Express Yourself!

About the Book

Express Yourself! is a compilation of writing exercises the author has developed as part of teaching materials used during her first year of teaching English Literacy to the first-year students of the Faculty of Policy Studies at Nanzan University, Aichi, Japan. Recognizing the students’ need to have a better grasp of the basics in writing (i.e., combination of words to form phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into a paragraph, and later, into a multiparagraph essay), the author decided to focus on organization and logical flow while limiting grammar instructions to “recall boxes” whenever the need arises. The choice of topics, about themselves, is firstly for motivation purposes (easy-to-write topics) and as an effort to encourage students to know better or affirm who they were. The choice of characters of different nationalities is an attempt aimed at giving students a glimpse of differences in cultures. Express Yourself! provides the basic learners a step-by-step training in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs. The book also encourages and offers ample opportunities to higher-than-basic-level students to apply what they’ve learned and express their creativity by completing the optional free-writing exercise at the end of each chapter.

About the Author

Teresita A. Calantas has been teaching since 1975. Being a graduate of commerce, major in accounting, she was not trained as a teacher. However, her first job included teaching business English as an elective course to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders at an international school in Tokyo, Japan, for five years. After completing a two-year course of Japanese Language & Culture at Nanzan University, she took a master’s degree course in English Language Teaching at the University of the Philippines. Since getting her degree in 1984, Ms. Calantas has been teaching English in different levels, starting from junior high school and high school, then junior college, university students, and adult learners. At present, Ms. Calantas is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics in Nanzan University, Aichi, Japan.