Writing need not to be a mystery [Archives:2003/667/Education]

By Rizg Ali Ahmed Al-Sanani
Lecturer in the Faculty of Education
Al-Mahweet
Writing is the are of literate people and those who have clear thinking. So it is one of the four skills that is taught in English Department, Mahweet college and the rest of the colleges in Sana'a University. It is taught in four courses for first and second level. All of the four courses aim to make students able to write accurately. However, what I have noticed in my teaching this course is that most of Mahweeti students have low proficiency writing. Of course, anyone would agree that behind this fact many different causes are there some of them related to circumstances beyond the control of the student himself and others are under his control. If we come to the causes that are outside his control, they are so many, but let me mention some of them: firstly, there is low emphasis on writing strategies in Arabic and English in schools. You'll not believe me, my dear reader, if I tell you that most of the SS in secondary school can't write an Arabic composition. Once, I observed one class of secondary school students in their mid-year examination. They were asked to write a composition of ten lines in Arabic, but most of them could write only one to two lines and couldn't complete it. This is an example of their inherent inability to write a composition in Arabic, let alone in English. There can be no grain of double that this comes as a result of the lack of adequate reading and practice. Unfortunately, our students read books neither in Arabic nor in English, so when they want to write they are handicapped because their minds are vacant. They need ideas and a knowledge base to write automatically about any topic. Secondly, students in schools know nothing about the structure of the sentences in English. They don't have the necessary patterns to follow in their writing. The curriculum and the teacher in schools concentrate on speech and neglect writing due to poor understanding of the mechanics of writing by teachers themselves coupled with low competencies of the students. Thirdly, the crescent series is difficult for our students, especially in rural schools. I think it was designed to be taught in private schools where you can find a cassette, a recorder, electricity and suitable atmosphere. Most of the schools in Yemen are without ceilings to cover them and neither chairs nor desks to sit and write on. In addition, the curriculum of English doesn't take into account the socio cultural environment of Yemen. Most of it talks about British culture. It is English for Britain and what we need is English for Yemen. The Ministry of Education should be aware that the curriculum should be pure Yemeni in its content, and the conversations, topics, drawings, should be rooted in the Yemeni cultural pattern. Fourthly, in many rural schools English isn't taught by a specialized teacher. It's taught by some teachers who are interested in studying English by teaching it. Therefore, when these students join the college and study English they are very weak. On the other hand, there are some student driven factors that result in their low competency in writing. I am going to talk about some of them on the basis of my experience. Firstly, some students are afraid of making mistakes and are apprehensive that the teaching will have negative attitude towards them in front of their classmates. Secondly, some of them are lazy to write even one paragraph everyday and when you ask them why you don't write daily they'll say that they didn't have time what an convincing answer! Thirdly, our students don't keep practice writing during vacations. Most of them forget whatever they studied during the year. They say that they would plan to read and write during vacation but unfortunately they don't fulfil their promise. These factors are beyond the control of the teacher the students are responsible for this impasse which needs to be remedied because it's better to light a candle then to curse darkness. In fact, there are many strategies that can help us to enable our students write freely by learning from others experience and let me have our beloved teacher Dr. Sahu as an example. Dr. Sahu came to our college in 1998-1999 and found a lot of students had negative attitude towards writing. He used many techniques to get rid of such attitude and one of the bright ideas he used with his SS was inter college competition in which the students can participate in writing essays, short stories, and poems. Moreover the end of the year he used to hold a celebration in which the excellent students were rewarded and encouraged to improve their writing skill. Besides, he organized their creative output into a journal titled 'the spectrum' he has been doing this activity since 1998. In addition, he encourages students to write journals and after correction he either publishes them in the wall magazine of the department captioned the celadon by Dr. Abdullah Al-Majer the former dean of Mahweet college, or they find place in Yemen Times. All these activities give the students motivation to write and have a positive attitude towards writing. In addition, attendance at seminars and symposiums which are held in Sana'a University are a rare chance to look at others experience who spend their life in teaching writing. For example I attended the symposium on classroom, centered research in English from 29 to 30 May 2002 which was organized by the Department of English, Faculty of Languages, Sana'a University and I enriched my knowledge with so much data that I wouldn't hope to get after two years of teaching. In my opinion such opportunities boost the competencies of a junior teacher by enabling him to from the experience of senior professionals. I think a baby can't dance at once, he needs time and practice to achieve it. Therefore, it's very necessary to teach students the basic patterns in English language and how we can expand them into compound, complex and compound complex sentences in the first stage. Then they will be able to acquire the techniques of writing personal and business letters, essays, short stories, and reports. However, the teacher should simultaneously help his students to have a clear thinking and the power of expression by reading and reading alone. One of the best ways to develop students' writing is to make them to journal writing. In other words, a student has to write at least one page daily about any topic that he likes. Besides, the teacher can choose four to five notebooks to correct and then he can discuss students' errors on the black board of course, without mentioning their names, otherwise, it will be as if you're pointing your gun at their heads. Besides, he can give his students some marks to encourage them. In fact, when I had practiced this method with my SS, I noticed a positive reaction and they had improved a lot of since the beginning of the semester. At the end, my dear students don't say I can't write, you should always remember what a man can do, another can do so as well.
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