I was quite pleased with the students' work on descriptive writing today. They tried their level best to produce two paragraphs giving details and using the five senses. The part I hope they benefited most from was the editing stage in which we both, teacher and students highlighted and corrected the language errors. Although they made quite a number of mistakes, you have to allow them to go through that process of learning through mistakes. Although descriptive writing is one of the most challenging of genres, they can still apply the knowledge for other genres such as the narrative and reflective compositions.
Those who can Do Those who can do more TEACH
I fully agree that the joint criticism of a piece of work is where children can learn a great deal. I am faced with 100% Malay children (mostly of poor background) who may not achieve an A at UPSR with likely C or D in English. For these children I find it useful to give Malay sentences followed by Malay essays which I take from books on UPSR contoh karangan. It is often hilarious to see how a simple Malay sentence turns out in English. These children think in Malay and speak only Malay. Translation will home to these children that direct word for word is not possible. Believe it or not, for my Cambridge School Certificate Malay paper 60 years ago we had to practice translating Engglish passages into Malay. Of course English was the medium of instruction then.
ReplyDeleteYour teaching situation is different pakcik, definitely more challenging but I believe there are challenges in any teaching situation. in residential schools, they only want an A nothing less so the pressure is there to perform. Getting students to be involved in editing their friend's work is one way that is suitable in my teaching situation. Translation is another method that helps ESL learners too. Whatever it is we decide to do in the classroom, we always have the students at heart :) And very much of that decision lies in understanding the make up of our classroom. God to hear from you again pakcik :)
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