• Main Page
• The Process Overview
• Process Outlined
• Sample Unit Plan
• Class Starter
• Research Phase Explained
• Intermediate Products
• Final Products
• Example Newsletter
• Setting up a Blog
• MS Publisher Setup
• Blog Setup
• Website Setup
• Theoretical Background

Research Phase + Topics

To see the details of how a class period doing the research is organized, see the Main Lesson section of this lesson plan for Phase I of a unit on Music/Lyrics and Culture.

For an example of the format of the "notes" page students turn in at the completion of the research phase, see this image. Notice that textual quotes and images are collected at the same time with the links of their location included.

The remainder of this page explains the overall purpose of Phase I: Research to the writing process for ESL (and ELA) students.

• Ideally, the research would start on the Internet.

This is where people turn in real life to get information they need.

It is the future now: more and more of our lives involve the Internet as computers, television, video games, and more merge into a connected universe.

• The library and other paper sources can also be used.

Besides the ability to use paper sources each newsletter, I will set aside at least one edition to focus wholly on traditional research means.

• The best research topics are ones that touch on the ESOL student's native culture.


• Topics can come from anywhere.

ESOL textbooks include a very wide variety of material/text types: Excerpts from novels/short stories, poems, magazine-style essays, everything...with the expository texts covering any field - science, history, culture, literature...

So, the focal topics for newsletters produced in my ESOL classes vary greatly - Poetry, fragments of a fictional story, music, science, history, anything.

• The important thing isn't the topic or style of text the students end up producing as the final product.

What counts is the repetition of the process - through which - student move from acquiring information, organizing it, then using it to communicate in a meaningful way.

• When students are going to write a fictional text as the end-product for the newsletter, I explain to them:

  Real Authors Do Research Too...

So, in the research phase, they can find info. related to their text: for example, if the poem or story involves ghosts - they can research ghosts, haunted houses, famous ghost stories in fiction, and so on.