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A) PRINCIPALES HECHOS Resumen
In the chapter, I have discussed the pedagogical practices and strategies of Mr Eilyas, Ms Raisha and Dr Dalia in responding to their students’ writing development. I observed not
only that these teachers taught but also facilitated students’ learning to write. In other studies, the classroom culture in Malaysia has been described as placing emphasis on the teacher as the “expert” and on memorization. Students are described as lacking “any encouragement of self-regulation and self-assessment” (Behroozizad et al., 2014, p. 218) and skills are isolated (James et al., 2001). By contrast, in advocating students to take a dynamic and constructive role to their own learning (Panhwar et al., 2016), Mr Eilyas, Ms Raisha and Dr Dalia, portray teaching practices that appear to be shifting from this traditional approach to a more socio-cultural approach.
In the classrooms I observed, students were given opportunities to talk about their own L2 writing processes and experiences. The pedagogical approach seemed to emphasize interactions both with the teacher and between students. In addition, the spaces that the teachers created for their students broadened their contact with the use of the target language outside of classroom. These positive teacher-student interactions were observed to play a crucial role in effective teaching and learning. Teachers were observed incorporating in-class activities and providing strategies that drew on Vygotsky’s scaffolding ideas. Vygotsky defined scaffolding instruction as the “… role of teachers and others in supporting the learners’ development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level” (Raymond, 2000, p. 176 in Van Der Stuyf, 2002). However, in scaffolding their students’ learning, the teachers took different positions and strategies, with regards, for example, to the importance of reading, feedback and code switching in support to writing development.
In classroom observations, Ms Raisha and Dr Dalia appeared to put more effort into engaging their students’ reading-to-write ability. Arshad and Chen (2009, p. 328) suggest that teacher who “scaffolds for L2 reading and writing”, helps students with the difficulties they encountered in both “content knowledge (including vocabulary and structure) and the discourse knowledge of the L2”. This was seen crucial for both teachers as the writing that students were learning, (i.e. annotated bibliography and Executive Summary) required them to respond (extract and synth esize main ideas) to the source texts. On the other hand, teaching reading strategies were not seen as important for Mr Eilyas, who generally encouraged students by using learning-by-doing exercises. As students had to complete their report writing, I observed that this learning process involved a lot of independent work for the students. In this respect, Mr Eilyas seemed to
expect his students to “construct their own learning”, “dependence of new learning on students’ existing understanding” and underlined the “critical role of social interaction” for meaningful learning especially during group discussion (James, Applefield & Mahnaz, 2001, p. 4). Throughout my observations in Mr Eilyas’s writing class, students were expected to make sense of their new writing experiences. One of the ways Mr Eilyas gauged his students into doing this was by having a face to face discussion with them about the topic they were working on. Students were then seen to take up an active role in constructing meaning which they built from their own understanding.
I have also discussed that Mr Eilyas, Ms Raisha and Dr Dalia viewed feedback as an important element in scaffolding learning, building the confidence to participate in the target communities (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). In Mr Eilyas’s writing class, oral feedback was given after the students presented and reported their progression during teacher- student conferencing. Although Ms Raisha favoured written feedback more, the use of oral feedback during the teacher-student conferencing was also important. All the teachers gave extensive oral feedback on linguistic skills and linguistic knowledge. With regards to code switching and use of L1, in oral feedback, Ms Raisha and Dr Dalia allowed the use of students’ mother tongue to be used.
Though all of the teachers were predominantly teacher centred and took up authoritative figure during feedback session, student writers appeared to be given some agency to make decisions. For example, to further understand feedb ack and to successfully engage with it, student writers had to look at the meaning which was created during the feedback discourse (Bakhtin, 1981) and how it was interpreted by the teacher and the students (Lea & Street, 1998). Such understandings and interpretations were constituted in the linguistic form of the texts and in the social relations that existed around them.
In this chapter, the focus has been on understanding the different academic writing teachers’ practices and roles in the journey of approaching their novice student writers. I have explored their views regarding the importance of reading effectively before handling writing tasks, on teachers’ feedback and peer feedback in the development of writers and the use of code switching in order to support students’ confidence in writing during pre- writing and drafting stages. These perspectives enabled me to understand the challenges and decision making in the classrooms and how these might influence students’ writing experience. In the following chapter, I explore students’ perspectives, their response to
their teacher’s approaches and how they perceived and understood the challenges of academic writing.