FOCUS ON THE LEARNER'S WRITTEN LANGUAGE

FOCUS ON THE LEARNER'S WRITTEN LANGUAGE

INTRODUCTION

As this essay is about learners written language I have come to the following conclusions after careful consideration:

The written skill is perhaps the most difficult of all to develop because of the accuracy students need to develop when expressing themselves in writing.

For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that students first develop the speaking skill given the fact that if they are able to verbalize something it should be much easier to transfer it to paper.

Writing has to be taught, it does not happen automatically.  Students’ attention should be drawn to all elements of the writing skill; punctuation conventions, grammar selection, choice of vocabulary items depending on the subject, the right sequencing of ideas, the layout on the paper, among other elements.

The students should not be asked to produce any piece of writing if they have not been exposed or have not been given a model of what they are supposed to reproduce.  In addition, students should be given the chance to draft their piece, subject it to corrections and then come up with a final piece.

It is only when students are given the chance to apply the “trial and error” technique that they get closer to an accurate piece of writing leaving them with a sense of success and achievement.

In the pieces of writing that I had the chance to correct I realized that most students have trouble with verb tenses, the presence of subject pronouns, collocations and punctuation conventions.  The higher up the students go the more they run risks which should not be penalized strictly speaking but the students should be duly informed of the correct use of those structures or lexical pieces so that they integrate them to their writing production.  

STUEDENT A

She is a fifteen year old girl, in third grade of secondary, in a bilingual school, whose level is a B1+ according to the CFR, she has been studying English for ten years, since she was in elementary school, she manages different tenses, such as past perfect, passive voice, and cohesive devices.

I decided to choose her composition because, she is an average student in the classroom and this can give valuable information about those topics which need to be reinforced in order to consolidate the whole group as B2.

Gabriela is a strong student with her receptive skills that makes her feel very confident when working with this,  the problem is that when she speaks or writes there are many slips may be because she tries to do it very fast and does not pay attention to basic errors that she is able to correct by herself. She needs to acquire more vocabulary such as adjectives and expressions that will help her to reinforce and sophisticate her message.

ANALYSIS OF THE CORRECTED VERSION

Gabriela is capable of a developing a composition in a coherent and structured form. She manages to use with no problem simple, past perfect and past continuous;  she uses accurately time expressions such as now, tomorrow, for a long time, among others.

The errors I found are related to past tense of certain verbs, such a wake (irregular verb)- woke, Gabriela writes “waked”  which is an overgeneralization of the rule of a regular verb, which adds ed to all of them.

She is consolidating more complex structures such as “I was eager … in this sentence, she takes the risk to use new concepts previously used in class, although there is a mistake with the correct collocation, she is totally capable to be aware of this and with more practice, use these expressions in a natural way.

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