15.1: Best Lesson Conducted (Kian Tiong)

One of the best lessons I conducted during TP was for a group of international students in their second year of the Integrated Programme, which is equivalent to Secondary Four in mainstream schools. This class was created as an extra pullout language enrichment lesson for these students (a mixture of Vietnamese and Chinese international scholars). These students came over to Singapore, joining as Secondary Three students only last year. Hence they have not encountered the English standard required by our local schools until recently. Their English language proficiency is similar to or lower than the NA stream in our mainstream schools. Hence they have much difficulty passing the essay writing assessments (which focus solely on the genre of argumentative essays). A major problem is incoherence in their writing due to the lack of organisation of ideas in their writing compounded by their weakness in the language. However, students are motivated to learn, asking questions whenever they were uncertain about something taught. In fact, they provided useful feedback that they would like to have more practise in the genre of argumentative writing (partly due to fear of failing GP as well). Based on their feedback, I decided to begin by helping them improve their essay organisation through focusing on the writing of individual paragraphs in an argumentative essay so as to first improve their coherence in writing.

In one of these lessons, students were first shown a PowerPoint which explicitly taught them about the components required in the introductory paragraph i.e. general statement, specific statement, definitions, thesis statement and main points of discussion. This was guided by what we learnt from Mrs. Josephine Phang that if students are uncertain or do not have prior knowledge, we need to teach them the basics before moving on to more challenging activities. After the deductive, explicit teaching exercise, a handout with four different introductory paragraphs was then given to students (adapted from authentic students’ essays with additional modification by me to improve coherence). They were then required to identify the different components of an introductory paragraph that they notice in each of these samples and explain the reasons for their choices. This exercise was guided by a mixture of the genre approach (students learn about language components specific to the argumentative essay) and also the inductive approach (as students were exposed to authentic examples of writing and then they were required to notice the language components used and explain their choices by themselves). After this exercise, students were given another handout, this time with four different introductory paragraphs again. However, these were adapted and modified from weak student essays that were relatively incoherent. In these samples, I had edited the grammatical errors in these paragraphs but left the flow of ideas intact in order to show students how incoherent organisation results in a weak argument. Students were then required to reorganise and rewrite these introductory paragraphs, trying to make their version as coherent and persuasive as possible. This exercise was guided by the strategy of process writing to ensure that students focus on a certain portion of the writing and work on improving it rather than conducting a full writing exercise where they make the same mistakes repeatedly (and the teacher has to mark the same mistakes repeatedly as well).

I consider this lesson successful because students demonstrated that they were able to correctly identify the different language components in the positive examples of introductory paragraphs and provide their own explanations for identifying these components, thus helping me to ascertain their understanding of the lesson. Also, after marking students’ rewriting of the weak sample paragraphs, I found that they were mostly able to improve the coherence and organisation of the original (despite the presence of grammatical errors). Hence the lesson’s objectives were met. At the end of the lesson, students also expressed that they now had a clearer idea of what was required when writing an introductory paragraph in an argumentative essay. This was possibly due to the way the worksheets were laid out in a table format so that students could easily write down their ideas and compare with the original paragraphs provided.