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!