I. Context
Back to 5 years ago, when I started my teaching career to my son, Gau and his cousins at home as the Design of Experiment (DOE) process for my today decision in job changing, I encountered some initial difficulty in teaching writing.
The Teddy Bear, my private class, consisted of 7 learners at different ages of from 8 till 22 with dissimilar English levels. Gau, my son, 8-year-old boy just started his study English for around 3 years in elementary school, meanwhile his other 5 brothers and one sister have studied English for over 7 years. However, no matter how long they studied, they all disliked writing compositions. What they did was compulsory and unwillingly.
Having been as the unprofessional teacher, I was left at no option but to apply traditional Grammar-translation method (GMT) that I employed in learning process in teaching writing to systematize, sharpen learners’ knowledge and brush their writing skill to accomplish the classes’ planned objective. To build up knowledge base, I often had all learners do two major tasks: translate all samples of essays and compositions available from English into Vietnamese to construct bank of ideas and translate texts from Vietnamese into English to create their habit in manufacturing the writing product based on the bank of ideas available. Besides that, learning some grammar structured sentences from translated texts by heart was the learners’ obligation. Sometimes to assure that learners could write fluently an essay in the examination at the highest score, I had them learn the whole texts translated with interesting content by heart.
Therefore, all writing tasks have been launched based on the content of the texts that learners made their translation. In other words, writing in Teddy Bear was the repetition process on what students have manufactured in another translation task. Peer review was the final step that all learners execute in class.
II. Problems
After applying the GMT in teaching writing, frankly speaking, I did employ some activities as translation exercises and peer review to assist them to imbibe knowledge from the input source to process it and create their own writing essays. However, I could feel a very dull study non-language environment in class and problems remained are as under:
2.1 Learners still faced difficulty in grasping the texts available accurately though new words were translated into mother tongue. That made them tough in learning by heart once encountering texts with complicated content. Besides, the quantity of the input source was so uncountable that students could not translate and learn by heart for all material within limited time duration. Consequences, the scores of writing essays in the IELTS exam were not as high as we desired. Besides that, the translating process for all readings took too much time.
2.2 Learners have not yet been able to create writing authentically and independently, though in some cases, my learners succeeded in high school exams at high scores for writing part.
2.3 Learners could not find out any interest in writing and for them, writing was the most difficult and heavy burden that they had to suffer.
I did make up mind to change the teaching method to motivate students in learning English and help them with looking for the sake in creating their independent ideas in writing.
III. Solution
Since I had chances to meet up with some acquaintances that have been experienced in teaching languages for years, I did consult with their ideas for my improvement project. Through conversation, I brainstormed and realized that people take the Internet’s advantage in executing many business areas, including teaching foreign languages. That encouraged me in carrying out the project using the Internet for teaching writing.
Getting back home, I divided my class into children group and adult group so that I could perform the project easier. Children in my class named those groups “Elder Teddy Brother” (ETB) and “Younger Teddy Brother” (YTB). I devoted my small beloved class to two activities: “Non-Stop Story Writing” and “Your Diary in Blog”.
This project has been running so far.
3.1 “Non-stop Story Writing”
Thanks to the applying GMT for years, most students in Teddy Bear had a very sharp grammar base and that was the favorable condition to start new teaching strategy. Moreover, all brothers and sister like cartoon very much. One morning, waking my son up, I asked if he liked to make a story by himself. Against my wish, he negated as he was afraid of writing; making errors; listening to complaints from my side. I said to him that I have changed my mind and wanted to read some story written by him and other boys’. He was surprised and has shown his willingness to begin. Many questions have been made by all boys and girl, upon coming to the class in the next day, regarding around story making: whether they had to write a kind of dry, ruled and standardized story; whether they had to pay much attention to errors and so on. Contrary to their prediction, I did give flexible rule for writing story:
a. The topic will be open.
b. Stories will be built up by all members in Teddy Bear, including myself (teacher).
c. Each story will be done and finished within one or two months as the latest. In some cases, if all participants accept story’s ending, it can be closed earlier.
d. Each participant should think the name of the one story and that will be the first to start the story accordingly.
e. After the first part of the story written, the next member will keep on constructing the content of the story by himself / herself, paying attention to the logic of the content.
f. Writer can write as long as he can.
g. Participants must write one per week at least.
h. Peer review will be executed ending each week on Friday afternoon.
i. Many stories can be written at the same time.
Having listened to all easy and flexible rules for writing, all students felt happy to start the project and I did volunteer to write the first story and first paragraph of “Teddy’s Dreams”.
To execute the peer review effectively, two groups of adults and children learners have taken part in reviewing and correcting errors every week. In this time, instead of dominating the class discussion, I played the role of adult learner only and also took part into discussion as a member of the project. I paid very much attention to their ideas on my writing’s content, even negative one. The open part of my first story of “Teddy’s Dreams” has been criticized too old to children’s world. The correcting errors in my writing class became cheerful atmosphere instead of heavy dull environment. Standing in the position of learners, I did realize the tight bound the writing’s rules for essays written in high school that learners did not like and at the same time, the happiness in writing that learners have found out in building up the project with open topic.
So far, our project keeps on running with many interesting and funny stories that no one wants to stop them.
Besides that, to take the Internet advantage, I kept on opening the blog for Teddy Bear to stimulate my learners’ indulge in writing and develop, sharpen their writing skills.
3.2 “Your Diary Blog”
Using the internet is popular now in Vietnam and it is evaluated as the revolution in technology in the 20th century. The blog for Teddy Bear has been open with aim to help students to communicate with each other at any geographical distance. As they gathered in my house just two times per week, I could not control their self study performance. Blog helped me a lot in assigning tasks and I found out a way to encourage learners in writing.
Parallel to executing non-stop story project, I had all learners utilize blog for daily log. All topics are open. They could write about their daily activities in school, in job, their thinking of all issues happened in society. Non-stop-stories created by all class members have been posted in a specific folder in blog as the memory for each member in class. When outsiders surf into their blog, read their stories, give comments, all participants will have the positive and correct attitudes on their works. That is not only the writing exercises, but also the tool to stimulate learners to participate the community’s interaction.
3.3 What are my beliefs about my successes and failures?
I have drawn various conclusions from these findings
3.3.1 To learn writing via translating the readings available is the most effective way to assist students to enrich their vocabulary – the most important language component.
3.3.2 To get students to create new sentences by translating from Vietnamese into English will strengthen their grammatical structures and effectively using new vocabulary by context.
3.3.3 Getting the student to write by translating from Vietnamese into English seems abnormal, however, my students’ essays are more impressive and logical than other students’ who have not applied GTM. Besides, translating short sentences taken from newspapers can improve grammatical structures and enrich general knowledge for students in later writing.
3.3.4 I set up the teaching program not based on the learners’ needs, but by my own perspectives on what I believe will help them in their future. In other word, learners have studied English writing based on my own desire.
3.3.5 Obviously, it is hard to employ the GTM alone to help learners be successful but to combine it with other substitution drills constructed under the repetition habits by learning by heart structures with new relevant words. That will improve learners’ skills in daily interaction.
3.3.6 Combining the GMT and other methods like non-stop story making with open topics and participating the Internet activities can encourage learners to look for sake in writing performance.
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