for all high school English teachers and any education professionals responsible for teaching adolescents how to write essays competently and confidently.

Table of Contents

"This book, Essay writing for adolescents with language and learning difficulties: Practical Strategies for English Teachers, came at the perfect timing for me supporting a student in Year 10 to write essays. Although the book is essentially about essay structure, Knight has at several points introduced useful, succinct sections on sentence-level grammatical concepts. These sections can clearly be adapted by teachers for use in a range of essay writing contexts. Ultimately, nothing is left to chance in this book - all the essay barriers faced by students (and teachers) have been addressed. The extensive worked examples provide the opportunity for teacher workshops to be planned, during which the strategies can be rehearsed before teachers take them into the classroom. Even though Knight states that the book is not purposed for general classroom instruction, like any good instruction, I have noticed that anything that works for students with learning difficulties also works for all other students. This book has its place in any secondary English teacher’s toolkit, as well as for speech-language pathologists and consultants. Even better, it can even have its place in the classroom for Tier 1 instruction as well as in any learning support setting."
- Jacinta Conway, specialist teacher and Director of Impact Tuition, Australia.