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Analysis of Written Work
4.2.2 Analysis of Written
Work
As will be shown later in this chapter the quality of the written work produced by the learners in the experimental group improved as they worked
on more and more tasks. But in the initial stages both the quality and the quantity of the written work was very poor. Comparatively,
the learners of the controlled group wrote long passages, which were exact replicas of what were given in their course book (Appendix 9).
(a) The ‘what’ and ‘howmuch’ of writing
In the course book lesson ‘Men at Work’ (Appendix 5), the
daily activities of people of various professions like the postman and the washerman are described. The usual composition that learners are made
to write in a regular classroom situation is a composition on a postman. A sample of this composition, which is an exact copy of what is
given in the course book, is discussed in chapter 1 (Appendix 4b). As they were used to this kind of writing task, learners were not ready
to write anything different in the beginning, because they could not understand that a composition on a topic like, ‘The postman’, could also
include other points, which are not given in the text book. After much persuation, some of them changed the name of the person given in the
course book and repeated all the other points as they were. Some others, with hesitation wrote three or four sentences about their own
uncles or brothers and talked about their professions. Even though their write–ups have a number of mistakes, expression of their own ideas
was encouraged. Much of the class time was spent in making them work in groups to ask each other questions and write about their friends,
rather than write a composition based on a textbook lesson. This was necessary to get them to avoid reproduction of memorized passages.
(b) Meaning in Focus
Right from the first task, the
focus was on making the learners realize that writing is a meaningful activity. In task 1, the learners were to organize a set of sentences
in a proper sequence. These sentences were in fact information collected by the teacher from a learner in class. Instead of giving
just any sentence for organization, the teacher questioned a learner in class about his daily activities and recorded this information on the
blackboard in a jumbled order. To make this activity more meaningful, the same procedure was repeated a number of times, and the
information obtained from different learners was recorded. Then the learners worked in pairs to collect information about their pair partners and
wrote short paragraphs of about five or six sentences. The pair partners carefully watched to see that the information supplied by them was
recorded properly by their friends.Some of the pairs started arguing over the mistakes in the write-up.
For example, on pair began to argue because the pronoun ‘she’ was used while writing about a boy. The learner who
supplied the information to be recorded by his pair partner, got angry because he was referred to as a girl. Though they wrote only five
sentence and the basic framework was on the blackboard for reference all the time, whatever the learners wrote was not done mechanically.
Similarly, in letter-writing and paragraph writing also learners tried to convey their message as explicity as possible using simple
language.
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