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Classroom Practices in Teaching Writing
1.3 Classroom Practices
To analyses the way
teaching and testing of writing is undertaken in schools in Gujarat, a teacher’s questionnaire was prepared in Gujarati, so as to get the
teachers’ views about the following :
a) The selection of topics for composition
b) The way it is actually taught in schools
c) The way composition work is checked in schools
The information obtained through the questionnaire was cross checked by personal interviews and individual report writing by teachers. The
overall picture formed by putting together these three types of data were compared with the data collected by observation of classroom teaching,
analysis of learners’ classwork note-books and test papers which are administered at the end of the academic year for classes IX and X.
1.3.1 Teachers’ views
Teachers’ views as revealed from the questionnaire, interviews and report writing
are summarised here. A more detailed report is given in Chapter four.
a) For 98% of the teachers the school Board (which takes care of all the schools in a particular district) decides the topics for
composition work. The Board decides the topics on the basis of the syllabuses (see appendix 2) and the course book. They also decide
the number of compositions to be written in a year.
The topics are the same every year. The topics chosen are based on the coursebook lessons. For example, for units 4 and 5 class IX
coursebook (Appendix 5) the topics chosen by 95% of the schools are, ‘The Postman’, ‘Letter-writing’, ‘My Home’ or ‘My
Hometown’, or ‘My Village’.
b) About 50% of the teachers said that through the School Board send them a list of topics
for composition they had the freedom to change the topics if they wished to do so. But they also said that they rarely choose their own
topics. About 5% of the teachers said that they occasionally choose some topics of their own choice. But even these topics were not quite
different from the ones chosen by the School Board. For example, if the School Board choose topics like ‘A visit to a Diary’ or ‘A visit to
a Zoo’ the teachers choose topics like ‘A visit to a Circus’. In the suggestions offered for improving the teaching of writing all the
teachers said that the choice of topics should be left to the learners. But none of them had actually left it to the choice of the learners
so far.
c) For teaching composition all the teachers followed more or less similar procedures. The following is a report written by a
secondary school teacher. Other teachers also have written similar reports.
A Report written by a Secondary School Teacher
Explaining the procedure of teaching compositions.
Q.3. Class work checking :-
A Visit to a Zoo
When I taught the composition ‘A Visit to a Zoo’, first after going in the class I asked some questions to the pupils like
(1) Have you seen a zoo?
(2) Is there any zoo in your town?
(3) Where have you seen the zoo?
(4) With whom did you go to see a zoo?
(5) What did you see there? (which are the wild animals)
(6) Did you enjoy there?
These types of questions I asked to the pupils for five or six times orally. Then I put some question on the blackboard?
Like
(1) Where is a zoo? Ahmedabad, Baroda. Any city.
(2) When did you go to see a zoo? On Sunday, in vacation.
(3) With whom did you go? With friends, parents, uncle, neighbours.
(4) What did you see there? Wild animals like lion, Tiger, Elephant,Deer etc.
(5) Did you enjoy there? Yes, we eat bananas and biscuits.
After writing there questions on the black board further I asked them to speak the answers. They thought on the questions and
then tried to answer it. Five or six students spoke. Then I explained. They wrote the essay.
d) As for the testing of writing, all the teachers considered the
features mentioned in the questionnaire as important.
The features mentioned in the questionnaire were as follows:
s Correct use of punctuation
s Correct spelling
s Correct use of words
s Proper sentence construction
s Good handwriting
s Grammatical accuracy
s Style of writing
s Overall impression
s Natural use of language
s Language appropriate to the message
Though most of the teachers considered all these features as ‘very important’ or ‘important’, they did not assign marks individually to any of
these features. They said that they allotted a single score for the learner’s written work, keeping in mind all the above
features.
(e) Since all the topics are based on the course book lesson, a general question was asked in the interview to find out what
they usually did when some learner, unable to write on his own, copied from the course book. The usual reply obtained from the teachers to
this question was that they would talk to the learner personally, advise him not to do so again, and motivate him to write on his own.
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