Teaching writing

Among the things I want to avoid doing as a teacher, is to teach a lesson that is aimed at the average level of most of the students, at the expense of the weaker as well as more proficient students. I want real learning to take place for every single student, not mindless copying of sentences and what not without understanding.

Today, I was able to achieve this to some extent. I did a reading and writing lesson with 5B. There are 31 students in 5B, an ideal number for a Malaysian classroom. I divided students into groups based on their scores in writing, putting students of the same ability in the same group. The groups are Alpha 1 & 2, Beta 1 & 2, Gamma 1 & 2 and Omega 1 & 2. The Alpha group got the highest scores in writing during the recent exam, while the Omega group got the lowest.

The task given to the Gamma and Omega groups was to construct sentences based on pictures and notes given. There was a picture of a pilot, and the words were given as follows:
uncle - pilot
takes - passengers - countries

It turns out that Gamma and Omega had to look up the meanings of take, passenger and country. Also, they did not seem to know that the root word of countries is country. Students also mistook are for a, producing Uncle is are pilot. 


It is somewhat disheartening to discover how much Gamma and Omega did not know, at their level. However, it is encouraging that today, I managed to provide scaffolding for almost all the individual students in Gamma and Omega. I think some learning has taken place for them today. Some now know that country means negara, and that misses doesn't mean Cik but merindui. 


So yes. It appears that:

• Students in Gamma and Omega do not have a solid grasp of the basic sight words. They have trouble matching the sound of the word to the spelling, due to lack of exposure to the language. Hence, you get students mistaking are for a. 
• Teaching word attack skills may be useful to help students identify the root form of words. This will help them when they need to look up words in a dictionary. 
• Individualised learning enables me to witness the processes students go through when they write. For example, they wanted to write menaiki kapal terbang. To find out the English word for menaiki, they checked the bilingual dictionary, found a list of words, and just picked one: 'climb'. I told them to then look up climb, and they discovered, to their amusement, that it means memanjat. So, yes. These are things that I wouldn't discover if I had just done a whole-class-instruction and everybody-do-the-same-task kind of exercise.

I did not pay as much attention to the Alpha and Beta groups, however. I need to figure out the needs of the Alpha and Beta groups and how to cater to their needs for the next lesson.

In the meantime, it seems that I have struck gold - there is actually a way to teach low proficiency students some writing! There is potential in this approach; it just needs further experimentation and refinement. Your suggestions and ideas are most welcome!

examination jitters

Upon reflection on my teaching during the first semester, I have come to the realisation that more careful and deliberate planning needs to go into my teaching. Hence, I have begun doing very careful thinking and planning based on some of the theories I have learnt (particularly from the Language Curriculum Design course) and the past four months of experience.

• I only have another 10 weeks of teaching with my Form 3 class before they sit for the PMR examinations!!! Omigosh!!! How do I teach them how to write speeches, note expansion etc when they don't understand the vocabulary used? Is it possible to teach all the words in 10 weeks? Is it possible to narrow down what kind of words will be used? Is it possible to teach such things when one student today pronounced 'comes' as 'co/mes', and many aren't sure what 'kumbang' is in English?
• I examined the PMR exam paper and concluded that I may not be able to help much with Paper 1 as much of it requires understanding of the vocabulary. They can just shut their eyes and circle any answer since it's a multiple-choice question paper, I suppose. But, I will need to teach the question words and make sure they know what those words mean. As for Paper 2, I need to start writing short paragraphs for literature question, in very simple English, and get them to memorise them. What about note expansion for guided writing? Would it work if I took all the past year questions, taught the meaning of those words and then guide them in turning them into sentences? Omigosh!!! 

The bottomline is: AAAAAAARGHHHHH!!! I'm freaking out!!! ^-^

My introduction to EFL Kingdom

I was trained as a TESOL / TESL teacher, which means I'd be teaching secondary school students who'd have some exposure to English in their daily lives, be it through television, at home, etc. However, the actual situation is so far from the ideal. I am teaching in a semi-rural school where the students have very little exposure to English. None, perhaps. All those 'theories' I had learnt at uni about not using the L1 in the classroom, etc could not be applied in this situation. Among the things I did not expect are:

• I find myself speaking the Malay Language 90% of the time, in an English classroom.
• Students' limited vocabulary, even at Secondary Five (final year of high school). I had to explain the meanings of words such as 'lunch', 'breakfast', 'small', 'large', 'coconut' and so on. 
• Students' lack of knowledge of even the basic sight words such as 'here', 'he', 'she', etc. Students get confused between 'he' and 'here'; 'the', 'there' and 'they', etc.
• Most students are very very shy and reluctant to read aloud, because they do not really know how to pronounce the words.
• Students' inability to write a simple sentence in English correctly. The word order is all jumbled up, so much so that the sentence is unintelligible. Even the words used may not seem to be English words sometimes...

This situation has forced me to reconsider some of the ideas I have, and made me aware of lacks in my own knowledge. 

1. What does it mean to be able to read?

    From my own experience as a reader, reading involves auditory as well as sensory processing - recognising the spelling of the word, for example, and knowing how it sounds like, as well as what the word means. However, I don't seem to know very much about what it means to be able to read. I did learn about the subskills involved, such as skimming and scanning, guessing meaning from context, etc. But I suppose these subskills cannot be applied if the students can't even understand English at word level...  Again, back to my question: What does it mean to be able to read? How does one learn to read (from scratch)? How does a FL learner acquire the semantics, phonology and syntax of the language? 

I have had wonderful suggestions about the need to teach phonics, and I do agree. I can't possibly be there forever to teach my students how to pronounce every single word...

I do notice that knowing how a word sounds like is very much linked to being able to spell it. Perhaps the lack of knowledge of pronunciation is what leads to students getting confused between 'the', 'they' and 'there'. When they see the written form, they are not able to recognise which is which. 'Want' and 'one' is another example of confusion faced by students, perhaps also due to not knowing how the word is pronounced. 

However, again, I find my knowledge very much lacking in this area. This is something I need to improve on in order to help my students. 

That's it for today. I would really appreciate your constructive feedback and suggestions.