Teaching and Assessing Writing

7/27/2019 Teaching and Assessing Writing

1/10

English Language Journal Vol 3, (2009) 102-114

ISSN 1823 6820

115

Teaching and Assessing Three Types of Direct

Writing in Malaysian ESL Classrooms -A

Survey of ESL Teachers Opinions

Normah Othman

Universiti Malaysia Pahang,

Beg Berkunci 12, 25500 Kuantan, Pahang

Abstract: A survey, in the form of an open-ended questionnaire,

was conducted to nd out how Malaysian ESL teachers teach and

assess direct writing in their classrooms. Sixty ESL teachers from

secondary schools, chosen through the representative sampling

method, were the respondents. The result of the questionnaire

showed that these teachers did not refer to any specic scoring

method to assess direct writing at the classroom-based assessment

level. They referred to the scoring method adapted or adopted

from the Malaysian Examination Syndicate, which is meant forthe assessment of the SPM papers. Their teaching also focused

on preparing their students to sit for the SPM examination. This

result shows that these ESL teachers were overly exam-oriented in

regard to direct writing.

Keywords: direct writing, guided writing, summary writing,

continuous writing, classroom-based assessment, feedback,

examination

INTRODUCTION

There have been complaints recently about the education system

in Malaysia being too exam-oriented. The education system is so

exam-oriented that it has forced many students into rote learning

and memorising just to score well. This is said to have greatly

reduced creativity and our ability to understand and analyse things

(Darshan and Ong, 2003). One of the ways to lessen the formalexamination emphasis is through the introduction of school-based

oral assessment for all levels of secondary and primary schools. This

was announced by the then Director-General of Education, Datuk

Abdul Rae Mahat, after the closing ceremony of the National


ISSN 1823 6820


2/10


ISSN 1823 6820

116

Assessment Seminar, which was held in May 2003, and organised

by the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate.

Datuk Abdul Rae Mahat said that the decision to introduce

school-based oral assessment was part of the Education Ministrysinitiative to make the education system less exam-oriented (Gomez,

2003). Nonetheless, the ministry has yet to suggest a more benecial

move in the assessment of writing. Thus, it timely to propose school-

based writing assessments in the Malaysian secondary schools,

specically for ESL direct writing.

TEACHING AND ASSESSING DIRECT WRITING IN ESL

CLASSROOMS

ESL teachers who conduct classroom-based assessments of writing

are expected to provide immediate feedback to the students, thus

enabling students to progress in their learning process. The nation-

based assessment of writing only provides grades that determine the

students future pursuits in their further studies. It is important to

validate assessment carried out by ESL teachers at the classroom

level for the sake of students learning progress and to improve the

learning environment in schools.

The need to provide students with fair and supportive assessment

approaches is very important because many decisions are made

based on scores obtained from writing assessment. It is imperative

that decision makers, national raters and schoolteachers who

provide language performance reports based on assessments of

students writing, give a fair report that really depicts the students

actual ability because the report given determines the students

future undertakings and even future careers. Thus, it is necessaryto validate classroom-based assessment methods that assess direct

writing in order to get a true picture of writing ability especially

when school-based assessment is given greater signicance.

Apart from giving grades to students writing, ESL teachers

need to give feedback about their students performance, in order to

help them improve in their learning. The former Director-General

of Education, Datuk Abdul Rae Mahat, when announcing the

decision to move towards school-based oral assessment, stressed

that teachers would have to give more specic feedback regardingan individual students ability. In this way students improvement

will be facilitated. The ministry felt that this approach would

tremendously improve teaching and learning (Gomez, 2003).


3/10


ISSN 1823 6820

117

A SURVEY

A survey was conducted to nd out whether it was true that ESL

teachers in Malaysian secondary schools were overly exam-oriented.An open-ended questionnaire was posted to sixty secondary

school ESL teachers who were chosen through the representative

sampling method. The seven items in the questionnaire required

the respondents to describe how they teach and assess their

students guided writing, summary writing and continuous writing

for classroom-based activities.

THE RESULTS

Sixty Malaysian ESL teachers in secondary schools responded to

the open form questionnaire which was mailed to them. Most of

the respondents wrote one-word or one-sentence responses. The

respondents experience in teaching the English Language at

Malaysian secondary schools ranged from one to 20 years. However,

these varied experiences did not reect differences in the quantity

and quality of their responses. For example, the respondents who

had only one year of teaching experience gave more comments thanthose who had had more than ten years of experience. The comments

received from these respondents reected the training that they had

just received from their higher institutions of learning. This result

was identied because they related their comments about teaching

and assessing direct writing to what they had learned during

training. In fact, the less experienced teachers seemed to be more

cooperative in giving responses to the questionnaire than the more

experienced teachers.

To adopt a suggestion by Best and Kahn (1993:203), three

steps were taken to analyse the qualitative data obtained from

this questionnaire. First, the responses were grouped together

across respondents and tabulated according to the similarities of

the answers that they gave. From these tabulated responses, the

salient points that reected the respondents viewpoints were noted

and described in the analysis of the data. Finally, following another

suggestion by Best and Kahn, the responses were interpreted based

on the researchers background, skills, biases, and knowledge. In this

report the responses to seven items given in the questionnaire were

grouped into two sub-sections: 1) teaching and assessing students

direct writing, and 2) giving feedback to students direct writing.


4/10


ISSN 1823 6820

118

TEACHING AND ASSESSING STUDENTS DIRECT WRITING

The rst item of the open form questionnaire (What is your opinion

about your students performance in guided writing, summary

writing and continuous writing?) required the respondents to give

comments about their students performance in guided writing,

summary writing and continuous writing. The majority of the

respondents (54 out of 60) stated that their students preferred to

write guided writing and summary writing over continuous writing.

Their students could not produce good continuous writing because

they had difculty in expressing ideas, had limited vocabulary, lacked

ideas, and lacked interest in writing. The respondents believed that

these weaknesses were caused by the students low prociency in

English. They diagnosed their students low prociency to be the

result of a lack of interest in learning the English Language and

also to a lack of reading texts written in English.

The students were said to prefer guided writing and summary

writing because there were clear guidelines and information given

to them on what and how to write. These kinds of writings could be

easily scored. Even weak students could write because they were

guided clearly by the instructions. The students were also said toprefer summary writing because they could lift words, phrases and

sentences from the text and as a result, they were able to obtain some

marks for their writing. These reasons caused both types of writings

to be preferred over continuous writing among the students.

Even though the students performed better in guided writing

and summary writing compared to continuous writing, the

respondents found weaknesses in their students performances in

both types of writings. The students had difculty in elaborating on

the information given in the guided writing instruction. As a resultthey could not score high marks in the writing. As for summary

writing the respondents found that their students could not

differentiate between the main ideas and the supporting ideas in

the summary text. The respondents also found that their students

had difculty in using their own words in summary writing. These

problems caused the respondents to have difculty in assessing their

students writing, as found in their responses to the second item

(What were the problems you face when you assess your students

guided writing, summary writing and continuous writing?).The second item required the respondents to describe the

problems they faced when they assessed their students guided

writing, summary writing and continuous writing. However, 43 of


5/10


ISSN 1823 6820

119

the respondents described their students weaknesses in the three

types of writing, instead of describing their own problems. Most

of the weaknesses described were repeated from the answers to

the rst item of the questionnaire. They regarded their studentsweaknesses as a factor that de-motivated them to assess their

students writing.

Only ve out of 60 respondents who responded to the second

item stated that they had problems assessing their students

writing because the scoring methods that they referred to did not

allow them to give good marks to their students effort in writing.

These respondents were ve teachers who had experience assessing

the English Language Papers in the SPM Examination. They felt

that the marking scheme, which was adopted from the MalaysianExaminations Syndicate that they normally used was too strict.

Another three respondents who also had experience assessing the

English Language Papers in the SPM Examination stated that they

had no problems with the scoring method adopted from the Malaysian

Examinations Syndicate. They felt that this scoring method could

help them to train their students for the SPM Examination.

The remaining 52 respondents who responded to the second

item were the less experienced teachers. These teachers were

able to respond very well to other items but could not describetheir problems in the second item. They were not well exposed to

the scoring method adopted from the Malaysian Examinations

Syndicate. In fact, one of them stated that the Head of English

Panel in my school asked me to use the scoring method adopted

from the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate. I do not know about

this scoring method because this is the rst time I am using it to

assess my students writing.

Ten out of 60 respondents who responded to the second item

stated that they had problems assessing their students continuous

writing due to time constraints. They had more than 40 students in

a classroom, and they had to complete assessing their continuous

writing within one day, so that they could give feedback to them

during the next lesson. However, these respondents could not

complete assessing their students continuous writing in one day.

Thus this situation hampered their intentions to give immediate

feedback to their students. Apart from that, they could not correct

their students grammatical errors because they were given

responsibilities to teach too many students in a class. They also

had to teach more than one class and that meant that they had

at least 100 students to teach. It was difcult for them to handle


6/10


ISSN 1823 6820

120

such a big number of students. These respondents complained that

assessing continuous writing was the most difcult task for them.

They preferred to assess guided writing and summary writing.

The validation of scoring methods used for classroom assessmentsof direct writing is important to improve classroom assessments, as

suggested by Rabinowitz (2001) and Stiggins (2002). It is also the

intention of the Ministry of Education in Malaysia to see that school-

based and classroom-based assessments are increasingly used to

ensure that there is an improvement in teaching and learning in

the classroom (Gomez, 2003). ESL teachers in Malaysian secondary

schools classrooms do not have specic scoring methods to refer to

for classroom assessments. This fact was reected in the responses

given for the third item of the questionnaire (see Appendix 1). 57respondents stated that they referred to the scoring method adopted

from the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate to assess guided

writing, summary writing and continuous writing in the English

Language Papers for the SPM Examination. This conrmed the

fact that ESL teachers in Malaysian secondary schools are so overly

exam-oriented that this situation invited complaints from parents

as well as students (Gomez, 2003).

In response to item number four of the questionnaire, 20

respondents who stated that they referred to the scoring methodadopted from the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate in item

number three, mentioned that they were instructed by the Head of

English Panel in their schools to refer to that scoring method. Even

though the scoring method devised by the Malaysian Examinations

Syndicate was classied as condential, most ESL teachers in

schools were able to access it immediately after the assessments

of the English Language Papers in the SPM Examination was

completed each year. The respondents claimed that they could help

their students excel in the English Language Papers in the SPM

Examination. They were instructed by their school administrators

to help their students to achieve A in the English Language

Papers for the SPM Examination. So they focused their teaching on

providing daily exercises as practice for their students to do well in

the nationally standardised examination. These teachers felt that

they had to spend too much of their time focusing on their students

performance in the nationally standardised examination. Hence

they could not plan their teaching according to the syllabus provided

by the Ministry of Education for direct writing.


7/10


ISSN 1823 6820

121

Giving Feedback to Students Direct Writing

The ten respondents, who in response to the second item complained

that they had too many essays to correct, stated that they couldnot give immediate feedback to their students. However, they still

attempted to give feedback to their students, even though they

took more than a week to do so. It was the purpose of this study to

investigate how ESL teachers give feedback to their students. Thus,

the fth item (How do you give feedback to your students about

their writing performance in guided writing, summary writing and

continuous writing?) asked the respondents to describe how they

gave feedback to their students about their writing performance.

58 respondents reported that they wrote comments in theirstudents exercise books so that their students could identify their

strengths and weaknesses in writing. They gave encouraging

comments like good work, good attempt, interesting story,

and fantastic ideas. They also wrote comments for improvement

like you need to improve your work, check your grammar,

and organise your ideas. Such comments served as constructive

feedback for the students because they would be motivated to write

more and write in future daily exercises given to them during

classroom activities.For grammatical errors in the students writing, the respondents

wrote symbols like S for spelling, V for vocabulary, P for

punctuation, and Ss for sentence structures. The symbols could

also serve as constructive feedback for the students because they

could interpret their performances in writing. All respondents asked

their students to do corrections. 40 respondents orally discussed the

essays with their students after their students had completed their

writing tasks. Both types of feedback, either written corrections

or oral discussion served as encouraging feedback to the students.

Five respondents gave some continuous writing samples taken from

workbooks to their students so that the students could get some

ideas about good essays.

Five respondents complained that it was difcult for them to

give feedback on continuous writing because each student needed

individual feedback. Three respondents felt that the feedback given

to the whole group of students in a class could not help individual

students to improve in their writing. This showed that they believed

in paying individual attention to individual students in order to give

effective feedback. However, six respondents found that they could

give better feedback on their students guided writing and summary


8/10


ISSN 1823 6820

122

writing compared to continuous writing. There were clearer

guidelines in the format of writing instructions and it was easy for

them to give feedback to the whole group of students in their classes

for these two types of writing.In respect to the sixth item in the questionnaire two respondents

felt guilty if they could not give immediate feedback to their students

about their writing performance. The other respondents who did

not feel guilty about this could have taken for granted that delayed

feedback was the norm. Ten respondents found that their students

always insisted on receiving feedback. The good students always

requested their teachers to give feedback. Thus the respondents felt

that giving feedback was more important than teaching something

new because their students reacted more seriously to feedbacklessons. This was the respondents response to the sixth item in

the questionnaire. Two respondents found that their students were

happy when their written tasks were corrected and returned to

them, even though the comments written in their exercise books

were negative. This showed that students felt satised if their

teachers read their written work.

Even though the students were eager to receive feedback from

their teachers on their writing performance, 45 out of 60 respondents

found that there was not much improvement in the students writtenwork. This response was given in the nal item in the questionnaire.

30 respondents complained that most of the students repeated the

same errors in writing. This problem caused 23 respondents to feel

frustrated when they had to give feedback. Thus, a newer method

of assessing writing needs to be pursued to solve this problem. The

fact that the students repeated the same errors and did not show

much improvement after receiving feedback could be the result of

an ineffective assessing method. However, 11 respondents believed

that the good students showed some improvement in their written

work after receiving feedback. As a result one of them preferred to

give individual feedback to the good students who normally came to

see them in the staff-room.

Three respondents found that the good students wanted to do

well in the English Language Papers for the SPM Examination. The

students insisted that their teachers trained them to do well in the

writing tasks given in the examination. The weak students were not

so motivated to do well in the examination. This indirectly caused

the respondents to neglect the weaker students. One respondent

felt that this negligence was not her fault but she could not avoid

it. Five respondents said that they were directed by their school


9/10


ISSN 1823 6820

123

administrators to help their students to achieve As in their

examination. Thus the only way they could do that was by helping

the good students to excel. This response indicated that the school

system did not permit teachers to concentrate on the weak students.The present system that is too focused on examinations has de-

motivated many students to learn.

A SUMMARY OF THE SURVEY

The salient points obtained from this survey showed that the

ESL teachers surveyed had problems in teaching and assessing

too many students in a classroom. As a result they could not giveindividual attention to all the students. This constraint hampered

their intentions to help their students improve in learning. The

school administrators who were more interested in seeing that

many students achieved As in the SPM Examination, instructed

these teachers to concentrate on training their students to do well in

the examination. This instruction indirectly caused the teachers to

neglect the weaker students who needed more individual attention

than the better students. The ESL teachers focused their teaching

on training their students to do well in the nationally standardisedexamination. This phenomenon seems to be the major feature of the

classroom assessment procedure used in schools.

The ESL teachers did not have specic scoring methods for

classroom assessments of students writings. A majority of them (57

out of 60 respondents) made use of the scoring methods adopted from

the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate for the SPM Examination.

They were instructed by their administrators to train their students

to do well in the standardised examination. These teachers did

not realise the importance of having specic scoring methods for

classroom assessments and that they should be informed about

them. By having specic scoring methods for classroom assessments,

a positive learning environment can be created and a less exam-

oriented environment will prevail in their classrooms.

Five respondents, who had been teaching for more than ten years,

seemed to be quite lost amidst the current assessment procedures.

This could be an indication that these teachers need fresh training or

need to attend more seminars and conferences on teacher education

so that they can be up-to-date with recent ndings in education.

This survey has also shown the need to have more scoring methods

for classroom assessments.


10/10


ISSN 1823 6820

124

REFERENCES

Darshan, S. and Ong, M.L. (2003, May 9). Mixed reaction to new exam

move. New Straits Times, pp. 3, 1-3.Gomez, G. (2003, May 7). Less exam-centred system. The Star, pp. 3.

Gomez, G. (2003, May 9). School-based assessment for all levels. The Star,

pp.12.

Rabinowitz, S. (2001). Balancing state and local assessments in

School Administrator. Arlington: American Association of School

Administrators; Vol. 58; Issue 11.

Stiggins, R.J. (2002). Assessment crisis: The absence of assessment

for learning In Phi Delta Kappan ; Bloomington; June 2002; Vol.

83; Issue 10.

Documents

Teaching and Assessing Writing