Very often, for high school ESL students, their English as a Second Language classes are the only courses they take that come close in content to the teaching of Language Arts. This leaves ESL teachers with the double responsibility of teaching a language, and teaching the basic skills that normally fall upon Native Language Arts or Language Arts teachers.

One of the most essential abilities a student needs to leave high school with is the ability to organize and write a research paper. Writing a research paper is a complex process involving multiple skills. Selecting a manageable topic, locating source material in the library, searching a data base, making notes from sources, writing the essay, documenting references are just some of the skills needed. Teaching students what they need to know can take several weeks. Perhaps I should say that it can take years. (I strongly believe ESL teachers should begin to teach many of the skills needed very early in the language development process.)

The two lessons below are for advanced students. I have found the lessons to be useful as part of the larger process of teaching advanced students how to produce a good research paper.

Reverse Engineering a Research Paper

Students often don't know what a good research paper looks like. How are the notes taken from source material integrated into an essay? What is the function of footnotes and a bibliography? Where did the quotes and paraphrases originate? What does a finished research paper look like?

To give students an idea of what will be expected of them, I prepare a very short research paper that contains all the elements you would expect in one. I base the footnotes and bibliography on a book or magazine, or both, that the entire class has access to. After reading and discussing the paper, I then ask the students to locate the information provided by the footnotes and bibliography in the original source material. It is important to explain that footnotes and bibliographies are pointers to more information that interested scholars can use, and that they are not required by professors in order to torture students. This experience provides students with a good model of what a research paper is.

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Mini-Research Paper

The mini-research paper is an in-class exercise to familiarize students with some aspects of writing the research paper. It should be taught prior to any independent undertaking on the part of your students, and it can also be done for reinforcement after students have undertaken independent projects. It is an exercise you should do with your class several times. First, as a teacher lead activity, then as pair work, and finally with students working individually.

In all cases the teacher chooses a topic. One good topic for this exercise is the climate of a country. The teacher provides the students with copies of two different source materials. One source can be an entry from an encyclopedia for children on the country with several subheadings (population, climate, etc....) The other source can be a selection from a book on the country dealing with the topic, and written at the appropriate reading level for your students. Both readings should be brief. The purpose of two sources is to require the students synthesize the notes they gather when writing the essay.

In the first teacher guided lesson, take the students through the steps one would go through after having decided on a topic, and having gathered source material. :

Read the source material as a class.
Using the chalkboard as note sheets/index cards, draft paper, etc..., call on students to find quotable material relevant to the topic, and write the quotes on the board. Ask them to also supply the information needed to create footnotes (author, title, publisher info, date, page number.)
Use the ideas of students to compose a brief essay on the chalkboard that includes footnoted quotes and/or paraphrases from both source materials, and a bibliography.
As a follow up to the first lesson, have the students delineate the steps to process the class went through. Then repeat the lesson several times, each time requiring more and more independence. Their essays should be no more than a page long, but it should include all the elements one expects to find in a normal research paper. Your students should write several mini-research papers before you have them begin working on the BIG research paper.