DEVELOPING THE SKILLS OF USING SOURCE MATERIALS IN WRITING ESSAYS

Abstract

This paper describes the way second year
students in the Institute of Language Studies at
Addis Ababa Universi ty are trained to use source
materials in academic essays, a crucial problem in
the advising of graduating students who need to write
senior essays. Specifically, it describes materials
and methods prepared and used by the author to teach
students on the course Intermediate English.
Three major kinds of tasks have been designed to meet
this challenge. In Listening and Reading to Notes
tasks students generalize the gist and isolate
relevant from irrelevant details on the basis of a
purpose set. In Reconstructing Source Notes tasks
students learn how to wri te source summaries wi th
quota tions. In the last kind of task, Research to
Writing, students not only collect source facts on
specific writing topics, but also learn to integrate
them in their essays by attending to source relevance
and support, mechanics and acknowledgement of
sources.