"Journey on Learning in Action - Experience, Explore, Enlighten" -English

E02 Who can write? Learning and teaching the complexities of Process Writing

Dr TSE Kwok-keung, Ernest
( Senior School Development Officer)
Mr Kevin WONG
Ms WONG Wing-sze, Vince
( Pui Kiu Primary School )

According to Evans (2001), writing is a complex and multifaceted process requiring the ability of students to master and manoeuvre many sub-skills simultaneously. Some of the thought provoking early research visualised writing not as a ‘think, write, think, write, think, write’ continuum but as a complex ongoing thought processes manifested in ‘writing episodes’. These thought processes and episodes interact with each other as they influence and support each other milling their way through until the writer produces a finished piece of writing. Early researchers state that the stages involved in writing – planning, writing and revising – are not linear stages but are recursive; they intertwine and link with one another as the writer works towards a finished product. It is evident that to develop as effective writers children need:

l the opportunity to try out things and to relate their previous knowledge of printed materials to their own personal intent;

l to feel able to take risks without being frightened of making mistakes;

l to be exposed to an adult role model who will share writing and the whole writing experience with them; and

l to have something to write about and reasons to write.

In addition, they must also have exposure to top quality literature and books as children write what they read. It is against this background that teachers from Pui Kiu Primary School adopt the philosophy and practice of process writing in developing the writing proficiency of her students.

Providing Opportunities for Children to Develop their Full Writing Potential

Pui Kiu Primary School , like many schools, has a student body with a large range in their English language ability. As students progress through the years, the gap stretches wider, leaving many students behind. In adopting the process writing program, the intention is not to close the gap but rather, to meet the students where they are – pushing them to improve in their writing at their differentiated levels in recognition of the Zone of Proximal Development advocated by Vygotsky who points out that what the child can do with assistance today can lead to his or her independent learning tomorrow.

The Intervention

In support of this philosophy, Pui Kiu has decided to invest more resources into the process writing program, allocating two teachers to each classroom: one form-level process writing teacher and one General English teacher. Two teachers are allocated to a classroom because the philosophy of process writing advocates personalized and individualized writing conferences with one student to one teacher. With such an arrangement, students are able to conference with teachers at least once in each lesson, allowing the child’s individualized needs to be met, and for the teacher to assess the ability and progress of the child. The goal of the individual conferencing is for the teacher to help the student succeed in the writing task. When this is achieved, not only is the child proud of his or her writing, but also the trust and rapport between teacher and student is strengthened. This is equally vital when a child’s ability is stretched to reach his or her full writing potential.

Adopting the Process Approach in Writing

Process writing includes the following steps: brainstorming, mind-mapping, drafting, editing, making the fair copy and sharing. Teachers begin to develop the writing units based on the text type, vocabulary and language forms and functions of the units taught in the course book. Additional appropriate key skill focuses are then added to the list. The course book is used as the point of departure as it complements the General English curriculum and provides effective pre-writing reading and language input for the process writing lessons.

Creating a Safe Environment for Successful Writers

The task of writing often conjures feelings of anxiety as students often feel pressured to perform perfectly in writing tasks. In process writing, students are asked to write at least two drafts before completing a final copy. In students’ first draft, teachers are required to mark for ideas only. Although unconventional in local writing classrooms, marking only for ideas relays a message to students that the quality of their writing content is important, whereas the writing conventions and grammar related areas can be refined in a later stage. Once students understand the value of expressing their ideas and are confident they will not be penalized for incorrect language forms and functions, they will enter the “safe environment” of process writing. As a result, with increased motivation, students begin to write with confidence and ultimately with pleasure. The scaffolded lessons with clearly broken down steps and guidance throughout the writing task also contribute to nurturing this safe environment. Mini-lessons will be given from time to time when teachers found mistakes common to most students. Students learn how to do self editing by themselves and become more aware of the accuracy of their writings. In the long run, this writing approach teaches students that an independent and lifelong learner needs to take risks in order to value the lessons learned in the writing process.

Institutionalizing Professional Development

While students are engaged in learning, teachers at Pui Kiu are also continuously engaged in learning. In order to broaden their knowledge and keep abreast of recent developments in process writing, core teachers attended a professional development workshop on writing hosted by the Education Bureau. After applying the strategies learnt, teachers organized a school-based Professional Development workshop on process writing for the English teachers in Pui Kiu in April 2008. In this workshop, teachers covered the following topics: What is Process Writing; Process Writing in Pui Kiu; How to Conference; How to Mark for Ideas; and Useful Co-Teaching Strategies. The professional development continues in their weekly reflection meetings thereafter. In the weekly form meetings where General English teachers and the Process Writing teacher meet, teachers reflect and evaluate previous lessons and discuss strategies and focuses that can be used and taught to classes of varying abilities. After a unit is completed, teachers also review the “Unit Cover Sheet” and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the unit for consideration by teachers who take up process writing lessons in the new school year.

The workshop and the weekly reflective meetings are beneficial to the panel and put all teachers on the same page, especially the novice teachers to the program. As a result, the quality of process writing lessons improves as teachers develop ownership of the program and share a common goal of developing good English writers. This is evident in both the students’ attitude and quality of writing.

Beliefs in Process Writing - Developing Motivated English Writers

Pui Kiu Primary School is a mature learning community where teachers are enthusiastic about teaching and learning from other schools and educational agents. Process writing has been implemented at Pui Kiu for four years, yet the core beliefs of the program and their writing team have remained unchanged. They believe that all children can write. They have developed teaching plans and resources for P.3 to P.5 process writing modules which they would gladly share with local counterparts in the hope that the writing program may help to develop motivated and well-equipped English writers across Hong Kong primary schools. Despite the fact that process writing has been in practice in many schools for years, new learning evolves from the quantitative and qualitative description and analysis at Pui Kiu. The sharing session will focus on teachers’ reflections on their process writing program that has captured several areas worth further exploring:

l Teacher Development – How the program contributes to teachers becoming reflective practitioners;

l Curriculum Development – Deliberating the part/whole relation in the process writing program;

l School Development in terms of the search for knowledge, skills and dispositions in an intervention strategy that believes to help students achieve language proficiency; and

l How students learn writing - impact of process writing on students' writing proficiency.

References:

1. Evans, J. (2001). The writing classroom. London: David Fulton Publishers.

2. Graves, D. (1994). A fresh look at Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

3. Ho B. (2006). Effectiveness of using the process approach to teach writing in six Hong Kong primary classrooms. Perspectives: Working Papers in English and Communication, 17(1) Spring 2006.

4. Hornsby, D. (2000). A closer look at guided writing. Melbourne: Eleanor Curtain Publishers.

5. White, R. & Arndt, V. (1995). Process writing. London: Longman.

E03 Reading skills - Taught, not caught!

Ms Kwok Wing-ki, Judy
( Senior School Development Officer)
Ms Chan Shun-yi
Ms Lam Wai-man
Ms Wong Wing Yee, Ivy
(T.W.G.Hs Lo Yu Chik Primary School)

The above was the reflection of an English teacher in an interview on the teaching of reading (Farrell, 2001). Does the portrait sound familiar to you, particularly when you coach students to tackle the TSA mock papers? What are the possible alternatives if you want to break the usual cycle and teach reading skills more explicitly?

One possible alternative, as suggested by Nuttall (1996), is to adopt a skill-based approach to teach reading. Instead of teaching everything in the text intensively (i.e. a text-based approach), a skill-based lesson only focuses on a particular skill, for example inference from context. In order to teach, to practice and to consolidate this skill, a number of texts may be used in the lesson, each offering opportunities for students to reinforce their learning.

The teachers in T.W.G.Hs Lo Yu Chik Primary School decided to adopt this new approach. They complemented traditional text-based lessons with skill-based lessons. First, based on internal tests and examinations; and past TSA Item Analysis Report, teachers worked out a number of reading skills their students were weak in. Then they categorized them into two categories: basic skills and high order skills. The former are expected to be covered in P1 and P2; the latter are then tackled in other levels. These basic skills include understanding the question words, locating specific information and interpreting pictorial clues. Other high order skills include pronoun referencing, finding the main idea, making inferences, drawing conclusion, guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words by using contextual clues and making predictions.

The panel believed that this systematic framework can help individual teachers teach reading skills consciously and students understand and monitor their own reading process actively. An integrative approach is adopted when developing the skill-based materials. That means the texts chosen for skill training are in context and they match with the modules in the textbook. Since most of the ready-made instructional materials did not match with the reading framework, teachers had a hard time developing the materials themselves. This challenge encouraged collaboration among teachers and deepened their understanding towards skill training. The teaching process encouraged teacher to gain a deeper understanding of their students’ learning difficulties and to explore further on various teaching pedagogies.

Initial findings in internal tests and examination showed that high achievers benefited most from skill-based lessons. The performance of average and low achievers was found to be satisfactory, but not significant. However, this limited success did not deter teachers from further introducing skill-based lessons into their future teaching. They believe that skill training takes time. Learners need time to get into the habit of incorporating skills into their reading process. For poor readers, they need to do one thing more: they need to change their ineffective reading skills or habits as well. Gradually, teachers began to recognize the importance of meta-cognition. They realized that they were helping students to pay attention to their own thinking process. Students too, through active interactions in the reading lessons, began to have conscious control of their own cognitive processing. Their motivation to read increased. This was particularly obvious among struggling readers, who in the past tended to tackle reading tasks reluctantly and mindlessly.

The session aims to share with the audience the developmental process of the reading framework and its reading materials. The presenters will share with the audience their success and failure when conducting the skill-based lessons. Most importantly, they will tell how this exploratory move changed some of their beliefs towards skill training. They will also caution the audience that skill-based teaching is only a complementary of text-based teaching, but not a complete replacement.

References:

1. Farrell, T. S. C. (2001). Teaching Reading Strategies: ‘It Takes Time!’. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(2).

2. Nuttall, C. E. (1996). Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (2nd edition). Oxford: Heinemann.

E04 Building blocks for language learning – Unfolding the process of vocabulary teaching

Ms WONG Kit-mei, Gladys
( Senior School Development Officer)
Ms NG Wing-fun
Ms YIP Nga-yan
( Yan Tak Catholic Primary School )

In many occasions, English teachers in Hong Kong share their worries over their students’ poor performance in reading and writing. To deal with this problem, they have tried hard in equipping their students with the necessary reading and writing skills. The results, however, are always far from satisfactory even with a carefully planned reading and writing program. Teachers of Yan Tak Catholic Primary School experienced the same problem. In an attempt to address the problem, they observed and interpreted students’ performance in reading and writing. Informal interviews with students were also conducted. The results all pointed to the fact that students were weak in vocabulary. Some students even confessed that they were pushed away by the lengthy passages loaded with large amount of unfamiliar vocabulary. They turned to the strategy of skipping the text and yet trying their luck in all the MC questions. Unsurprisingly, the wrong ‘strategy’ gave them poor scores in the reading and writing papers. Seeking solutions from literature on language learning, teachers found out from past research that second language learners had to handle the “linguistic and processing differences” (Grabe & Stoller, 2002). L2 learners need to possess sufficient L2 vocabulary and knowledge of structure in order to understand the L2 text thoroughly. Poor vocabulary hinders students from not only comprehending a reading text but also expressing themselves in a writing task. The 2008 TSA reports drew similar conclusions to students’ performance in the writing tasks for both KS1 and KS2:

All these helped to confirm the teachers’ assumption that vocabulary growth is essential in second language acquisition and that a sound vocabulary foundation is especially important (Nation, 1995). On examining the current reading and writing program, the teachers conducted a thorough review on the existing vocabulary teaching program at the school and found that insufficient time and effort had been devoted to help students develop vocabulary. Students were found unable to retain many of the vocabulary items taught, not to mention the very limited amount being retrieved in the production tasks. Bearing these in mind, they decided to re-design the current vocabulary program to make it a better “planned”, “deliberately controlled and monitored” one (Nation, 1995-6).

Based on the suggestions of Gairns and Redman (1995), the vocabulary program was comprised of three key elements – (1) direct instruction on vocabulary, (2) retention of vocabulary, and (3) retrieval of vocabulary. While the teaching of vocabulary was made an integral part of the General English Program, the first element received the most attention this year. The vocabulary items came mainly from the textbooks and the supplementary reading materials. In this sharing session, teachers of Yan Tak Catholic Primary School would share with the audience the teaching process in which the vocabulary items were dealt with graphaphonically, semantically and syntactically in the classroom. They would demonstrate the strategy in how they activated students’ previous knowledge on phonics to sound out new words. Teachers also attempted to build the concept of word family by helping the students to associate the previously learnt words with the newly learnt items. Besides the introduction of word meaning, teachers also drew students’ attention to the syntactic qualities of the vocabulary by highlighting the prefixes and suffixes adhered to the words that denote the different parts of speech. At the same time, teachers would also share the problems and difficulties that occurred in the course of teaching, the intervention strategies they adopted in tackling the problems, and also tips they have generated in helping students retain and retrieve the learnt vocabulary.

References:

1. Gairns R. & Redman S. (1995). Working with Words – A guide to teaching and learning vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2. Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (2002). Teaching and researching reading. London: Pearson Education.

3. Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. (2008). Territory-wide System Assessment, 2008 – report on the Basic Competencies of Students in Chinese Language, English Language and Mathematics Key Stages 1-3. Hong Kong: Government Printer, HKSAR.

4. Nation, I.S.P. (1995-6) Best practice in vocabulary teaching and learning. EA Journal 3, 2, 7-15.

E05 Making peer discussion work for primary school students

Ms.Chan Yeung-ming, Eve
( Senior School Development Officer)
Ms Chan So-yee, Zoe
Ms Chau Wai-mui
(Tai Po Methodist School )

Facing the reduction in class size in recent years, many schools in Hong Kong have adopted a number of strategies to cope with the new teaching and learning classroom context. Co-operative learning, which advocates the need to promote learning through peer-to-peer collaboration and quality teacher-student interaction, ties in well with this change and thus has attained wide-spread popularity. Yet, when it comes to peer collaboration in English classrooms, teachers have been very hesitant.

Many English teachers find that their Key Stage two students are often tongue-tied when they have to communicate their own ideas in English to their group mates. Students in Tai Po Methodist School are no exception. The traditional transmission view of teaching and learning emphasizing drilling and recitation in response to teachers’ questions and controlled speaking activities stressing replication of teacher or textbook models do not seem to help students.

Since 2008, teachers of Tai Po Methodist School have revamped their school-based English language curriculum and introduced discussion as a major vehicle of knowledge construction for their Key Stage 2 students. Their initiative has been rooted on two principles. First, they believe the fundamental purpose of English language education is to foster students’ ability to communicate in the language, rather than their skills to construct correct sentences. Discussion tasks provide students with natural contexts and pressing needs to communicate in English. Second, they are of the opinion that collaborating in dialogue with others enables students to understand and co-construct knowledge more effectively than when working alone. As Brophy puts it, “learning is most likely to be meaningful and accessible for use when it is negotiated through classroom discourse” (Brophy, 2008 P. ix).

The whole revamping journey has been arduous, as any language teacher can imagine that getting students to express themselves freely is far more difficult than elicit right answers from controlled exercises. Over the years, through collaborative effort, the teachers have conceptualized strategies to run effective discussions in English classrooms. They have identified effective ways to facilitate student discussions through teaching students the necessary discussion language and the appropriate attitudes to collaborate with group members. Student-centred discussion tasks, and teachers’ timely and focused feedback are other factors enhancing students’ performance in discussions and their overall English language proficiency.

Integrating the necessary discussion language input

Engaging primary school students to conduct discussions in English is not possible without giving students the necessary discussion language input. The curriculum started with teaching students a variety of short responses contributing to the maintenance of conversation. Students learned ways to express their opinions, show disagreement and agreement, provide feedback to classmates’ opinions and close a discussion task.

Teaching students the right attitudes to learn in a group

Then teachers noticed that students’ appropriate attitude to respect group mates is as important as language input in a discussion context. As Johnson et al. (1991) point out that discussion would be doomed to failure if there was no relative balance between dominant and passive voices. Patience, encouragement and a desire to see the partners succeed, however, will pave the way for all group members to succeed. Interpersonal skills were then weaved into the school-based curriculum. Students have been taught skills to invite group mates to speak, to take turns and to be attentive listeners. This curriculum focus allows students to appreciate the depth of interpersonal skills in a joint task.

Designing student-centred discussion tasks

“A discussion that works is primarily one in which as many students as possible say as much as possible.” (P.3 Ur 1981) To achieve this, teachers have found that interesting topics play an important role. Open-ended discussion tasks relating to students’ life and appealing to students’ imagination can often catch students’ attention and secure a better chance of full participation and high motivation. Tai Po Methodist School teachers have successfully engaged students in discussing school problems, imaginative situations and new story endings.

While the topic provides the motivation to speak, a tangible record of students’ discussion process helps students to find focuses of their interaction (P.13 Ur 1981). Tai Po Methodist students have made use of the discussion record to make sure every one contributes to the discussion, clarify group members’ opinions and give each other peer feedback in terms of ideas and language. From the teachers’ perspective, the tangible record, which is an indispensable part of a discussion task, would allow teachers to monitor students’ progress of the discussion task and their mastery of the language input suggested by teachers.

Facilitating discussion through effective teacher feedback

A successful discussion class cannot finish without teachers’ feedback. A discussion context closes the physical gap between a teacher and students in a classroom as a teacher can reach individual groups to offer immediate help specific to the needs of a particular group. In an interview, all high-achieving, medium-achieving and low-achieving students of the School expressed their willingness and readiness to ask questions and express doubts in a discussion task comparing with the whole class context. Another type of immediate feedback occurs when the teacher comments and appreciates students’ work after discussion. This kind of feedback helps students to synthesize and consolidate their knowledge. Teachers have observed that valuable learning has actually occurred through the two different kinds of feedback during a discussion and after a discussion. Students showed better knowledge retention with the help of the timely and appropriate feedback.

Focuses of the session

Throughout the two-year curriculum revamping process with a focus on discussion, students showed improvement in vocabulary usage, sentence pattern learning, writing strategies and speaking skills. In this sharing session, teachers of the Tai Po Methodist School are going to share with participants their knowledge to facilitate students’ discussion through integrating the necessary discussion language input into the curriculum, teaching students the right attitudes to learn in a group, designing student-centred discussion tasks and effective teacher feedback. Classroom videos and students’ work will be shown to track students’ development and performance in different aspects of English language learning.

References:

1. Brophy, J. (2001). Social Constructivist Teaching: Affordances and Constraints. Bingley: Emarld Group Publishing Limited.

2. Johnson, D.W., R. Johnson, A Ortiz, & M. Stanne. (1991). Impact of positive goal and resource interdependence on achievement, interaction and attitudes. Journal of General Psychology 118 (4), 341-47.

3. Ur, P. (1981). Discussions that work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.