Elaborating

Abstract

In elaborating students focus on particular grammatical features while adding information to simple texts to make them fuller or more complete. As students progress as language learners, they are naturally expected to produce more sophisticated texts and to master more sophisticated grammatical features. Sometimes, however, the link between the more difficult grammatical constructions they are learning and how these constructions can actually be used to make the texts they are writing more effective is not always made clear to them. Elaborating activities can help to dramatise for them the fact that learning grammar is not just about ‘correctness’ but that it is first and foremost about gaining control over resources for making communication more effective. These activities often focus precisely on those areas where less skilful language users need to learn how to improve their texts (e.g. adding descriptive background to events in a narrative, providing supporting reasons or evidence in an argument or giving historical background in a description).