How to Help Senior High School Students Develop English Writing Ability in an Internet-mediated Writing Class
成淵高中英文科教師：詹惠玲老師
Summary: This paper aims to show that how the Internet Access in an English
writing ability helps high school students develop English writing ability in the spirit of process writing. The teacher was also the syllabus designer and material provider, who tried to help student develop a smooth writing strategies in weekly writing class.Since the participants were 12th graders of senior high, the teacher also emphasized the importance of finishing an essay in the required time limit. Initially, the writing class is structured with a collaborative pen pal project with an Austrian school. But there were some difficulties keeping both sides writing because of the different space and time. The teacher also used the Internet as information resources to supplement her reading material. Later, the teacher created a blog to encourage students to read peers’ articles and make comments on each other’s essays. Qualitative and
quantitative analysis were both used in the study hypothetically, but actually the teacher had only their essay scores on Academic Proficiency Test and the Entrance Exam at hand.
Keywords: English writing, process Writing, the Internet
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation and Goal
Writing is always regarded as a torture to both teachers and students of senior high. Most students nowadays have difficulties in writing a good Chinese
composition, not to mention an English one. In the five years of English education,
they are input with too much information, but they seldom know how to use English as a language. They spend most of time studying grammatical rules and memorizing new words. As for them, English is just one of the subjects to study, not a language to use in daily life.
In Taiwan, the entrance exam orientates what we teach in English class. 12th graders usually have 7 English classes a week, but there is never enough time for teachers to cover the review and the new lessons. So the writing practice is often sacrificed. Teachers only focus on the final writing product, instead of paying attention to writing process, i.e., how to develop their writing skills step by step. But we cannot over-emphasize the importance of writing. The composition takes up 20 points of the test, and it is worth investment.
As I have mentioned before, most students give up on writing because they don’t know how to get started. They don’t know how to put words into sentences, not to mention making logical sentences or even coherent essays. Their life experience is limited, so their background knowledge is poor. They also don’t know how to
organize their thoughts before writing. Most essays are usually badly written with all kinds of mistake imaginable. Mis-spelling and grammatical mistakes are common, but what gives teachers a headache is that most essays are poorly organized or lack content.
As we know, the effects of CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) have been in the spotlight of language teaching in recent years. Scholars have explored new ways to combine computer technology with English teaching to make English more appealing to learners. Murray (2000), Herring (2001), and Crystal (2001) claimed, “It is clear that Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) is not a single, uniform genre of language use, but rather a constellation of genres related partly to the
particular medium, e.g., instant messaging, e-mail, chat groups, blogs.” People meet each other on the Internet, where there is no physical boundary.
With the access to the Internet, students find English more fun and interactive.
You don’t need to have a conversation with a partner in a physical setting. English becomes a medium for you to communicate with people around the world. The Internet connects you with others and you can make friends online as long as you speak English. English learning nowadays is no longer limited to the classroom. The Internet provides a variety of resources and interesting people for you to go on an adventure as long as you can communicate in the universal language: English.
Senior high school students are young adults who expect not lonely to learn how to write, but also enjoy the learning process at the same time. They need proper writing strategies and a platform to use English. Luckily, the Internet can meet most of their needs.
1.2 Purpose of the Study
Students are afraid of writing because they don’t know how to put thoughts into words. Their poor life experience also limits what they can write about. Their essays lack content and organization. Writing training in senior high school is product- oriented rather than process-oriented. Both teachers and students center on the final product of writing instead of the evolving writing process.
To solve the problems students face in writing, my writing class is instructed as follows. First, they read an article which is highly relevant to the topic they will write about in the second hour. Then students are divided into groups to discuss and share their ideas generated in the brainstorming activity. If they need any more reference, they can also search the Internet.
Process writing centers more on the individual personal growth. They think,
make an outline, draft, re-write, revise, and produce their final essays. With the access to online resources, they turn in their draft every week and they are also asked to revise the corrected draft next week. While revising, they go over the thinking process again to present a better essay. To reinforce their retention of the writing process, they have to post their articles on the blog, where they are required to make comment on others’ essays. They may as well talk about the topics we have covered to their individual key pals who turn out to be their listeners and learning partners.
If you want students to write, you have to give them topics relevant to their life experience. The pen pal project triggers their needs to communicate with people in English. They express their feelings about life and share their experiences with other teenagers their age. Learning English starts to have a meaning. English helps them make friends and explore the world.
1.3 Significance of the Study
In Taiwan, students study English to pass tests, not to communicate with people.
They have spent hours studying difficult grammar, but they seldom have chances to use English as a language. In the future, educators and EFL teachers should focus more on the use of English than the usage of English. Students are crammed into too much information, and what they need most is put their knowledge of English into a real-life scenario. Not like speaking, writing requires a thinking process before words are written. Their ways of expressing themselves may not be mature, but it represents a growing development. By writing more and more, they modify their writing pattern and wording or even gradually develop a unique story-telling style.
Language learning is no longer limited to the classroom. Actually, with the access to the Internet, we have a 24-hour classroom, ready for our reference and for learning.
The textbook editors and course designers should focus on more interactive projects,
using the Internet as a platform to provide more creative fun activities for students.
These activities should be designed in the spirit of “learning by doing” to encourage students to find answers by themselves.
Teaching writing can be also rewarding. We teachers are not native speakers and sometimes we do have our limitations. In my class, I never assume I am the authority in English. Once in a while, I cannot answer my students’ questions, but I always do my best to search for the best answers online for them. Sometimes people say,” You can google almost anything on the Internet.” And most of time, the statement is true.
Also, Helga, the Austrian teacher who collaborated with me on the pen pal project, gives me lots of inspiration and creative ideas to renew my teaching methods. We try to create topics which cater to teenagers’ interests and find every way possible to keep them writing to each other on regular basis. Most importantly, the project offers a chance for students to use English to talk about their life. So teachers should always have an open mind to teaching, willing to accept new ideas and learn from colleagues and students.
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 The Internet and English teaching
In 21st century, we are living in a technology world where we communicate with people with lots of sophisticated electronic gadgets. Computer technology is
accessible at any time anywhere. You can contact people easily by cell phone. The Internet connects you to the outside world when you are comfortably sitting at home.
E-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, discussion groups, blogs and wikipedia lead you to a wonderful world with many faces. With a click, the virtual reality unfolds before your eyes, offering all kinds of fantasy for you to explore. The new avenues present a new construction of communication which transcends the visual boundaries
between nations. With the advance of computer technology, the English learning starts a new revolution.
The prevalence of the Internet is becoming the spotlight of English teaching in recent years. People always have a desire to reach out for the outside world. We teachers should take advantage of the convenience and attraction of the Internet to make our English teaching more practical and appealing. With the connection to the outside world, students realize that English becomes a language tool for
communication, not another boring subject to study.
Many other teachers also have tried to supplement their teaching with the aid of the Internet. Huang, S. (1999) conducted a study on the use of the Internet in writing instruction in English as a foreign language (EFL). The students in her study showed positive attitudes toward use of the Internet for writing instruction. She recommended that the school makes Internet-access facilities more accessible and reliable, and that teachers modify assignments to take advantage of student enthusiasm and
communication and research needs.
And several other studies also showed that the use of Internet is more learner- centered and caters to students’ needs. Canning-Wilson, C. (2000) also argues that on- line teaching and learning will become a more practical and viable solution to meeting learners' educational needs.
2.2 The Process Writing
Unlike product writing, a signal shot approach which focuses mainly on the final product, paying attention to the rhetoric style, correct grammar and a well-organized structure, process writing, emphasizing the process of individual learner’s growth, is more learner-centered instead. In Brown’s (2000) words, product refers to “a great deal of attention placed on ‘model’ composition,” while process writing is more
learner-centered, focuses on the personal growth of the writer.
The process approach centers on how students write and learn. Kroll (2001) also correctly points out:
The “process approach” serves today as an umbrella term for many types of writing courses… What the term captures is the fact that student writers engage in their writing tasks through a cyclical approach rather than through a single-shot approach
To sum up, the process approach encourages brainstorming, drafting, writing, feedback, revising, and editing in a cyclical fashion. It emphasizes the learning to write more than creating a final product.
Maggie Sokolik (2003) claimed that the routine practice of process approach should be brainstorming, draft, feedback, revision and proofreading and editing. In Brown’s (2000) words, brainstorming, in the pre-writing period, helps students generate ideas individually or in group. Students are asked to come up with their ideas freely and then share with each other. Then they have a sketch or framework in their mind. Another technique used in brainstorming to develop ideas is the freewriting skill. Given an assigned topic, students are required to write down ideas without considering the grammar, spelling, punctuation, or spelling in 5-10 minutes. With these ideas at hand, students start to write a draft.
After reviewing drafts, teachers can write comments as feedback or proceed peer- editing, feedback from peers, to help students enhance the cohesion and coherence of their essay. While revising, students should go through a thorough revision to make their essays more convincing and clear. In the revising period, students should also pay attention to the mechanism of the essay in addition to the organization and content. In the final stage, proofreading and editing, students should focus on minor errors, such as spelling and grammatical ones. In the process checklist report, Jenks,
C. J.(2003) also stated the writing process is categorized in a five-stage sequential pattern (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing), which is also very similar to Sokolik’s definition.
Although the popularity of process writing prevails no longer several decades, there is much research indicating its benefit on writing.
Goldstein, A.A.; Carr, P. G. (1996) conducted a study by analyzing the data drawn from the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in writing. Their studies indicated that:
(1) students of teachers who always encouraged particular elements of process writing, such as planning and defining purpose and audience, were generally better writers than students of teachers who reportedly never encouraged these activities;
and (2) average writing ability was higher among students whose teachers emphasized more than one process writing strategy.
2.3. The Internet and Process Writing
Dorn, D. (2000) states that the process-oriented approach combined with the Internet and distant learning can help learners put ideas together piece by piece to form a coherent structure. In a graduate-level seminar for seasoned writing teachers, Mauriello, Nick; Pagnucci, Gian (1997) found that experienced teachers with little experience with the Internet distrusted the notion of writing for an unknown audience and resisted sharing their own personal works with the world.
2.4 Research Questions
This study is to investigate what effect might cause in a writing class
implemented with the Internet and process writing. Though there have been some research on the application of the Internet in English teaching, research on these two
combined in a writing class is not much. The study is trying to focus on the following questions:
1. What are the effects of the Internet on Students’ writing ability?
2. What aspect of writing do students improve most?
3. What are students’ attitudes toward process writing implemented with the Internet?
CHAPTER THREE: METHOD
In this chapter, the researcher preents the participants, instruments, procedure and data analysis.
3.1 Participants
Twenty-two students of 12th grader participated in this study. The participants, ten boys and twelve girls, chose the elective writing class based on their strong drive to improve writing ability. Their socio-economic status is basically homogeneous.
Chinese is their native language, while English is the foreign language studied at school for over 5 years.
These students are categorized as high achievers, with English grade over 75 points as the requirement to get admitted in this writing class. They are also highly motivated learners because they choose this class on their own will.
3.2 Instruments
The instruments employed in this study are stated as below: two essays before and after the implementation of instruction, peer assessment and self assessment, coding scheme, portfolio, questionnaire, students’ diary, teacher’s observation and interview.
Pre-test and post-test essays were graded by CEEC Scoring Standard as the coding scheme. During the semester, students were asked to write the teacher an e-
mail a month to report their thoughts about this program. At the end of the semester, students’ overall performance is evaluated by the individual portfolio, which includes drafts, revision, handouts, e-mail to teachers and comments received or made, the free writing drafts on the discussion board, etc. Questionnaires were also used to explore students’ attitude change before and after the class and to get the results of peer evaluation and self evaluation. The teacher also chose several students to do the one- on-one interview.
3.3 Procedure
Assessment of students’ essays
Students were asked to write an essay in the first class to serve as the pre-test writing, while another essay, written in the last class, as the post-test one. Two of my colleagues were invited to grade the essays according to SEEC Scoring Standard as the coding scheme, which includes content, organization, mechanics, grammar, diction and mechanics. The topic of the pre-test writing is “My Personal Profile,”
written without any instruction, while students wrote the last article after the implementation of instruction.
The blog was a forum for students to read peers’ essays and leave comments to each other. The teacher would ask student to vote the best five essays of each topic to help them do the peer assessment.
The implementation of instruction
Except for the pre-test (My Personal Profile), the two-hour class is istructed as follows. In the first hour, students read a highly relevant article to have enough input as background information. Teacher asked questions to help students analyze the article and found the topic sentence or the main idea of each paragraph. Then students
were divided into groups to do the brainstorming activity, where students came up with ideas in discussion. Before the end of the class, each group had to write down their ideas on the blackboard as well.
In the second hour, the teacher gave several topics, but in the same theme, for students to choose one to write about. Students also had access to the Internet to gather more information. They were required to finish the essay in 30 minutes, which met the time limit of entrance exam.
After class, the teacher would offer suggestions on the content and the
organization to individual writer online, without correcting any grammatical mistakes.
The first hour of the next week, the teacher would print out several articles to do the peer-editing activities where students learned to model and modify their writing skill in discussion. Then in the second hour, students had to finish their second draft. This time, the teacher made correction and offered some comments on their second draft.
Next time the class rotated in the same routine with another new topic
introduced. But in the second hour, the students had to hand in their revision first and then posted on the blog to receive comments from their peers. Every month, students had to write an e-mail to the teacher to discuss his writing progress or difficulties.
Meanwhile, the teacher also observed students’ response, interaction and participation in the process of instruction.
Qualitative Analysis
Since process writing emphasizes the personal growing experience, the teacher gathered a variety of data to do the qualitative analysis. Students were asked to do questionnaires before and after the class to explore if there is any attitude change after instruction. In the second questionnaire, the teacher would ask students to make self- assessment and peer assessment on their overall performance. The teacher also asked
students about what topics they were good at. In this way, the teacher knew how to choose topics close to teenagers’ life and promote their will to develop their writing skill with process writing.
Diary, the teacher’s observation, and the one-on-one interview were employed to explore the deeper factors affecting students’ progress in class. Several e-mails to the teacher were collected as diary to further analyze their personal growing progress in English writing and to see if the diary matched the teacher’s observation in class. If there was any conflict, the teacher might start a one-on-one interview to investigate more factors for case study description.
3.4 Data Analysis
Data gathered from portfolio, students’ diary, interview and the teacher’s
observation were analyzed qualitatively to explore what effects of the Internet on their writing ability. The teacher also tried to explain if there was any attitude change toward writing with the implementation of the Internet and process writing.
CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS
In the one-year writing class, a lot of materials are gathered. I kept piles of students’ portfolio, two questionnaires, both done at the end of each semester, and one-on-one telephone interview with several students. Most of them confirmed the benefits of process writing and the Internet. The average essay score on academic achievement test and the entrance exam was around 11-13 point.
In the telephone interview, they stated that the brainstorming activity was the most beneficial before they started writing, while they actually didn’t have much time reading the essays posted on the blog. They also admitted that the pen pal project was a failure, for both sides were too busy to write on regular basis. And they didn’t know
much about their pen pal either. They also said sometimes the schedule was too tight to follow. Several suggested that students should hand in an outline with the draft as well, while others advised that the teacher should sometimes implement with some easy activities to give them a break, such as watching movies, or playing a drama.
Basically they agreed the topics given matched their life experiences but the festival articles were too difficult to write. The reading materials were said to be some model and background information to follow. In general, they recognized the effects of the writing class on their overall English writing ability.
CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION
There are still a lot to improve in this writing class, but at least it offers a
different perspective in teaching writing. Students were more motivated to write about their life with proper guidance provided. The teacher created the blog to post their works to make up the unsuccessful pen pal project. The blog later served as a platform for them to learn and read more, but the use was limited to their works only. In the future, the teacher may explore more interactive functions of the blog to get students more involved.
Another domain to explore is the discussion group, where students may take an initiative to start a discussion without the teacher’s intervention. As for the pen-pal project, the teacher may think about the possibilities of doing the pen pal project in the class, i.e., asking students to write to each other rather than to foreign teenagers.
The writing class leads students to a wonderful exploration, where they write about their life and also improve their English writing ability.
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