Seameo regional language centre
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| 2.3.4. Writing skills
Table 12: Distribution of writing activities English 10 English 11 English 12 SB WB SB WB SB WB Total Preparation work 20 1 9 2 16 0 48 Controlled writing 7 13 1 8 2 12 43 Guided writing 7 2 7 3 3 4 26 Free writing 13 4 15 9 18 7 66 No. of activities 47 20 32 22 39 23 183 No. of units 22 16 22 16 22 16 114 The types of texts that students are taught and made to practice in the three books are quite varied, ranging from forms, postcards, letters, and announcements to mini- biographies, narratives, table descriptions, and expository essays. The writing approach adopted in the books seems to be product-oriented in nature as emphasis seems to be placed on the end-result of writing rather than the process of writing itself. A brief look at the Writing section shows that it normally begins with some preparation work in which students are required to analyze task requirements, work on models, or generate ideas. It may then proceed with one or two controlled or/ and 44 guided writing activities and end with a freer writing activity. In this way, students are engaged in imitating, copying and transforming models of correct language texts to the new writing task. There seems to be no explicit emphasis on the process of planning, drafting, revision, and editing. Table 12 illustrates the distribution of different types of writing activities in the books. Among the 183 writing activities included in 114 units, 66 are for free writing practice, accounting for 36%. That is, there is an average of only 0.5 free writing activity per unit. Given that the goal of teaching writing in CLT is to enable learners to become independent and effective writers, the textbooks would have been expected to offer more chance for free writing practice than they do at present. A qualitative investigation into the writing activities suggests that not all provide adequate and effective scaffolding for students. For example, in Unit 7 English 10 students learn how to write paragraphs about the advantages and disadvantages of mass media. They are scaffolded through three activities. In the first activity, they read a set of sentences about the advantages and disadvantages of television. The purpose is to gather ideas and learn vocabulary and structures. In the second activity they work in pairs to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different mass media including radio, newspaper and the Internet. The purpose is to generate ideas for the free writing task which comes afterward where they write a paragraph about the advantages and disadvantages of one of the mass media discussed earlier. It should be noted that paragraph writing is a new task type for most students since it is 45 taught only from Grade 10 and Unit 7 is the first unit in which this genre is taught. However, neither of the prewriting activities teaches the structure of the paragraph (topic sentence, supporting ideas, cohesive devices and coherence). Nor do they teach the process of organizing ideas into a good piece of writing. Apparently, writing involves more than putting ideas into sentences and without adequate prior preparation (e.g. instruction about paragraph writing, working on models, controlled and guided practice, and so on), this writing task would probably be too challenging and perhaps even beyond students’ ability. tải về 421.94 Kb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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