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High School level ESL students whose goal is to improve their writing skills across multiple academic genres. This specific lesson is geared toward a class of students who are in the second half of high school and are preparing to graduate soon, and is meant to teach students reading and writing skills needed to write a personal narrative within the format of a college application prompt.

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1. Students will apply previous skills learned from past journaling assignments to practice writing in their own narrative voice.
2. Students will engage in active reading of a relevant/authentic text with specific guiding questions to inform their reading.
3. Students will learn to maintain their unique voice while writing for an academic audience.
4. Students will notice structures and techniques used in a sample paper and begin to learn how to incorporate these into their own writing.

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Students will need: a journal that they have been keeping for previous in-class or take-home journaling assignments.

Instructor will need: 2-3 sample student essays in paper, google doc, or powerpoint form that follows a general format of a personal statement essay within the context of a college application.

Instructor will need: a paper worksheet, google doc, or a powerpoint slide of guiding questions for students' reading of the sample essays. (the post reading/pre-writing questions in part III may be combined with this document or provided on a separate document)

Instructor will need: Sommers (1992) excerpt about finding voice and authority while writing for an audience.

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Approx. 5 min: Begin a quick and candid warm up discussion with students about their favorite school subjects, and ask them what challenges they face in their classes. This can function as a discussion amongst the whole class, or students can break off into small groups/partners.

After this discussion, have students read and think about the following quote from Sommers (1992) "Between the Drafts:"

"It is in the thrill of the pull between someone else's authority and our own, between submission and independence that we must discover how to define ourselves. In the uncertainty of that struggle, we have the chance of finding our own authority. Finding it, we can speak convincingly... at long last"(p.31).

Ask students to discuss with each other what the author might mean by "finding your own authority" and "speaking convincingly."

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Students will begin this lesson with prior practice in writing a journal entry as an established warm-up from previous class sessions.
For this lesson, students are asked to spend 5-10 minutes working in their journal as they have in previous sessions, but this time following one of the specific prompts:
-Compose a journal entry about one thing you are most proud of.
-Compose a journal entry about one thing you hope to achieve in the future.
-Compose a journal entry about your favorite school subject. Why is it your favorite?
-Compose a journal entry about your favorite activity outside of school. Why is it your favorite?
Students may also choose to write about more than one of these prompts, but are encouraged to stick to one main idea to ensure that they have enough time to produce a substantial piece of writing to work with.

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After journaling independently, students are asked to read a college application essay prompt and a short student essay that corresponds with the prompt.
Students are asked to read one of the essays and its accompanying prompt once, paying attention to the structure of the essay, answering the following questions:
1. How many paragraphs are there?
2. Does the essay have a title?
3. Pick one paragraph from the essay, and note the number of sentences. Does this number seem like too many? Too little? Are there any sentences that you think could be edited or taken out?
While reading, students are asked to read for specific details and to circle/underline/highlight the following:
1. Words that stood out to you in the prompt.
2. The possible main idea of the prompt.
3. Where does the student try to answer the prompt? Does this occur in just one sentence or multiple?
4. A sentence that stood out to you. Make a note: Why did this part grab your attention?

Note: Evenly assign essays of varying levels of success to either individual students or to separate groups.

This part of the lesson reflects a method for teaching writing called "reading to write"(Cushing Weigle, 2014, p.277), in which students are asked to read a text with the intention to prepare for their own writing process.
Students are also answering questions to "raise discourse-structure awareness"(Grabe & Stoller, 2014, p. 197) in regard to this specific type of text.

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After a quick discussion of the students' findings from their two readings of the assigned text, students are asked to consider the content of today's journal assignment, and answer the following questions:
1. How could the sample essay prompt relate to the main ideas that you wrote in your journal today?
2. Could you imagine yourself being able to answer the entire prompt with the journal entry you wrote today, or would you still need more information?
3. Recall your second reading of the sample essay in which you marked a sentence that stood out to you. How could you  tell your own story in a similar type of sentence?

Allow some time for students to begin answering these questions in class, and assign the remaining work for homework. Encourage students to refer back to the guided questions worksheet, the sample student essays, and the quotes from Sommers (1992) as they complete this assignment.

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This lesson is intended to serve as a beginning lesson for a longer process in which students compose their own writing. A possible next step for another class session may include an assignment in which students work as a class to write an introductory paragraph in response to a college essay prompt, followed by an assignment in which students write their own draft, using the writing tools they learned in drafting the introduction together as well as their unique ideas from their own journals.

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Cushing Weigle (2014): "Considerations for Teaching Second Language Writing"

Grabe & Stoller (2014) "Teaching Reading for Academic Purposes"

Sommers (1992): "Between the Drafts"