ANÁLISIS DEL RIESGO CAMBIARIO Y DE TASAS DE INTERÉS

In school these students looked for ways to help them to engage with learning to write and appeared to be encouraged by activities such as dictation, memorizing new vocabularies and using model essays (provided by their English teacher) to adopt similar essay structure into their own writing.

Dictation provided Ema with her first experience of writing a complete essay in primary school:

In primary school, I learned to write in English mostly from dictation activities in the classroom, for me, it was just not about spelling, but also learning new words, understanding how sentence structure and gr ammar work and also how ideas were presented. I was also afraid I could not write one, so I memorised some of those essays.

(Ema)

She found duplicating and 120ummarizin essays helpful, thinking that it would develop her initial stage of writing. The idea behind this was to re-duplicate an essay of her own, similar to the models given by her teachers, in order to meet the requirements of the writing tasks.

Naja also referred to memorising the dictated essays, in addition to model essays that were provided:

My English teacher would write a sample of an essay on the whiteboard […] she explained what to be written in the introduction paragraph, body paragraphs and conclusion, and she gave us a similar title for us to write. We were asked to follow the structure, the format […] even the storyline and we just changed the details to make it different from the original one. That was how I first learned to write a complete English essay.

(Naja)

This indicates that memory played an important role, not only for learning grammatical rules and forms and learning new vocabulary but also for memorising whole texts,

suggesting that the emphasis was on form over content. The model essays were sometimes from other students. Farahin recalled memorising an essay written by her own classmate:

As for me, my English teacher chose the best essay from our classroom […] from my Chinese friend because he was good […] my teacher made copies of the essay and distributed to all of us […] we were asked to read and use that as a model […] so the next time we had to write, we had to follow his way of writing for a while […] and when we had more good essays from our friends, we did the same. That was how I learned, it worked for me.

(Farahin)

The use of model essays seems to have been widespread. Ika and Wan said:

My teacher gave a title to write a short story. […] she gave a copy of my friend’s essay, which she felt a good writing for everybody to follow.

(Ika) Most of my English teachers gave us examples of essays and then we just followed the format […] it was straight forward, we followed the format and changed the necessary details related to our own topics.

(Wan)

The practice of memorising essays as a model for writing seems to have been common practice for these five student writers. Memorising appears to have been an unintended learning strategy as, without teachers asking, this was practiced in school and helped develop their ESL writing strategy. Eleena continued the strategy of essay memorising in secondary school. ‘Yes, I found memorising essays helpful for my own writing even in

secondary school […] how grammar works in an essay […] the sample essays taught me how to present the ideas whenever I had to write my own’.

Students seemed aware that limited vocabulary impacted their ESL writing. They shared their experiences of how vocabulary memorising helped their writing in school. While this seemed to be daunting for some students, it appeared to be a positive process.

Ema recalled that, for homework, she had to memorise up to 15 new words a nd was tested the next day. She said she understood that vocabulary learning was invaluable to developing her writing:

I think I enjoy writing now because I had to memorise English words introduced by my English teachers […] we were forced to remember, I remember we were scolded sometimes because we could not remember the long list but we managed. I have better choice of words now.

Siti too experienced 122ummarizin new English words. She mentioned LAWAD22 _(Learn a Word a Day):

On a daily basis, my English teacher would give us a word to learn. We were supposed to find the meaning of the word and construct a sentence to show some understanding with the correct usage. As we progressed, with the new words we learned overtime, we were supposed to use the list to write our essays. The experience provided me confidence to write.

(Siti)

The vocabulary learning approach seemed to aid Siti’s ESL writing in school. Unlike others, Siti did not recall much emphasis on grammar and felt that improving her vocabulary repertoire gave her confidence to write in English. She added: ‘LAWAD

helped me to improve my writing but not grammar lessons because I had limited grammar lessons in school’. Eleena also mentioned LAWAD and was encouraged to use the new

words: ‘from the list of words I 122ummarizi, my English teacher then asked us to use the

words when we write our journal and short stories in the classroom’. She was taught to

link vocabulary expansion to better writing and was expected to recall words not only by sight, but also to use them correctly in specific context. This gives the impression that the ability to write hinges upon having an adequate vocabulary.

To sum up, students’ initial experiences suggest that their teachers attached great importance to rote 122ummarizing122 for vocabulary building and the use of model essays. These techniques, though seemingly laborious, made sense to the students and they adopted them into their writing practice.