The document provides tips and examples for improving English reading and writing skills through practice exercises. It includes outlines for writing a letter to a new pen pal, describing a person, writing a house ad, writing about a favorite movie, and summarizing texts. Sample exercises and outlines are provided for each type of writing.

1. Bloque I
“Aprendizaje del Inglés por medio de ejercicios de practica para
mejorar la lectura y escritura.”
Escuela Normal Superior del Sur de Tamaulipas
María del Carmen Martínez García
8° Semestre Inglés

3. WRITING A LETTER TO A NEW PEN PAL
• Writing tips:
• We start a letter to a new pen pal with a salutation.
Example: dear + our pen pal first name.
• In the first paragraph we introduce ourselves. Example:
we write our name, age, where we are from, and the
grade we are in.
• In the body paragraphs we write about our school.
Example: its name, a description of outside and inside of
the school, the classes, etc. in the last paragraph we write
our closing remarks. Examples: that is all about me or I
have to go now and ask our pen pal to write back. We
end our letter with your new friend and our first name.

4. A LETTER TO A NEW PEN PAL

5. AN ARTICLE DESCRIBING A PERSON
• Writing tips:
• PLAN
• Introduction:
• Paragraph 1: name, where from, family.
• Body:
• Paragraph 2: facial features.
• Paragraph 3: character.
• Conclusion:
• Paragraph 4: feelings about the person.

6. A Good Neighbor

7. A FANTASTIC NEIGHBOR
• Cassie Baker is my next-door neighbor and my best
friend. She is from Ireland. Her father Padraig, is a
doctor and her mother Lissa is a teacher. Cassie doesn´t
have any brothers or sisters, she is an only child.
• Cassie is very pretty, she is seventeen years old, with
straight red hair and green eyes, she also has freckles.
• Cassie is a wonderful person. She is smart and kind. We
call her social butterfly because she is always making
new friends. Her favorite sport is swimming. She is very
good at eat. Cassie has a cat, too. His name is Charly.
• Cassie is a fantastic neighbor. She is friendly and funny
and we have lots of fun together. She is a lovely girl and I
am lucky that she is my next-door neighbor.

8. WRITING A HOUSE AD
• Writing tips:
• To write an ad for a house for rent we write how
much the rent is and the exact address. We start
our ad by saying where the house is (location)
and how big it is (size). Next we write how many
rooms there are and what there is in each room.
Then we describe the outside of the house. We
end the ad by giving a telephone number for
more information.

9. WRITING A HOUSE AD

10. WRITING A HOUSE AD
Address: 42 Brooke Street, Shirley, MA
For rent: $400/week
This attractive house, on a quiet street in the beautiful
historical town of Shirley, Massachusetts, is for two
people or a small family. It has a spacious living room, a
small dining room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and a
bathroom. In the living room there are two comfortable
armchairs, a couch and a television with a DVD. The
modern kitchen has a new stove and fridge. There are
two cozy bedrooms with wooden closets. The bathroom
has a bathtub and a shower. There is a lovely front yard
and a huge back yard with trees.
Call
978 425 1804 for more
information.

11. WRITING AN ARTICLE ABOUT YOUR
FAVORITE MOVIE
• PLAN
• Introduction
• Paragraph 1: title, type of movie, opinion.
• Body
• Paragraph 2: main characters, plot.
• Conclusion
• Paragraph 3: restating opinion and reason

12. MY FAVORITE MOVIE

13. MY FAVORITE MOVIE
• Would you like to go from zero to hero? Then watch the
mask! It is a fantastic comedy, romance, and action
movie, all in one. It is an excellent movie because it has
everything!
• Stanley Ipkiss is a shy bank clerk in Edge City. He is a
nice person but he can´t do anything right.. one day,
he……………… an ancient mask. He…………… it on his face
and his whole life changes. He can move like superman
and dance like Fred Astaire. He………… to stop a bank
robbers are after him. The police………….. him
and……………. Him prison, but Milo, ………………. To a
nightclub to save Tina, the girl he…………. A lot, from the
robbers. The police arrest the robbers and Stanley
becomes a hero.
• All in all, I think the mask is a great movie with fantastic
special effect. It´s my favorite movie because it´s funny
and exciting.

14. Be a Writer

15. Be a Writer
• Essay writing
• “Writing an essay sounds like a difficult and time consuming
experience, a little like a visit to the dentist. But an essay is
just an expression or what you know and how you feel about
any subject, reading in a way that will make it understandable
and effective. Essay writing is not just a composition subject;
it is a skill that will help you succeed in every subject. An
essay can be informational and it can be explained in a
complex subject. It can also be personal. A personal essay
describes how you feel about something, an essay that uses
your opinion and attitudes about an important issue in your
life. It could include your attitude toward backpacks
endangered animals, or the way your school is organized.

16. Parts of an essay
• An essay has 5 basic parts: The thesis, the title,
the topic sentence, support sentences and the
conclusion. The paint of many essay is to make
you aware of a situation, and offend they suggest
what to do about it.

17. Working with sequence
• Essays name proper sequence. Imagine someone
telling you about a movie and scrambling up the
ending, the best points and how it stared. When
you write an essay about any subject you must
put your ideas in logical order. Take a look at the
event below and put them into the correct
sequence.

18. Writing a letter about vacations
Dear Miriam:
I hope you’re great. What is new over there? Sorry I haven’t been able
to send you that many of emails but I really have been busy.
Anyway, I ‘ve got some great news. I went to Las Vegas during the
summer. My sister really surprised me with the tickets. She bought
them for me, and I’m traveling with her and some other friends as a
bachelor party. She is getting married in October and this is like a
big bachelor party. I was awesome; I really had a great time. I visited
lots of luxurious hotels and played in the casinos. I also went to
many shopping malls and bought some clothes. The weather was
hot, but it’s a different kind of hotness, because in Vegas there’s no
humidity like in Tampico, because it’s a desert. I didn’t sweat at al
but I still was really thirsty after walking a long time under the sun.
That’s all for now. See you
Love, Marie

19. A complain in a restaurant
•
• Dear Sir-Madam:
•
• I’m writing to complain about the service, food and prices at your restaurant , T. G. I
Fridays.
•
• The first that I didn’t like is when a waiter has not acknowledged of new people on a table
yet, and they have been sitting there wondering if anyone will come over. This is always a
bad start in a restaurant, the waiter always must go to the table and even if they are too
busy at that moment to stay, they must tell the guest they will be right with them as soon as
they can.
We stayed waiting at least for 20 minutes, and then the waiter finally arrived.
•
• I expect an apology for spoiling my evening, and I hope that you will improve the service in
a future, or else you will keep losing costumers.
•
•
• Sincerely, Mary Carmen Martínez
•

20. An article about a visit to a buliding
• On this winter vacations I visited the Sears Tower in
Chicago. I had a good time and I learned about this other
famous tower. Here are some interesting facts about the
tower.
• The Willis Tower (formerly named, and still commonly
referred to as the Sears Tower) is a 108-story, 1451-foot
(442 m) skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois.
• At the time of its completion in 1973, it was the tallest
building in the world, surpassing the World Trade
Center towers in New York, and it held this rank for
nearly 25 years. The Willis Tower is the tallest building
in the United States and the fifth-tallest freestanding
structure in the world, as well as the fifth tallest building
in the world to the roof.

21. An article about a visit to a buliding
• There is a section inside the building where you can
look at the whole city with a telescope. Looking at if
from the ground make me feel very small. Inside,
there is so mucho to see and do. It was a clear winter
day, so I was able to take lots of pictures, of course it
was also very cold, but I didn’t mind I was having
lots of fun. After I had lunch in a restaurant in the
tower, I went to the gift shop and bought some
souvenirs.
•
• Those vacations where fantastic because I visited
many places in Chicago and learned many things.

22. Bloque II
“Aprendizaje del Inglés por medio de ejercicios de practica para
mejorar la lectura y escritura.” Parte 2

23. Enhancing Comprehension: Reading
Skills in Middle School
• Middle school is the time your child develops the
sophisticated reading skills that allow him to
analyze literature and master the content of the
entire curriculum — social studies, science,
math, health, and foreign languages. Reading
becomes a powerful tool to find information,
make sense of complex material, and find
enjoyment in literature and popular media.
Middle-school instruction therefore focuses on
refining and strengthening existing skills. Key
components are:

24. Strategic reading:
• Your child needs to learn how and when to skim
and when to study thoroughly. She doesn't have
to read an entire book about space exploration if
she only wants to find the date of the first lunar
landing.
• Reading milestones:

25. Strategic reading:
• Reading with a purpose, knowing when it's
important to understand every detail and when
she can read quickly for pure enjoyment
• Reading selectively, scanning chapter headings
and introductory sentences to find necessary
information
• Skimming a chapter in a textbook to form an
overall impression

26. Comprehension:
Grappling with the deeper meaning of a text will
strengthen understanding. Good readers are
continually questioning themselves.
Reading milestones:
• Getting below the surface of facts on the page
and evaluating critically
• Drawing conclusions about why certain things
happened
• Connecting new information to other knowledge
and personal experience

27. Vocabulary:
One of the key differences between a good reader
and a poor reader is vocabulary. Effective
vocabulary study involves more than
memorizing definitions.
Reading milestones:
• Using new words correctly in writing
• Using knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and base
words to expand vocabulary
• Mastering the vocabulary of different content
areas

28. Speed
Poor readers are usually slow even after they
become accurate. To build speed, your child
needs to read a lot of text at a level that is easy
for him to comprehend.
Reading milestones:
• Reading for pleasure
• Getting hooked on books by the same author
• Reading fast enough to do homework in a
reasonable amount of time

29. Writing skills
Written responses to reading can greatly
enhance comprehension. Writing
improves when your child practices
answering specific questions and
researching new topics.
Milestones:
• Linking sentences into organized
paragraphs
• Writing clear, coherent, and focused
essays including formal introductions,
supporting evidence, and conclusions

30. Reading Comprehension Examples
• Piers plowman: The prologue
• Translation in English
• Lines 11-19
• Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,
•
That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.
•
As I looked to the east right into the sun,
•
I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;
•
A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,
•
With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight
•
A fair field full of folk found I in between,
•
Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,
•
Working and wandering as the world asketh.

31. Pygmalion
• A Romance in Five Acts (1912) is a play by Irish
playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of
phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can
train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza
Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's
garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of
gentility, the most important element of which, he
believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp
lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day
and a comment on women's independence,
packaged as a romantic comedy.

32. • The Pygmalion myth was a popular subject for
Victorian era English playwrights, including one
of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a
successful play based on the story in 1871, called
Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would have
been familiar with the burlesque version,
Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.

34. Modernist poetry in English
• Is generally considered to have emerged in the
early years of the 20th century with the
appearance of the Imagists.
• In common with many other modernists, these
poets wrote in reaction to the perceived
excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis
on traditional formalism and ornate diction.

35. • In general, modernists saw themselves as
looking back to the best practices of poets in
earlier periods and other cultures. Their models
included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and
Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and
the medieval Italian philosophical poets (such as
Guido Cavalcanti), and the English Metaphysical
poets

36. • Much of early modernist poetry took the form of
short, compact lyrics. As it developed, however,
longer poems came to the fore. These represent
the main contribution of the modernist
movement to the 20th-century English poetic
canon.

38. • The roots of English-language poetic modernism
can be traced back to the works of a number of
earlier writers, including Walt Whitman, whose
long lines approached a type of free verse, the
prose poetry of Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning's
subversion of the poetic self, Emily Dickinson's
compression and the writings of the early
English Symbolists, especially Arthur Symons.
However, these poets essentially remained true
to the basic tenets of the Romantic movement
and the appearance of the Imagists

39. Examples
• The roots of English-language poetic modernism
can be traced back to the works of a number of
earlier writers, including Walt Whitman, whose
long lines approached a type of free verse, the
prose poetry of Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning's
subversion of the poetic self, Emily Dickinson's
compression and the writings of the early
English Symbolists, especially Arthur Symons.
However, these poets essentially remained true
to the basic tenets of the Romantic movement
and the appearance of the Imagists

40. I love
Poetry