Why can't we make up our minds?

This post was contributed by Christina Judy Fernandez.

It all started at a meeting to moderate how we mark our midterm essays. Eight benchmark essays were sent to us the day before and I was the only one who knew the scores awarded to each essay. My team of six members got through the first three essays without any hangups or major differences in scores we gave for each. The FOURTH one left us confused and divided. The confusion – partly because everyone in the team agreed that the essay deserved a non failing grade as indicated by the senior tutors. The student writer showed some understanding of how to organize ideas in paragraphs and connect ideas to the topic.

The essay, however, did not have explicitly written thesis statement and topic sentences. Clara, one of the teachers pointed out that the student writer’s lack of “thesis statement” was actually made up by a group of key phrases and sentences in the introduction that he or she explains later on in the essay. Clara added that she thought that this was a very creative student writer. But Walter, another teacher argued, “Isn’t that against what we’ve been teaching our students here – to have a sentence at the end of the introduction and a sentence to indicate controlling idea in each body paragraph? Alicia, another teacher interjected and said that she had not heard of thesis statement and topic sentences until she started teaching with us. One other member in the team agreed with Alicia. That comment threw me as I thought anyone having taught EAP would know the importance teaching these elements especially to novice writers.

Hours later …

I was in the midst of marking my stack of essays when I came across an essay that generally read well but had similar problems with benchmark essay # 4. What seemed to be a thesis statement was spread over two sentences in the middle of the introduction paragraph and the paragraphs had implied main ideas in them. With everyone else out administering an exam of sort, I had to approach Alicia for a second marker’s opinion.

As we were discussing our scores for this essay, we couldn’t help but refer back to our discussion earlier this morning. Alicia felt that teaching students thesis statement and topic sentences would only stifle their creativity as writers because she found it too prescriptive. She further added that topic sentence are not always present in all paragraphs written in academic journals so our students should not be expected to do it. My counter argument to that was teaching these elements would help give students a good base for organizing their ideas in an essay. Right at that time, another teacher, Joanna walked into the office. She shared Alicia’s opinion and added that she had learned to write academic essays through “osmosis” – analyzing and following how other writers write. In other words, professors did not prescribe what student essays should have even though they were in their first or second semester at the university. My question to the both of them was “Can this “osmosis” or non prescriptive method of teaching essay writing work for ESL/EFL students?”

Joanna said, “Well experts in the ELT field are in two camps on that one, so how can we ever know?” I was also struck by another thought - while we have always been focussing on training non-native students the skills of academic writing in EAP, how do native speaker students pick up the skills?

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Am I suffering from Identity Confusion?

Everything's feeling strange this week, mainly  because I've just arrived at a new environment, and I know that's supposed to be normal. But more seriously,  I think I'm also suffering from IDENTITY CONFUSION.

Obviously, at this point of time I'm not a teacher anymore. I'm now back to university as a full-time student. For years, I've always been working and looking at things from the perspectives of a teacher, which have strangely become none of my business now. But the mindset is not easy to change.

In the university's Freshers' Week, English Language assessments were given to the large population of new international students. Interestingly, for some time in the past, I had been the one conducting the assessments, but I was a test-taker this time. Rather than thinking about how to answer the questions, I was more interested in knowing how it was conducted in such a large scale for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The writing assessment was held in 4 different sessions, so did they come up with four different sets of questions or more? Were they not worried if the questions would leak out? Also, how did they cope with the marking?

Next, we were also made to do some grammar and vocabulary tests using the computers in the PC lab. The tutors didn't have to do the markings for this, but there were so many of them there to invigilate. And this time they needed to split up into15-20 sessions  for all the international students! I remember how I used to dislike conducting assessments like these, especially when we were understaffed and had to mark piles of the students' writing scripts.

Another funny feeling I had was about the talk on Plagiarism - I was the one telling and teaching students about it in the past, but now I was put in the position of being told.

This is perhaps the time for me to take the opportunity to experience things from the different point of view of a student. I could probably appreciate this experience more now as a 'matured' student myself.

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Cell phones are their lives

(Source: http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=38437)

This post was contributed by Christina Judy Fernandez.

The-re rum the-re rum the-re rum dum dum ...

"There goes the infamous Nokia tune again,” I thought to myself while trying to complete my once a year Peer Teaching Observation required by the English department. Lisa, known as such an approachable teacher to the rest of us, just paused for a good 4 to 5 minutes and grinned at all her students while asking them politely to turn off their cell phones. “Now, where was I, class?” she asked. “What was the last thing I said, Wilson?” she prompted. Dead silence for about one minute. “I think you were explaining how to identify …” he responded. “You see that’s why I hate interruptions especially from cell phones. Now I completely am not sure what exactly I was going to tell you. Well, blame it on the cell phone rings,” explained Lisa before she continued on with the lesson.

My heart really went out for dear Lisa, not a nice thing to have an observer and unexpected interruptions to her teaching. Personally, I thought she handled it very well. Letting the students know how much time such interruption wastes and also how they can miss out on crucial information was a good move on her part. But on the other hand, I can also see how students may not always understand that their actions can affect others negatively.

A few days later, at the pantry, I asked her how her classes were going. “A few more phones had gone off. It’s a wonder I can even finish my objectives for each lesson!!” she said frustratingly. Another colleague who heard this said that he used to have similar problems until he actually answered the phone call meant for a student during class. “Don’t you think that’s an imposition?” I asked him. “The students are in my classroom and any or all calls in the room should be mine,” he replied.

As for Lisa and I, we continued our discussion with other colleagues over the next few weeks and came up with a list of how other teachers handled the use of cell phones in their classes:

1) Get students to leave their cell phones in a basket at the beginning of each lesson. The phones must be turned off.

2) If a student’s phone rings in class, teacher will collect and lock it up in the computer cabinet in front of the class. At the end of class, the owner will need to apologize and ask for the phone politely in front of his or her classmates.

3) If a student phone rings within the first hour of class, the teacher will keep the phone until the end of class. However, if it rings in the second hour of class, the student can only collect it at the end of that working day.

I  know of a subject lecturer who frequently goes around collecting cell phones that ring in his classes of 100 over students. Once taken away, the students can only get them back at the end of the day. He said those kids that come to him at the end of the day look really miserable. "It does stop them generally," he said, "Cause it's a matter of life and death to them - who would want their 'lives' to be taken away, even for one second?"

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