3. Dealing with errors in pupils’ written work.
I do not have a sample to show, but generally, the pupils in my Secondary 3 express class cannot write well. I am not even talking about having a thesis statement, following it through with one topic sentence and elaboration per paragraph. Majority of the written work that I have marked are disorganised, lack signposting and some do not even address the question. The written works are rife with spelling and grammatical errors. As I have mentioned in my previous post, the school is an Anglican Mission School and so most of them come from English-speaking background. They tend to be over confident in their Language ability, sometimes unjustifiably so. Even the best student in class has problems spelling simple words and maintaining grammatical consistency in his writing. I understand that this is often difficult; even I cannot confidently say that I can do that. Having said that they are proficient speakers of English, some of them write in the way they speak—although the standard is not as bad as writing in sms or msn language, the most common error that I get is their tendency to write in sentence fragments. They often write incomplete sentences with no regard for subject verb agreement. I cannot recall any examples now, but I remember discussing this problem with my CT. She told me that she also noticed that problem and that she had conducted a lesson on sentence fragments with them. However, she did not share what she did with me what she did.
Thus, what I did was to go into class one day and wrote the words ‘NOUN’, ‘VERB’, ‘PRONOUN’, ‘ADJECTIVE’—4 out of the 8 parts of speech. To my horror, they only could confidently define 1 of them ‘VERB’. This is a Secondary 3 express class, how are they going to take the ‘O’ levels next year? After some prompting, some of them could give me examples of each and I gave them the definition. After that, I got a chorus of “ohh...” SO, I asked, “Haven’t you learnt this before?” and the replies I got were: “forgot already” and its variations. I then singled out noun/pronoun and verb as I taught them the SVO sentence structure. As a follow up, I gave them a paragraph from a comprehension passage, with the punctuation omitted. Their tasks were then to insert appropriate punctuations, to make complete sentences. I’m sad to report that despite my explanations and going around the class to assist them, a lot of them still made errors. Subsequently, I took care to remind them every time I assign them written work.
During the mid-year examinations, I marked a few other classes, including the best class and I realised that this problem is not limited to my class! This was, in my opinion, extremely worrying. Building sentences is the foundation (pun intended) to constructing good paragraphs—how would they then become competent writers of expository pieces? Since my main CT (EL teacher of the aforementioned Sec 3 class) wasn’t much of a help, I went to talk to my other CT, who is the EL HOD. I told him about my concern and asked him whether we are neglecting this cumulative deficit the students, for lack of a better word, accumulate over the years, in our rush to complete the SOW and syllabuses. He concurred with me and provided an interesting insight on this issue. He said that it’s not so much the fact that teachers do not emphasise the importance of grammar and the teaching of grammatical rules and features of writing, but that the students accord importance to the need to memorise these rules unlike the memorising of mathematical formulae and physics/ chemistry formulae. I have never thought to compare grammar with mathematical formulae and that to me, was a food for thought. I’m sure EL teachers everywhere emphasise the importance of grammar as the building blocks of English Language. How then, could we get the students to realise the importance of remembering grammatical rules?
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