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Learners' Needs Compared with Classroom Practices

1.4 Learner’s needs and classroom practices- a comparison :
According to the syllabus of English, learners are taught to write letters, descriptive and narrative paragraphs and are required to undertake a number of writing activities throughout the year, but because these activities are  undertaken mechanically for which the evidence is provided by the classwork  notebooks analysed (see 1.3.2 ) , learners are unable  to perform  these tasks  on their own.  They do not consider writing as a meaningful activity.  The learner’s are asked to write on topics like – A  visit to a Zoo – because they have a lesson in their textbook which describes such a visit.  Though the learners have not visited the zoo, (a fact confirmed by all the teachers interviewed) they have to write a composition as if they had actually visited it. They just have to rewrite the information give in the textbook with minor changes. For example, they may have to change the pronouns :

Textbook sentence 

They visited the zoo on Sunday. They enjoyed their visit to the zoo.

Learner’s sentence

We visited the zoo on Sunday. We enjoyed our visit to the zoo.

At times they make mistakes like 

We enjoyed their visit to the zoo.

There were men, women and children 

*  We were men, women and children.

These sentences are taken from a learners’ written work (Appendix 4 c) that was selected as the best by the class teacher who gave it to the investigator.  Other learners also have written exactly similar compositions.  This according to the teacher was better than many others because the ‘handwriting is good!’.  In this composition, this learner says, We enjoyed their visit to the zoo.

This sentence ironically tells the truth.  Since the learner has not visited the zoo himself, what he is supposed to have enjoyed is somebody else’s visit to the zoo.  But for this one learner, all the other learners in that particular class had written mechanically,  ‘We enjoyed our visit to the zoo’.

In assigning marks to the composition again, teachers said they take into consideration aspect like, punctuation, spelling mistakes, organization, overall writing ability and a number of other factors.  But no mistakes were in the notebooks analysed.  Learners do not learn to edit and revise their own writing, and the single mark awarded without being supplemented by any comment about their written work do not help them to understand, where they have gone wrong, why it is considered a mistake, how they should correct it and what they should do to improve their own writing.

When learners were questioned as to why they thought they should learn to write in English, they said that it would be useful to them for examination purposes. When they were asked how they would use it for examination, they said that they would memorise what they had written and write it at the time of examination.

Learners do not get a chance to express their ideas while attempting written assignments in their class or at the time of examinations (Appendix 6a and b – sample test papers).  Examinations mainly test their memory and the questions themselves are often inappropriate, inaccurate and ambiguous.  Since most of the class time is spent in preparing the learners for examination, the format of the question papers used for annual examination has a lot of impact on the classroom practices.

The teaching and testing of writing as it is undertaken in schools does not make the learners think that writing is a meaningful activity. They do not understand the importance of various procedures like collecting information, selection and organization.  They do not learn to concentrate on the message they want to convey, and choose the appropriate language keeping in mind, the reader, the situation and the message.  As a result of all these learners are not able to write even simple sentences on their own even after four or five years of language learning.