This study is an action research of an actual classroom in a junior high school in Taipei City. The researcher was also the homeroom teacher of the intact class. The teacher-researcher concluded three pedagogical implications based on the findings of
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the study. First, the innovative situational writing activities helped students improve their English learning motivation. Second, to meet the principles of 12-year
curriculum guidelines, teachers have to develop meaningful and practical learning materials for students. Last, one of the principles in 12-year curriculum guidelines is to integrate with other subjects. The teacher-researcher has found some possible ways for subject integration in the following section.
The Innovative Situational Writing Activities Have Raised Students’ Motivation in Learning English
The findings for social participation of this study imply that authenticity and practicality of the writing activities affect students’ motivation significantly. When designing courses, teachers should take authenticity and practicality into consideration.
In this way, students can use their imagination and creativity to finish challenging tasks a little beyond their ability. In addition, because the content of the course is closely related to students’ life experience, they would have intrinsic motivation to carry out in-depth studies out of their curiosity. For example, after the sharing event in the end of the intervention, the students knew more about other groups’ study of the certain restaurant. The students were motivated to understand the background information and the history of the restaurants near the school community. Although they didn’t carry out another interview toward other restaurants, their awareness of the community and the residents was aroused.
Besides the authentic and challenging tasks, the findings of the study indicate that making use of multi-modality, such as videos, in assignments interested different kinds of learners. This was also the reason why the students were asked to work in groups. In a heterogeneous group, each student could have individual strengths. For example, in a group of five, one could have English proficiency; one could be good at drawing, and maybe someone who is poor at everything except electronic devices.
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When the students worked in a heterogeneous group, everyone could have different contributions. In this way, each student can be involved in the class. Everyone can make efforts on something he or she is familiar with as well as finish unfamiliar tasks with others’ help. Within groups, they can even sharpen their social skills such as communication and leadership.
The Practicality and Significance for Teachers to Develop Meaning, Useful Supplemental Material for 12-year Curriculum Guidelines
Since the trend and the need for designing new courses based on the principles in 12-year curriculum guidelines, English teachers have to cope with the new
educational policy. In the findings of this study, students showed a great likeness in joining the situational writing activities. However, few students lost their interest for spending too much time in class without on the textbook. The location of the students’
school is in eastern part of Taipei City, where parents care about their children’s academic performances very much. The parents also expect the teachers to spend class time preparing students’ for tests rather than conducting time-consuming activities. Therefore, the course designed by the teacher-researcher could not occupy too much regular class time. To solve this problem, the teacher-researcher designed this course based on the original sentence patterns of the textbook and used the learning goals to create activity that related to real life experience. In this way, the course still took time in class, but the exercises were meaningful, impressive, and unforgettable to the students. In the future, teachers could apply more information on the textbook aside from sentence patterns to the course. It would be less
time-consuming if the course was based on the content on the textbook. Students would be more engaged in the textbook as well as the supplemental materials. Also, the topic was about the community that the students were located in; thus, the
innovative situational writing activities could be applied to any other school in Taiwan
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in order to discover the beauty of students’ own communities with the special features on each school.
The Need for Subjects Integration for 12-year Curriculum Guidelines
In 12-year curriculum guidelines, one of the goals is to ask teachers to design courses integrating with other subjects. To meet this goal, the teacher-researcher designed these situational writing courses in different types of tasks. The task types were multiple and were likely to integrate with other operational courses at school such as Performing Arts. Take Dialogue Creating activity as an example, the teacher-researcher could cooperate with the Performing Arts teachers at school to teach students how to write proper and interesting scripts such as a short English play.
In Performing Art classes, students could also learn some skills in performing. As for Poster Designing activity, Visual Arts teachers could be invited to join the course to teach students some drawing skills.