skkn CLASSIFICATION AND SOME WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN WRITING PERIOD IN GRADE 10

Trường THPT Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh Mã số :………… CLASSIFICATION AND SOME WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN WRITING PERIOD IN GRADE 10 Người thực hiện: Nguyễn Thị Xuân Mai Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu: Quản lý

Trường THPT Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh

Mã số :…………

CLASSIFICATION

AND SOME WAYS TO SOLVE

PROBLEMS IN WRITING PERIOD

IN GRADE 10

Người thực hiện: Nguyễn Thị Xuân Mai

Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu:

Quản lý giáo dục:

Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn:  Phương pháp giáo dục:

Lĩnh vực khác: ………

Có đính kèm:

Mô hình Phần mềm Phim ảnh Hiện vật khác

A REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH

B AIMS OF THE RESEARCH

C SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD

D MAIN CONTENT

I GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1 What makes writing so important?

2 Some difficulties of the teacher and the students

II CLASSIFICATION AND SOME WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN WRITING IN GRADE 10

1 Classification of the writing section in grade 10

2 What do students need to do in order to write?

3 Writing as a process

4 The meanings of some writing activities

5 Some ways to solve problems in writing period in grade 10

6 Demonstration

E RESULT AFTER APPLYING THE RESEARCH IN TEACHING

F CONCLUSION

G REFERENCE BOOKS

A REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH

This is the seven year we are carrying out the reformation in teaching new English textbook Most of the teachers are used to this new English textbook and try to find out good teaching methods as much as possible to apply in English periods

In Vietnam, secondary school students have to acquire four skills of English as reading, speaking, listening and writing when they study English Among them, writing is considered the most difficult skill Clearly, Vietnamese students are often much anxious about writing and afraid of making errors in writing classrooms Nevertheless, they need to be encouraged to see it as a means of learning, rather than demonstrating learning In order to make writing skill more effective, the teacher himself must find out the way of teaching suitable for his students

The Writing section may begin with a model, followed by activities that guide students through the writing process such as model analysis, language work,

or guided writing, etc In this part, students are required to produce various text types such as personal and formal letters, narratives, chart, graph and table description, and expository essays The general and specific objectives are set clearly in the books

The role of writing skill in grade 10 mainly helps students get familiar with style, some structures and learn how write letters, narrative, description, etc … If the teacher wants the writing period to be more effective, he should not only systemize the content but also prepare his lesson plans more carefully Also, there are a great number of problems in writing period, how can the teacher solve them?

I myself want to present the classification of the writing section and some

ways to solve problems in writing period in grade 10

B AIMS OF THE RESEARCH

- To introduce the classification of writing lessons in grade 10

- To show some ways to deal with problems that may arise

C SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD

- Scope: Researching in the process of teaching English at Nguyen Huu

Canh high school

- Object: Being concerned with classification of writing section and some

ways of solving problems in writing period in grade 10

- Researching method: Reading reference books, discussing with other

teachers, applying in teaching, observing and drawing out experiences

D CONTENT

I GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1 What Makes Writing So Important?

• Writing is the primary basis upon which your work, your learning, and your intellect will be judged in college, in the workplace, and in the community

• Writing expresses who you are as a person

• Writing is portable and permanent It makes your thinking visible

• Writing helps you move easily among facts, inferences, and opinions without getting confused—and without confusing your reader

• Writing promotes your ability to pose worthwhile questions

• Writing fosters your ability to explain a complex position to readers, and to yourself

• Writing helps others give you feedback

• Writing helps you refine your ideas when you give others feedback

• Writing requires that you anticipate your readers’ needs Your ability to do

so demonstrates your intellectual flexibility and maturity

• Writing ideas down preserves them so that you can reflect upon them later

• Writing out your ideas permits you to evaluate the adequacy of your argument

• Writing stimulates you to extend a line of thought beyond your first impressions or gut responses

• Writing helps you understand how truth is established in a given discipline

• Writing equips you with the communication and thinking skills you need

to participate effectively in democracy

• Writing is an essential job skill

2 Some difficulties of the teacher and the students

a To the teacher

- There are too many students in a class so it is very difficult for the teacher

to pay attention to all students in writing period

- There are a large number of students with different levels

- He is often anxious that he doesn’t have enough time to correct mistakes for all students

- The process of writing may last more than 45 minutes

b To the students

- They often fell bored in writing period

- They do not have enough vocabulary and structures to express ideas

- They have a tendency to use speaking English and translate Vietnamese into English in writing

- Their knowledge about society is limited

- They sometimes misuse the purpose of different types of writing

- They often express many ideas and information in the same sentence or they write too long sentences

- They do not have enough facts, information and knowledge about different subjects, so they cannot write convincingly

II CLASSIFICATION AND SOME WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN WRITING PERIOD IN GRADE 10

1 Classification of the writing section in grade 10

a What is teaching writing?

Good writing conveys a meaningful message and uses English well, but the

message is more important than correct presentation If you can understand the

message or even part of it, your student has succeeded in communicating on paper and should be praised for that For many students, writing skills will not be used

much outside your class This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be challenged to write, but you should consider their needs and balance your class time appropriately

Two writing strategies you may want to use in your lessons are free writing and revised writing Free writing directs students to simply get their ideas onto paper without worrying much about grammar, spelling, or other English mechanics In fact, the teacher can choose not to even look at free writing pieces

To practice free writing, give students 5 minutes in class to write about a certain topic, or ask them to write weekly in a journal You can try a dialog journal where students write a journal entry and then give the journal to a partner or the teacher, who writes another entry in response The journals may be exchanged during class, but journal writing usually is done at home The main characteristic of free writing

is that few (if any) errors are corrected by the teacher, which relieves students of the pressure to perform and allows them to express themselves more freely

Revised writing, also called extended or process writing, is a more formal activity in which students must write a first draft, then revise and edit it to a final polished version, and often the finished product is shared publicly You may need several class sessions to accomplish this Begin with a pre-writing task such as free writing, brainstorming, listing, discussion of a topic, making a timeline, or making

an outline Pairs or small groups often work well for pre-writing tasks Then give the students clear instructions and ample time to write the assignment In a class, you can circulate from person to person asking, “Do you have any questions?” Many students will ask a question when approached but otherwise would not have raised a hand to call your attention Make yourself available during the writing activity; don’t sit at a desk working on your next lesson plan Once a rough draft is completed, the students can hand in their papers for written comment, discuss them with you face to face, or share them with a partner, all for the purpose of receiving constructive feedback Make sure ideas and content are addressed first; correcting the English should be secondary Finally, ask students to rewrite the piece They should use the feedback they received to revise and edit it into a piece they feel

good about Such finished pieces are often shared with the class or posted publicly, and depending on the assignment, you may even choose to “publish” everyone’s writing into a class booklet

Tactful correction of student’s writing is essential Written correction is potentially damaging to confidence because it’s very visible and permanent on the page Always make positive comments and respond to the content, not just the language Focus on helping the student clarify the meaning of the writing Especially at lower levels, choose selectively what to correct and what to ignore Spelling should be a low priority as long as words are recognizable To reduce ink

on the page, don’t correct all errors or rewrite sentences for the student Make a mark where the error is and let the student figure out what’s wrong and how to fix

it At higher levels you can tell students ahead of time exactly what kinds of errors (verbs, punctuation, spelling, word choice) you will correct and ignore other errors

If possible, in addition to any written feedback you provide, try to respond orally to your student’s writing, making comments on the introduction, overall clarity, organization, and any unnecessary information

b Classification

Below is the classification of writing section in grade 10 When classifying and understanding their types and features clearly we can prepare lesson plans for writing periods better

Text types Examples Units Features

Letters

- complain

- filling in a form

- announcement

Unit 4 Unit 2 Unit 14

- Language: formal

- Logical ordering of ideas

- confirmation Unit 6

- Language: informal

- acceptance & refusal Unit 11

- giving directions Unit 8

- people’s background Unit 3

- instructions Unit 5

- a film Unit 13 - Language: friendly,

descriptive

Expository

(explaining)

- advantages &

disadvantages of mass media

Unit 7 - Language: formal

- generalization-to

- Specific ordering of ideas or facts

- tables & charts Unit 9,

16

2 What do students need to do in order to write?

When you ask your students to write any topic you should certainly know that they understand clearly the following problems:

 know the aim – why they are writing

 know the reader – who they are writing to

 know the genre – what type of text they are writing

 have enough time for:

 thinking about the topic

 brainstorming ideas

 planning ahead carefully

 drafting as many times as they can

 Students have constant feedback from teacher as well as their partners

during the writing process.

3 Writing as a process

We can summarize the writing process as the chart below:

8

Getting ideas together

Being

motivated

planning to

Planning

4 The meanings of some writing activities

There are a large number of activities or tasks in writing period All of these aim to develop writing skill for students Also, we easily recognize the logical relation of these activities or tasks In English textbook 10, each writing lesson often consists of 3 or 4 tasks constructed as spiral type If the lesson has 3 tasks, first two tasks (if the lesson has four tasks, first three tasks) provide students with genre, vocabulary, structures, etc (prepare to write) and at the same time help them use range of language features appropriately After finishing these tasks, the students have “a good source of information” and “coming up with ideas” 

writing production (final task).

Understanding the aim, meaning of each activity, function and requirement

of each task is very important It is not simple to finish those tasks but more importantly how to organize the class: work individually, in pairs, in groups or whole class? What is the process (how many steps)? How long do they write? 

Feedback: from doing the tasks the students can draw the things preparing for

production

Now look at some types of tasks in writing lesson class

Revising replanning redrafting

Final

version

drafting

+ Copying: this is the task to consolidate students’ knowledge One student

copies one sentence of the conversation or paragraph that they have just learnt and then the next student writes down the next sentence It is the chain dialogue By this way the students must understand what they write Teacher should use this one

as Warm-up

Example: In Unit 1: A day in the life of … to prepare for writing narrative

teacher can ask students to write a short conversation:

Student 1: What did Nam do yesterday afternoon?

Student 2: He went to the library

Student 3: What book did he read?

Student 4: He read an English book

Student 5: How long did he read?

………

Then teacher has students collect the answers to make a short paragraph

“Nam went to the library yesterday afternoon, he went there to read an English book, he read …”

After finishing this task the students define the kind of writing they are going to write

+ Constructing dialogue: there are 3 kinds of this in English textbook 10

- Students are given a writing sample After reading it they use the suggestion to finish the similar task We can see this kind of task in Unit 1, Unit 3, Unit 6, Unit

8, Unit 9, Unit 14

- Students are given jumbled sentences They have to rearrange them to make a good conversation We can see this kind of task in Unit 11 (task 2)

- Students are given unfinished conversation and some disordered sentences They have to finish the conversation by filling the blanks to make good one from disordered sentences or from the information they think suitable for each blank

We can see this kind of task in Unit 2, Unit 4, Unit 10 (task 2), Unit 11 (task 1)

+ Expanding frames: students have to finish the writing based on the given

frame This can be a letter, a biography, etc., related to the writing topic We can see this kind of task in Unit 10 (task 3), Unit 12

+ Idea frames: Students are given a reading task and they have to answer

some questions about that From answering those questions the students themselves draw out important things to remember Basing on the frame of questions and the given reading task they write another similarly required one We can see this kind of task in Unit 5, Unit 13, Unit 14, Unit 15, Unit 16

+ Parallel: Students are required to read a paragraph and then they write a

similar one but replace by new information We can see this kind of task in Unit 3, Unit 6, Unit 7, Unit 8

5 Some ways to solve problems in writing period in grade 10

As I mentioned above there are many difficulties in writing period in grade

10, how can we solve them? In my opinion we should do as following:

a To some objective problems:

The teacher divides the class into groups or pairs according to the aim of lesson While the students are working, teacher should walk around to give help if necessary Teacher can guide them to correct mistakes by themselves or help their partners correct mistakes It’s not necessary to carry out all the steps of teaching writing in class if the lesson is too long Some steps the teacher can ask the students to do at home For example: Teacher can ask students to prepare vocabulary, structures, outline, writing topic at home Students can draft their writings at home and final production is continued in class

Teacher should let students find out knowledge or social knowledge relating

to the lesson so that they can have necessary information they need in expressing ideas Teacher shouldn’t give all ideas for students

Teacher should share or exchange his wonder or plan with his colleagues in order to find out the effective solutions for difficulties

Teacher should use suggestions to encourage students to overcome their shortage of vocabulary, opinion, structures, …