in Chinese University EFL Classes
Background:
I am currently employed by Sichuan University, which is the key comprehensive university in China under the supervision of the State Education Ministry. SCU provides facilities for tertiary education and research in various branches of Arts, Science, Management, Law, Engineering and Medicine. It enrolls students from all over China and a limited number of international students to meet the manpower needs of the region, the nation and the world. Degrees awarded by SCU are recognized by the relevant institutions both domestically and internatioanlly. It offers undergraduate and graduate programmes. The highest degree confered by SCU is Doctor of Philosoqhy (PhD).
Traditionally, language teaching in my university employs a product-oriented, examination-centered approach, with a strong emphasis on grammar. Consequently, students’ perspective of language learning in general involves a considerable amount of careful, paintstaking translation of text as well as a great deal of interest in grammar analysis and a strong desire to be corrected when mistakes are made. These attitudes, of course, have a direct effect on teaching EFL writing in the classroom. Teacher focus on the product of writing and emphasises “correctness” or accuracy of writing skills, while the students are encouraged to imitate the abstract, idealized model of writing excellence. Finally, most of the students pass the required nationwide CET-4 ( College English Test, Band 4, which tests the candidates’ comprehensive language abilities in listening, reading, writing and translating.) and lose their interest in writing too! As the new epoch calls for the versatile talents with not only high academic achievements but also practical abilities and skills, the syllabus designers in my university commence to lay stress on the shift from “teacher-centered” learning strategy to “student-centered” strategy.
The students I teach are second-year college students of Computer Science. Most of them are highly motivated in English learning because they relise having a good command of English is dispensible to learning Computer Science well. As a consequence of this, they are fairly cooperative in classroom activities. In the case of writing, they are, however, facing a dilemma, whether to develop their natural tendency in writing, or to follow the instruction within an examination-driven, accuracy-oriented atomasphere. On the one hand, they want to promote their actual writing skills to deal with the real-world problems in the future. On the other hand, they are driven by the exam-oriented curriculum to imitate and reproduce the model writing, hence, no opportunity to develop his/her own style and voice. Therefore, what they need desperately is to pass the examination and to learn gradually how to write inside and outside class to gain the writing skills they need in the real-world experience.
Overview of Lesson Plan
This lesson plan targets at the second-year non-English majors with intermediate level of English proficiency. Process writing provides an overall pedagogical foundation for the lesson plan with the focus on peer conferencing. The general aim of the lesson is to guide students how to write interactively and collaboratively. At the end of the 2-period lesson, students will know how to conduct peer conferencing and will actively participate in peer conferencing, being positive and supportive in group activities.
Roughly, this lesson plan is divided into three procedures.( see the Appendix A for detail procedures.)
1) Teacher models peer response roles to introduce students into peer conferencing.
§ At the beginning of the class, teacher hands out a piece of writing to the students to discuss and informs them that it is the teacher’s previous writing at college. Doing this perpetuate the idea in the students’ mind that any piece of writing needs refining and polishing.
§ A list of questions is given to help students discuss the writing in their group, on both merits and demerits.
§ Teacher gives guidance to students how to improve the writing based on the problems the students find in their group discussion.
2) warm-up activities for peer conferencing
§ One student writer in each group reads aloud his/her own writing.
§ The other group members jointly recount the main ideas of the writing.
§ The whole group discuss wherever misunderstanding occurs.
3) Students participate in peer conferencing
§ Teacher asks the students to read the writing of student writer’s once again to make them more familiarized with material.
§ Students start peer conferencing in accordance with the conference worksheet teacher hands out.
§ They collaboratively improve the writing in terms of content, ideas as well as organization.
Discussion of Lesson Plan
In order to discuss the theoretical and pedagogical justification of my lesson plan, I will elaborate respectively on paradigm shift from product writing to process writing, pedagogical theories on collaborative learning and the benefits of peer conferencing.
A paradigm Shift From Product Writing to Process Writing
Traditionally, writing was viewed mainly as a tool for practice and reinforcement of specific grammatical and lexical patterns, a fairly one-dimensional activity, in which accuracy was all important but content and selp-expression are non-priorities. Thus, writing often takes place in tense, stifling atmoshpere. Students are purely “writing to learn” as opposed to “learning to write”.
A desirable alternative that is often suggested to this traditional product-oriented method of teaching composition is process writing, which sees writing as a complex intellectual-linguistic process involving the recursive application of a wide range of thinking skills and language abilities. As Sommers wrote, “ we need to sabotage out students’ convicton that the draft they have written are complete and coherent. Our comments need to offer students revision task by forcing students back into chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning.” ( Sommers,1984:166)
In Grave’s process writing model, ten stages of writing process are suggested: brainstorming, planning, quick-writing, peer conferencing, re-drafting, peer conferencing, re-drafting, peer editing, writing final draft, publishing.
The idea behind “Grave’s Model” is not really to dissociate writing entirely from the written product and to merely lead students through various stages of the writing process but “ to construct process-oriented writing instruction that will affect performance”. (Freedman et.al, 1987:13). We, EFL teachers need to systematically teach students problem-solving skills and help students writers realize specific goals at each stage of writing process. Thus, “process writing” in the classroom can provide students with a series of planned learning experiences to help them understand the nature of writing at every point.
In “process writing” class room, paradigm shifts from the teacher as the sole proprietor of knowledge to knowledge being jointly constructed between teacher and students. On the teacher’s part, he/she provides time and opportunities for students to tap on their own as well as one another’s knowledge and ideas. This encourages students’s originality and creativity. As for the students, they judge their work on their own merit rather than the teacher’s expectation. As effort is always praised and rewarded, students gradually gain self-esteem and confidentce in their own writing. Thus. Writing becomes fun, highly interactive and meaningful activity.
Pedagogical Theories on Collaborative Learning
In process writing, collaborative learning becomes the norm. Theories of collaborative learning and collaborative writing are gaining recognition.
“Usually, collaborative theorists offer three arguments in favor of collaborative learning:1) traditional classroom methods have failed to teach students what they most require---a critical stance toward authority and the ability to cooperate to solve problems of social concern-and therefore we need to restructure both education and society to promote these values,2) collaborative learning mirrors the social nature of language and writing, and 3) empirical studies demonstrate the positive effects of collaborative methods.”(David W.Smit 1994: 70)
Our educational system is to foster a new kind of nonhostile, coorperative personality in students and an attitude which questions traditional certainties and promotes a new relationship between authority and the larger group. But traditional pedagogical methods subtly teach the opposite values, such as “ Knowledge is what a teacher says”, “Answers are more important that questions.”, “I am what someone else says I am.” . The best way to counter these false values is to change the way students are organized to learning. Many of the published reports on collaborative learning indicate that collaboration may promote a wide variety of points of view; students often do not agree in their responses to the work of their peers, and their responses are often quite different from those of teachers. As such, a polycentralized collaborative learning community is created, in which students discover for themselves and learn through discovering.
It is generally acknowledged that all language is social, then all pedagogies that use language are social, too. In some sense, then, all experience with language is real world experience. “ Students need to know that writing involves not only linguistic process but also social and cognitive process. (Reid,Joy,W 1993: Chapter 6 ). Therefore, classroom practice ought to reflect real world experience and collaborative writing as a pedagogy more effectively models language as a social product than individual writing does. “ Collaborative activities unite and integrate all skills: conversation and discussion, comprehension of spoken and written text, and information for extended written compositions.” ( Reid, Joy, M 1993: Chapter 6 ). In this way does collaborative writing stress the value of every learner’s contritution to the learning process.
In composition, the most common forms of collaborative learning is peer conferencing. Peer conferencing essentially involves getting students to evaluate their peers’ writing in order to provide constructive feedback to improve the content and organization of the essay. It is conducted on a face-to-face basis, so that students can respond to the reader’s questions and comments as well as adding their own.
Peer conferencing creates a setting for respect and trust, respect for negotiation and cooperation. Writing is conventionally viewed as an isolated activity, with the writer individually labouring at the composition all the way to the final product. The timidated writer is fearful of publicizing their drafts because of his false assumption that any piece of writing should be perfect when it gets publicized. But peer conferencing diminishes the isolation and apprehension. It helps the students writer understand their interactive relationship with their readers and draw on both his and his peer’s resources to make the intended meaning.
One of the greatest benefits of peer conferencing is to establish non-teacher audiences for the students. It helps students appreciate the presence of a reader other that themselves or the teacher. Thus, the concept of audience provided by peer response allows student writers to think not just about readers as readers but also to actually read the text through the eyes of potential readers, trying to judge the meaning these readers would make. As a result, student writers begin to adopt the perspectives of their audience and assess their writing in terms of how their readers may react to or comprehend their text. With the real-world audience in mind, student writers begin to improve their writing to make the ideas more clear and transparent to the audience.
Consequently, peer conferencing enables student writers to identify strength and weakness in their own writing. With the extended practice of collaborative learning, students will be able to gradually transfer the skills they have developed in evaluating their peers’ writing to evaluate and refine their own writing. They become increasingly able to indentify lack of substance, organizational weakness, unclear writing, and illogical ideas and then revise it on their own.
Apart from the pedagogical value, peer conferencing also helps students develop skills they will need in the real world. “Peer response group provide a context for a variety of thinking, writing, listening, learning and role-play situations that form a powerful educative force on the students.” ( Reid, Joy, W 1993: Chapter 8 ). Student learns to know how to communicate with group members effectively, making his own stand clearly expressed and his peers’ point fully understood, giving cogent arguments appropriately and receiving unfavourable advice gracefully. Further more, by practicing peer conferencing students are able to learn critical thinking skills such as analytical reasoning and problem-solving. For example, when they find some illogical ideas in a piece of writing, they will automatically analyse how the illogic occurs and work jointly to come up with a solution to it. The benefits of these critical thinking skills go beyond writing essays. They will enhance their future learning experience and real life experience as well.
Conclusion:
The implementation of peer conferencing may encounter some obstacles in my actual classroom context because the traditional perception of teacher and student roles in the classroom have been deeply rooted. But I am of the belief that the benefits of peer conferencing outweigh the difficulties of implementation. In order to make students have a more productive and meaningful esperience in the classroom, and to promote their writing skills and critical thinking abilities, it is worthwhile for us to make a change. The long-term benefits reward our present endeavour.
References:
Reid, Joy, M. 1993. Teaching ESL Writing. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Regents/Prentice Hall.
White, R&V. Arndt. 1995. Process Writing. London. Longman
Teo.P. 1999. “ Process Writing”: Peer Evaluation Revisited. In REACT, June 1999. National Institute of Education, Singapore.
Carney, Barbara, 1996. ‘Process Writing and the Secondary School Reality: a Compromise’. In English Journal. October 1996, Vol.85, Issue,6: High School Edition: P 28-36
Seow, Anthony, 1994. ‘ Understanding “Process Writing” and How To Make It Work In The Classroom---The Singapore Experience’. Paper presented at the Educational Research Association Conference in Singapore, 24-26. Nov.1994
David W, Smit, 1994
Some Difficulties with Collaborative Learning. In Cary A and Sidney I
Dobin’s Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom.
Appendix A
Lesson Plan
Aim: The general aim of the lesson is to guide students how to write interactively and collaboratively.
Objectives: At the end of the lesson,
1) Students will know how to conduct peer conferencing.
2) Students can actively participate in peer conference, being positive and supportive in the group activities
Students: Second-year non-English majors, Intermediate level
Class size: 40
Time: 100 min (2 periods)
Skill focus: peer conferencing
1* Lesson steps 2*Estimated time for each step
|
1 |
2 |
Teacher activities |
Students Activities |
Purpose |
Materials |
|
|
1 |
15 min |
-gives students(Ss) a piece of writing and tells them it’s teacher’s previous composition at college -writes down on the blackboard a list of questions concerning the content of the writing |
-read the composition -discuss those questions with their group members |
-let students know any piece of writing needs refining and polishing -introduce students into peer conferencing |
AppendixB AppendixC |
|
|
2 |
15 min |
-asks two or three students to report the results of their group discussion. ( both positive and negative points) -gives guidance to Ss on how to improve the writing based on the problems they find such as inappropriate title, insufficient information, illogical ideas etc. |
-report in class the merits and demerits of the composition they’ve just read -listen to the teacher’s instruction to make sense of peer conferencing |
-teach students how to practice peer conferencing by modeling peer response roles. |
AppendixB AppendixC blackboard |
|
|
3 |
5 min |
-asks Ss to take out their draft written in the last session. -asks one student writer in each group to read aloud his/her writing in their group |
-take out their writing -read aloud / listen |
-practice students reading and listening abilities |
One authentic piece of writing of student writer |
|
|
4 |
10 min |
-asks one student in each group to recall what the writer wants to say, the other two give support in constructing the ideas |
-recount jointly in their group, summarizing, listening and adding. |
-improve Ss’ communicative ability |
|
|
|
Break ( 10 min ) |
||||||
|
5 |
10 min |
-asks student writers whether there’re some misunderstanding about his writing among the group members. If there are, discuss how it happens |
-discuss in group wherever the misunderstanding occurs |
-improve their communicative and problem- solving abilities as well |
|
|
|
6 |
5 min |
-asks Ss to read the writing again silently and carefully |
-take turn to read the writing |
-make the students familiarized with the material |
|
|
|
7 |
25 min |
-hands out the peer conferencing worksheet to Ss to improve the writing in terms of content, ideas as well as organization -reminds student writers to write down the writing tips the group member give |
-discuss in group according to the guidance of the worksheet and collaboratively improve the writing -take notes of constructive info. and suggestions |
-help students actively engage in peer conferencing |
AppendixD |
|
|
8 |
5 min |
-gives assignments § Conduct peer conferencing after class for the rest 3 pieces of writing in each group § Student writers revise their draft individually after discussing their first draft in group. |
-listen to the teacher attentively |
Tell students what they should do after class |
|
|
Appendix B
How I Overcome my Difficulties in Learning English I think that English is very difficult to learn. Now, I am faced with several difficulties. First, I find that it is very hard to recite the new words; every day, I will recite over 50 new words, but a few days later I can remember only half of them. Second, the grammar is different from the Chinese so much so that I think it difficult; Third, although I keep on studying English every day,
I still can not manage to put it into practice, for example, once I met a foreigner, I just can’t open my mouth to communicate with him. Although there are so many difficulties, I will not lose heart. As I have planned, I will recite the new words repeatedly, and pay more attention to the grammar. Furthermore, I will go to English corner more often to practice my oral English and to use it more. I believe that I can succeed at last.
Appendix C
Appendix D
For Student writer
For Student reader