Técnicas que emplean polímeros de cadena flexible

Once the work had been transferred into digital form, it was analysed for common ESL writing errors, using the categories described by Ferris (2002) as the base for analysis. Saadiyah Darus, Tg Nor Rizan Tg Mohd Maasum, Siti Hamin Stapa, Nazlia Omar, and Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz (2007) state that Ferris divides common ESL writing errors into four categories, which are: i) morphological errors (verbs: tense, form, subject-verb agreement; nouns: articles/determiners, noun endings); ii) lexical errors (word choice, word form, informal usage, idiom error, pronoun error); iii) syntactic errors (sentence structure, run-on, fragments); iv) mechanical errors (punctuation, spelling). Language problems would be identified using codes like Word Form (WF) to indicate confusion between word forms such as nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and Verb Tense (VT) to indicate confusion between tenses like past, present and future. Any additional information is also noted in the event that it could be used to identify language errors, as well as to mark potential areas to be developed.

Analysis of writing

Sample 2 was chosen because I found that the level of proficiency of writing found in Sample 2 could be considered as the average language ability of the whole group. The least-performing student in terms of task completion wrote three words and left the paper empty, and better-performing students filled the entire page. After analysing Sample 2, the salient features of the student’s writing were as follows. First of

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all, it was clear that the student had a good grasp of the language that had occurred in the preceding sessions. This can be seen in the way student summarised the events that had happened, and on top of that, seemed to be able to focus on the crisis point that made the whole story. Keywords like ‘danger’, ‘scared’, ‘safety’ and ‘follow’ that were used in our account of the story were also markers that the student was able to use them appropriately in the correct context, though problems with the language was clearly evident. In the sample above, it can be seen that the student has problems with many aspects of language such as word form confusion, verb form errors, articles and determiners, and verb to be errors, to name to more consistent errors that were typical across the writing of the whole class.

However, through discussion with the Lead, I found that although we were looking at the same text analysis, we were looking at the analysis through rather different lenses. As an ESL practitioner, I mainly saw problems in the language, and spent a great deal of time and effort analysing them in detail, though I did note down certain criteria like ‘task fulfilment’ and ‘interest value’, as per norm in the marking scheme of most Malaysian test and examination rubrics. However, the focus on the language remained clear. On the other hand, the Lead seemed to see other details that I had only acknowledged in passing. An example of this was in the way the student had written the story from two different viewpoints, namely Joe’s and the boy’s, and how she made them distinct from one another. In my analysis I acknowledged that the student had done this, but the analysis did not go beyond a creative ability to tell a story, which earned the student extra marks in the ‘interest value’ column of analysis. Cremin, Goouch, Blakemore, Goff, and Macdonald (2006, p. 279) advocate the pairing of drama and writing as they had identified three ‘threads’ that appeared to connect drama and effective writing, which were “tension, emotional engagement and incubation and a strong sense of stance and purpose gained in part through role adoption”. This was where another critical episode in my learning occurred. The Lead went on to comment on the student’s ability to write from different viewpoints, as had been discussed by Cremin et al., citing that the student had displayed a high level of understanding of the use of role. Further, this use of role created with it an exploration of a complex range of emotions from both points of view – fear, danger, gratitude, sympathy, empathy, feeling stupid, and missing someone. This was the range of emotions that we had tried to simulate in the activities in the Silence Seeker unit, and seeing them written down gave credence to the non-linguistic uptake of drama, where the student exhibited behaviour that was synonymous with achieving drama objectives that were not necessarily to do with language uptake or acquisition. For the purposes of this study and the overall thesis, I shall refer to this form of uptake as ‘dramatic uptake’ to differentiate between feedback that confirms language uptake as defined Ellis (1994) and Lyster and Ranta (1997).

Sample 3 below is a sample analysis of one of the higher-proficiency students in the group. This judgement is based on observation of more sophistication in the writing, as well as on how well this student was able to communicate verbally in the classroom.

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