高级英语作业

Group member: 屈旖51140400094胡婷51140400052范晓燕51140400034孔繁夏51140400064陈芳51140400019For most high school teachers, writing assessment is a hard and even suffering process, which means they tend to take great efforts to look for the mistakes in the writing by either correcting incorrect sentence structures or correcting spellings and typos. Although they may try other means, the situation is that the students do not improve their writing skills obviously from the responses given by their teachers. For those who have just become English teachers, writing assessment is really a big challenge. Furthermore, writing plays an essential part in high school learning. That is the reason that we design this project. The objectives are as follows. The first one is to clarify what the teacher should focus on when assessing the students' writing. The second one is to suggest possible improvements for the most used assessment methods of writing currently. The last one is to explore possible ways to help students improve their writing skills.My group assigned two teachers as interviewers. One of them is an English teacher from a senior high school and goes on her work in one year. She has a series of ways to teach how to write, so she mainly asks questions in the interview. The other interviewer is a Math teacher from a junior school but her major is English in her graduate studying. So she finally takes notes for the interview.My group finds three interviewees. The three interviewees all come from senior one, but different cities in the northern parts of China. One of them comes from the key senior middle school and the other two just come from the average schools in each city. We made a questionnaire and through their answers, we discovered some similarities as well as differences about teaching writing among them. Here are the major findings.1.Writing takes up 25 points out of the full mark 150 points, approximately 17% in the English exams in senior high schools, which indicates the significant status of writing in English teaching and learning.2.Writing is a regular program in English teaching in senior high school, because the text books provide a writing task related to the topic of each unit. So the teachers interviewed always use these tasks to train students’ ability of writing as well as check how well the students have grasped the knowledge in the unit. Writing classes normally take place twice a month.3.As for the ways to respond to students’ writing, all the three teachers use different marks to point out the mistakes in the passages, for example, underline the wrong sentences with grammar mistakes or inappropriateness in meaning, and circle the spelling mistakes. What’s more, all the teachers interviewed give some brief comments as well as a mark to the students’ writing. The comments usually focus on either the major problem or the possible improvement about the current writing and are frequently written in Chinese within 3 sentences.4.As for the attitude towards the assessment methods, all the three teachers agree that correction is necessary but not enough for writing assessment. For them, assessing students’ writing is demanding and troublesome occasionally. However, even if they have exerted a great deal of time and efforts on it, most students don’t seem to have improved their writing ability obviously. They can avoid some mistakes in writing but still lack a sense of writing and fail to accomplish a satisfactory passage.5.As for the possible improvements of the assessment methods of writing, all the three interviewees will stick to their current way to some extent as a result of the limited time and the excessive workload. But one of them suggested that she would try to talk with the students about their writing and correct the inappropriate sentences and improve their sentences by first offering a better one and then asking the students to feel the differences.In English teaching, writing is an important but difficult part both for teachers and students. An expert, Diederich points out “ All their teachers lookedfor were mistakes, and there are so many kinds of mistakes in writing that their students despair of ever learning to avoid them”. His words tell us that most teachers use the error correcting when they correct their students’ compositions. However this common method is not always effective to help students improve their writing ability. Our study is designed to learn more about this problem and to try to find some effective methods of writing correcting. In order to do that, we designed a questionnaire and interviewed three English teachers from northern cities in China who just have worked for a year.After collecting and analyzing their answers, we find the following facts. At first writing is very important and necessary in English teaching and learning in all of their schools. Then they just as most other teachers use the common methods, error correcting, to correct their students’ compositions. All of them find out this method is necessary but not enough and effective in their teaching practice, but only one of them tends to make changes for example talking with the students about their composition. The other two teachers will stick to their old methods for there are so many students in class and so much work needs to be done. They have no time and energy to try the new ways which usually cost much time.Form our study, we can know more about the teachers’ methods of writing correcting and find some problems and advantages of their methods and the study may help both teachers and students improve in writing teaching and learning. However, as the study itself, I think, there are some limitations. We just interviewed 3 teachers and all of them come from senior hing schools in northern cities on China, which can not get various answers. And then all of them are newly graduates, so they do not have enough experience in writing correcting. The similar and limited interviewees make our study can not provide various opinions and new methods for solve the problem, so we have a lot to do.QUESTIONNAIRE1. How many percentage does writing occupy in the examination of your school?2. Do you have regular writing class in teaching? If yes, how often?3. How do you respond to your students' writing? (ways of correction, suggesed answer: giving no comment except a grade, helping develop ideas by making suggestions, correcting incorrect sentence structures ect.)4. How do you think of your way of assessment?5. With these assessment, whether your students improve in their writing? (obvious, slight or not at all)6. Do you know other useful assessment methods used by other experienced teachers?7. Can you come up with some other useful methods?8. Are you going to change your way of assessment in the future?Answers for the questionnaire1. The writing occupies 25 out of 150 at first, but after the reform of the college entrance examination, now it changes into 12 out of 120, which means 10%. I will deal with the latter one in the following interview.2. Yes, we do have writing classes, because we have a writing part in each unit in the text book. But not very often, like twice a month. Sometimes I will emphasize the key points of writing before examinations.3. I will use different marks to point out the mistakes in their writing, for example, underlining the wrong sentences which have grammar mistakes or structure inappropriatenes and circle the spelling mistakes. And I will also give some comments, usually within 3 sentences and the most important thing is the comment is writthen in Chinese.4. My students do not comment at all and no feedbacks even when I ask them.5. Yes, they do make a little improvement in writing for most students.6. I know two experienced teachters in my school. One stresses the skills of writing so he will illustrate all the details to his students before writing. In this case, his students have a good sample beforehand which leads to a good composition in the end. The other one teaches top students so she tends to correct every mistake in the writing which works greatly for her students.7. No, because time is limited in class, I think mine is the best.8. Maybe some day in the future, I will adjust my ways of assessment according to the students.。