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?
I really like your posts :)..Well, Maritza I guess I´ve made the same mistakes you have; my main concern was always grammar, and when students got confused with some structure, i would freak out. Now that we have the opportunity to share all this, I realize what I was doing wasn´t helping students in their process;and now that I think of it, it is somehow considering mistakes as crimes. Another issue is that sometimes we, as teachers, leave this skill aside, we just expect the students to have it. The problem is that this is how most of colombian teachers think; writing is not that important in shcools, and that is why students have so much trouble to express themselves. So our job, and challenge is to change all this misconceptions, and really help our students do their best when writing, providing them wit all the strategies needed to encourage their development of the skill.
ResponderEliminarThanks for your comment, Yuly.
EliminarI agree with you when you say that we need to teach more than structures. As teachers, we have a powerful position in which not only we can teach them how to write but also the importance of it. In this way, we can create better opinions, feelings and attitudes towards writing in our students that would increase the quality of their outcomes.
I've made so many mistakes when assessing my students' writing skill. I have also focused on the grammatical rules rather than on what they want to express. Sometimes, we as English teachers forget about our students' level or proficiency in the language and we want them to write correctly. Even if we know that the input they receive is little, we assess and grade them as if they were experts at writing. we sometimes hear some students to say that they are so bad at writing and that they hate it. I think it is mainly our fault as we don't encourage them to write; on the contrary, we only give them some bad grades without feedback or if so, we only focus on superficial aspects of the language.
ResponderEliminarThanks for your comment, Reyna.
EliminarI consider that what you said is true, teachers giving only bad news about students performance is certainly not an appropriate way to encourage them.
I also think that we are very impatient and many times we expect our students reach huge goals in few time. This shows that we constantly forget the real language level our students have and that writing is a long process that requires a lot discipline and practice.
"The best way to teach is the way that makes sense to you, your students, and your community. Steve Peha
ResponderEliminarMaritza, you made me reflect on the way in which I assess writing to my students. I am completely sure that as we are young we tend to be strict, and give them marks that really do not give us any clue of their real performance. Sometimes, we also underestimate what they can do or their real potential to write, and we did not encourage them to practice or improve this skill by themselves.
I found really interesting suggestions in the book "New Standards For Teaching and Learning in America’s
Schools", written by Harvey Daniels, Steve Zemelman, and Arthur Hyde (2nd edition, 1999)
As they explained here we must:
• Increase student ownership and responsibility by:
helping students choose their own topics and goals
for improvement; using brief teacher-student conferences; teaching students to review their own progress.
• Decrease teacher control of decision making by:
teacher deciding on all writing topics; suggestions for
improvement dictated by teacher; learning objectives
determined by teacher alone; instruction given as
whole-class activity.
• Increase class time spent on writing whole, original
pieces through: establishing real purposes for writing
and student involvement in the task; instruction in and
support for all stages of the writing process.
• Decrease time spent on isolated drills on “subskills”
of grammar, vocabulary, spelling, paragraphing, penmanship, etc.
I have the complete chapter if you want to read it just let me know.
By the way, great reflection!
Thanks for your comment, Bonnie.
EliminarThose are wonderful suggestions! I have to say that teacher-student conferences are a great help. I experienced that when I was in the States and my writing improved a lot.
As you also mentioned, make students feel that they are part of the process is crucial too. This encourages students to be more committed with the improvement of their writing skills.
Maritza, you have here a spectacular reflection!!!!!!!
ResponderEliminarI must be completely honest and say that I am not very strict with my students and their writing skill. I understand the fact that they are in the learning process and, as Brown said, if they write with no logical order in their native tongue, how are they going to do it in a second language!!? But, the few activities that I use in the classroom are not well done. Sometimes they do not even have a purpose! I think I have to change the way I assess my students' writing skill. I must help them to improve that skill with purposeful activities and with clear objectives.
Thanks for your comment, Camila.
EliminarI agree with you. It is always necessary to set clear objectives not only for students but for us too. Otherwise, students won't know what to do and we won't know what to expect from them and what to do with what they do.
This lack of clear objectives can upset our students when they see our suggestions because they can say that what we are asking them was not stated when the activity was proposed.
I would like to share with you what I've exerienced teaching writing: Actually when I started teaching I didn't really assess that skill in itself but though other exercises related to vocabulary because they were little kids who didn't know how to write in Spanish.
ResponderEliminarAs time went by, I realized of the importance of this skill and I started to implement it. I'm glad to say that I have seen very good aoutcomes from my studetns. I understood it is all about taking it as a process, so practice and practice was necessary even with little kids. For me, what really works is to implement practice as much as posible and take into account their level to be able to accomplish specific objectives and go to their actual needs as learners of a second language.
Thanks for your comment, Yury.
EliminarI have also had the chance to work with little kids and I think you would agree if I say that as much as you can teach them they will teach you too.
They really make you understand that the process of writing takes time, patience, practice and that it needs to be meaningful for them; otherwise, few things can be done.
Mari this is certainly one of the best posts I have read so far. You remind me of myself; I actually do pretty much the same when it comes to grading. Assessing writing is a really tough job for teachers because we really focus on grammar, spelling and other microskills that in fact are a really important aspect of writing, but we should focus a little less on those aspects and more on content and structure.
ResponderEliminarThanks for your comment, Caro.
EliminarIt certainly is a tough job. That is why we need to gain a lot of experience on doing it right. I think that thanks to what we have been studying, we are becoming much better at assessing our students.