which can fit both the grammatical and semantic sense of what they are reading.
iv) Match the task to the topic
Once a decision has been taken about what kind of reading text the students are going to read, teachers need to choose good reading tasks—the right kind of questions and useful puzzles, etc. Asking boring and inappropriate questions can undermine the most interesting text; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and challenging tasks. Working in groups, the
English teacher and students take turns asking each other questions following the reading. The teacher may ask, “ What is the significance of the character’s age?” These questions require inferences based on details from the reading text.
Section Two------How to teach writing (Developing correctness in students’ writing)
“Students learn to write by writing, and they learn to write correctly by writing, revising, and proofreading their own work”---with some help or direction from the teacher when it is necessary. They do not learn to write correctly by studying about writing or doing isolated workbook exercises unrelated to their own writing. So, the most important technique a teacher can use to guide students toward grammatically correct writing is to let them write, let them write things related to their own experiences. There is no limit to the kinds of text the teacher can ask students to write. Teachers’ decisions, though, should based on how much language the students know, what their interests are.
“Do I read a paper and ignore all punctuation, what good is that for students?
We spend hours at night with papers---I’m not sure the students get as much from it as the time I spend on it.”
These comments by senior high school English teachers discussing the process of marking student papers reflect the dissatisfaction and frustration of many teachers over the problem of dealing with the errors in student writing-----the obvious mistakes in spelling, punctuation----Traditionally, teachers have worked to correct errors in two ways: by teaching grammatically correctness through exercise in grammar texts; by pointing out all errors when making student papers.
Most students find it very dispiriting if they get a piece of written work back and it is covered in red ink, underlings and crossing-out. It is a powerful visual statement of the fact that their written English is terrible. Of course, some pieces of written work are completely full of mistakes, but even in these cases, the teacher has to achieve a balance between being accurate and truthful on the one hand and treating students sensitively and sympathetically on the other.
Some techniques can be used in dealing with the errors in student papers:
i) Selectivity
Rather than engage in intensive error-correction
when responding to student writing, teachers are encouraged to adopt a more moderate approach to error. If the teacher over-corrects the students’ mistakes, the students would be likely to focus on errors instead of ideas. Students are more likely to grow as writers when the teacher’s primary purpose in reading student papers is to respond to content.
However, if attention to content and correctness are combined when making papers, it is more helpful to select one or two kinds of errors the individual student is making than to point out every error in the paper.
The teacher can identify a selected error, show an example or two on the student paper, and either explain the correct form or direct the student to a handbook for further explanation. It is always worth writing a comment at the end of a piece of written work -----anything from “Well done” to “This is a good story, but you must look again at your use of past tenses---see X grammar book page xx.”
ii) Error-analysis
Another method for working with student error, one that can be especially fruitful for teachers, is to approach it from an analytic perspective. Teachers, as error-analyst, look for patterns in the errors of an individual student, tries to discover how the mistake arrived at the mistakes by analyzing the error (Lack of knowledge about a certain grammatical point; A careless one or a mis-learned rule?), and plans strategies accordingly.
iii) Publish Student Writing
The final basic strategy is publishing. Students need a reason for laboring over a draft until it is perfect; the urge to see oneself in print can be a powerful drive toward revision and proofreading.
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