Improving writing skills

In most of the cases, a written composition activity is the most hated task for students. That is the reason why teachers have a huge responsibility: keep students motivated and on task. As an English teacher who works with teenagers in high school, I have witnessed students’ highly reluctant attitude towards written tasks. Before thinking of the reasons why they do not like writing we may start by mentioning that the mere idea of having to write a paragraph instead of isolated sentences seems to be the worst thing that could have happened to them ever. Now, moving to the reasons it must be said that students do not like to write about topics they do not feel related to, they do not want to use formal ways to express their thoughts and what is more, they feel too frustrated to continue when they face vocabulary issues or lack of knowledge on how to conjugate a verb or use a word.

Keeping those aspects and others in mind, some of the things I have done to help my students in their writing process include:

- Let students create stories about a topic of their choice as long as they use the target vocabulary and structures.

- Have students work in small groups so that they do not have to think of the whole idea of the text, but continue with what the other classmate started.

- Show students a picture that they can use for their written composition, as sometimes they assure that it is hard for them to start writing something without something inspiring.

- Give students very clear instructions of what the writing must include and also the approximated number of words.

- Have students start their writing compositions brainstorming.

- Ask students to hand in drafts and talk to them when I give them feedback so that I can help them clarify their ideas before they finish their product.

In conclusion, I would say that we need to help our students see writing as a process. My students feel easily frustrated as they have many knowledge gaps and this makes writing even harder. What I have been working on the most is trying to make them realize that writing is something that they can modify, restate and improve rather than a reason for a bad grade.

I also invite you to read my post: what should we expect from our students' writing outcomes?

Assembling and scoring tests

    Regarding assembling and scoring tests, I have to say that the aspect that call my attention the most was the following statement made by Genesee and Upshur ‘The instructions themselves should not be a test; in other words, instructions should be clear and meaningful to students’(201).

    This statement made me remember that somewhere I read that instructions are not the time to assess our students’ language ability to figure out what we expect them to do in a task. Instructions are not intended to be tricky because we are not trying to know how good our students are at solving puzzles, but our aim is to collect reliable information about students’ language abilities.

    For this reason, we should keep in mind that because of unclear instructions our students may feel frustrated and their performance would be affected.

    Furthermore, in order to succeed at giving proper instructions for tests and that those lead to the information we want to gather from our students, we have to keep in mind that instructions are our way to guide students towards a successful performance of the task. To do so, we need to be clear of what aspect of language we want our students to focus on; otherwise, they might end up doing something that does not really correspond to what we are asking them to do. Consider the following example:

    Finally, I would like to share some of the experiences I have had with instructions. I'm going to start with one that I think most of us have experienced, I have written my whole name and then figured out that I should have written my name and last name separately. I have chosen the right answer, when I was supposed to choose the wrong one. I have circled, when I should have underlined... And many of the like. Now, please share your experience with instructions or maybe with instructions you gave and your students did wrong.  

My students using learning logs and our first interview

   I am currently teaching a Tuesday to Friday two-hour class with students between 14 and 16 years old. Last week, I started to introduce them to learning logs and we had our first interview. I would like to share with you how it went.

   Firstly, I would like to mention that along with the learning logs, I am using field notes to support the outcomes of my students’ logs. The note-taking exercise has helped me a lot in keeping track of my students’ process and my teaching practices. I need to say that it has been very useful and I confirmed this when I had my first interview with them.

   After the first couple of classes, I talked to my students about the learning log and so far we are still in the trial period in which they are getting familiar with it. In their blogs, they are asked to express in the way they prefer how they felt in class, what they did and what they liked or not about that class. Although they have had a lot of doubts regarding what they should include or not, I have noticed that after the first week they became more comfortable and interested. Mostly, they have wrote a lot of good things about the class, which I’m glad to read but I’m waiting for them to open themselves more and to be able to express dislikes too.

   Since they were in the second week of classes and the mid-term exam was coming soon, I wanted to know how they thought things were going from another source different from the notes and the learning logs. So, I decided to have a short interview with them and I prepared few questions; however, I was expecting that they wanted to talk about other doubts or comments. During the interview, they first seemed surprised and expressed that they did not experienced such thing before in any of their classes (having interviews with the teacher). After the first two minutes, they seemed more comfortable and I asked them the questions I had prepared.

   As I was expecting, my students expressed concerns they had that they did not include in their learning logs but that I was noticing and writing down on my notes.

   I found this exercise very useful and the biggest advantage that I have is that I’m working with only five students, which makes things much easier. However, although I have tried to persuade my students to write things that are going right and wrong in their logs, this hasn’t happened yet. Based on this I would like to ask you:

What do you think would be a good way to make this happen?

Are you currently using journals, questionnaires and/or interviews in your class? If yes, how is it going? If not, Why not?

What should we expect from our students writing outcomes?

Brown (2000) asserts that literate people in developed countries learn the rudiments of writing in their native language, but ‘very few learn to express themselves clearly with logical, well-developed organization that accomplishes an intended purpose. And yet we expect second language learners to write coherent essays with artfully chosen rhetorical and discourse devices!’(p.218).  

The writing skill then is clearly very hard to improve in every case. The questions for us as English teachers are: what should we expect from our students writing? How can we successfully assess their performance? I certainly do not have the answer, but I am going to share what I believe we should take into account in order to avoid big mistakes.

From my experience as an English teacher I have to say that for teaching and assessing writing, as well as for the other language skills, we go to classrooms without solid bases. Because of this, we make a lot of mistakes such as: not setting objectives for the tasks we want our students to perform, not having clear what we want to assess, not considering our students needs, and more importantly, we tend to forget that English is not our students’ mother tongue and that the input they are exposed to is little. As a result of this, our assessment on students writing ability is poor.

In my personal case, I used to be very strict with my students writing; for instance, if a student did not write an accurate sentence that followed all grammar rules, I did not give any recognition to his/her job. To make matters worse, instead of giving my students’ accurate performance a thumbs up, I used to punish their mistakes. In other words, my grading rubric basically consisted of discounting one or two points for each mistake. Consider the following example:

1.       Write about your vacations.

       I go to Cartagena last month.

           ( -2  )   

For this reason, a lot of my students used to get low grades in writing, which truly did not reflect their real performance.

As teachers, we need to understand the process that our students go through in order to improve their writing ability. Furthermore, we need to be there to help them and to guide them in their process. To do this, what I now consider is the best way is not to punish their mistakes, but to encourage their practice.

Now, I would like to leave some questions for you:

What mistakes do you think you made when assessing writing?

How would you change your writing assessment procedures?

Assessing Speaking

    Keeping the reflection mode on, I would like to share some aspects of my personal English learning experience concerning the assessment of speaking. Going back to school time, I remember that my first English classes were based on memorizing vocabulary and drilling. By that time, the only way of speaking assessment I can think of consisted on repeating a set of vocabulary over and over again. Because of this, I consider that the only kind of speaking assessment that took place was imitative.

    Moving to high school time, I would divide my learning experience in two: the first four years and the last two. In the first period of time, I remember my English classes being more based on grammatical structures than isolated vocabulary. During that time, it was common for us to see titles such as: The Verb TO BE, Present Simple, and Past Simple on the board. In fact, our teacher used to teach to us some formulas for getting the right structures. For example:  

The Present Simple

Negative form:   S + AUX (DO / DOES) + NOT + V + C

    Our speaking assessment by then was very rare. We were mostly asked to write a lot of sentences in whatever grammatical structure we were studying. The only speaking practice that I can think of is that every year we had to memorize an English song and sing it to the teacher.

    Finally in the last two years, things changed and more importance was given to speaking practice. Our learning was still mostly grammar focused; however, activities such as: songs, acting out conversations and retelling stories were also included in our English class. As a project for English class, learning an English song was included in our curriculum. For this activity, I would say that the kind of assessment that took place was intensive. On the other hand, acting out conversations was interactive assessment. Finally, when retelling stories extensive assessment took place.

    To sum up, I would like to say that the study of speaking assessment has been very useful not only to identify the types of assessment I was exposed to in my school years, but also to learn from what I was taught in the past and analyze how those assessment tools influenced my learning process. In that way, I feel more capable of analyzing and taking into account the wide variety of assessment practices that I can use in my professional life. 

Based on this reflection, I would like to state some questions for you:
In what ways were you assessed in speaking?

How effective do you think they were?

Do you assess your students the same way you were? What kinds of speaking assessment do you currently use in your teaching practice?

Which way of speaking assessment do you find more comfortable to be assessed? Why?

A Reflection

At this point, I would like us to share the impact that our study of assessment as made on us so far. To do so, I would like to state the following questions:

- Has your conception of teaching and learning changed? How?

- Have you been reflecting on your teaching practices lately?

- Have you consider making some changes? Which ones?

- What strategies are you planning to use to make those changes happen?

As it has been previously said, teaching is all about making decisions and I would like to share a decision that I have made lately. I decided to carefully reflect on my role as a teacher and to try to analyze how successful or not I have been and why. 

Thinking about our discussion of the principles of language assessment, I realized that I had little knowledge about designing successful tools of assessment. I discovered that I was making huge mistakes when designing formal tests for my students. Firstly, I used to design the tests in either two ways; on the one hand, I used to give my students the suggested test provided by the textbook. On the other hand, I used to look for exercises on the topics and organize them to fit the test design. Those two decisions were mistaken because they were based only on my conception that the tests were appropriate for my students. Among other things that I should have thought of; I never thought about how my students were going to feel like when they were exposed to the test; I did not ask myself if they were familiar enough with the kind of exercise they were asked to perform or if they were familiar with the instructions that were given. 

Another mistake was that although from the beginning of the cycle/course I knew when the tests were supossed to be administered and the topics that each of those had to cover, I used to wait until days before the due date for the draft of the test to be given to actually design the test. By that time, I used to think that it was not ok to design the test in the last minute. However, I never thought about how those decisions were affecting my students learning process. Now, I realize that if I had thought of the test in accordance with the lessons, I would have helped my students to have much better outcomes. For example, if I had exposed my students to the same kind of exercises that I presented in the test, they would have been more successful because they were already familiar with those type of exercises. I used to desperately wonder: Why are they underlying when I am asking them to circle? And I used to tell myself: It is because they are not taking time to read the instructions. Now, I know that it was my responsability to first make my students familiar with the exercises before using them in the test. At that time, I had no idea about key concepts of students' assessment such as: washback, validity, authenticity, among others. I can say then that the lack of knowledge and reflection on my teaching practice affected negatively my students learning process.

As a general conclusion, I would say that although we all have made different kinds of mistakes in our teaching practice, the most important thing is that we learn from those mistakes and that we try as hard as we can to avoid them in the future. I would finally say that we should think of our mistakes as the basis in the construction of the successful teachers we want to be. 

Assesment, Evalutation, Testing and Grading

According to what Craig (2012) argues in the discussion of assessment versus evaluation:"in terms of what, it is often said that we assess students and we evaluate instruction"(p.3). It can be said that assessment is the way in which teachers, curriculum designers and administrators can know students success on grasping the concepts that they are exposed to. To do so, teachers use tests (among other tools)in order to know to what extend students are sucessful or not. By grading, teachers provide a feedback that can be a number, a letter, etc that represents students'performance.

On the other hand, evaluation is how the success of teachers as instructors is analyzed. In this case, their ways to teach, to introduce a topic, and to explain (among others) are subject to study.