Sorry for my late post…
I believe the goal of any responsible writing teacher is to create an environment, which is inviting and comfortable for their students to produce good writing pieces. I just want to ask one question here: what are you going to do with a class with over 60 students (,which is commonplace in most English classes in Asian counties)? How will you build the community there? It is for sure that students won’t write freely and express their ideas clearly when they feel uncomfortable, but facing such a huge class often makes the teachers uncomfortable (, and this is just one of their classes through the semester), not being able to know each one of their students well enough even till the end of the semester.
As for the red-ink marks on the students’ writings, many people think it means “stop” and looks scary (because of the traffic lights?), however, red is somehow the representative color of Chinese culture. We wear in red and decorate most stuffs around the house in red when it's important festival, and I’ve got used to the red marks on my exercise notebooks because I’ve seen them since elementary school. For me, those marks mean that I need to pay more attention to the particular places in my writing. Just suppose, if we return the students’ work without any marking on it, will they think that our teachers are not doing our job well? If we conduct teacher-students writing conference that will surely help them a lot, but how long will it last concerning just one piece of writing? Two weeks, or one month? What about the other elements of English learning, such as speaking, reading and listening? Maybe peer-writer conferences would be time-consuming, but who are going to monitor (maybe it’s not an appropriate word to use here) them? What if they learn from each other’s errors, say the wrong expressions and the usages of words?
2 comments:
I can definitely see your concern for such large classes. I know that I have hardly felt community in any of my college classes. The only ones that I have been able to build community in are my education classes this year, and some of my English classes. 60 is definitely an intimidating number! Maybe you could try to break them down into groups, or teams, that would work together on large group projects. That way, there could at least be community within the teams, and it might make getting to know them a little easier if you checked on the progress of the teams. You would associate the students in groups and possibly be more likely to get to know them as individuals more easily.
Yes, Community building and small-group work are the terms that I learned from here, and I'll definitely try to apply what you suggested into my own classroom teaching in China :)
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