Seeing is Understanding: Improving Coherence in Students` Writing
Chien-Ching Lee leecc [at] ntu.edu.sg Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. They tend to to be more concerned with language matters rather than making meaning. This may be because they do not have a mental representation of their writing. Tree diagrams help students to see the hierarchy of their ideas and how their ideas are related to one another. Thus, tree diagrams can be used as a planning and diagnostic tool to help students improve the coherence of their writing.
Introduction
The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability to write. Many university students write incomprehensibly. These "novice" writers adopt different writing strategies as opposed to expert writers. Research provides a profile of the novice writers to help us understand how they approach the writing task and how we could help them overcome the problem. Novice writers do not have the propensity to plan paragraphs or essays as a whole formally or informally (Stallard, 1974). Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986) said that they use the trial-and-error approach to trigger more writing (if they get stuck in their writing, they will just start all over again using another word in the topic that they can relate to and tell about). They also spend little time planning and start off writing although they are still confused about the task (Richards, 1990). This may be because they lack a mental representation of what they are writing. Furthermore, students tend to think that their lack of composing competence is due to their limited language resources. Hence, they are very concerned with language matters. Sommers in Humes (1983) said that they have a "thesaurus philosophy of writing" (p. 211) where they make many formal changes at surface level, especially in vocabulary choice and sentence formation but do not clarify meaning (Richards, 1990). Their main aim is to detect and fix errors rather than rethink their composition. This proves detrimental as concerns about language in the initial stages of writing would truncate the flow of writing (Perl, 1979).
The Sample
I was teaching an English Proficiency class in a university in Singapore. The students in this class failed their English test, taken before their university studies began. They consisted of foreign students from Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and a few Singaporean students. Hence, they had to pass this 11 week course in order to graduate. The course mainly exposed them to writing the paragraph, compare and contrast essay and cause and effect essay.
The Challenge
The challenge in teaching them was that they came from different educational backgrounds and have been through many years of education. Although they were good in their science subjects, their English proficiency was weak. So how could they be helped to understand why their writing was not comprehensible? How could they be made to see that writing was more than just grammar?
Aim
The author decided to concentrate on helping them "see" what they are writing using a tree diagram. It was felt that using a tree diagram would be more helpful than an outline as the tree diagram could show the hierarchical relationship between ideas in a paragraph or essay. This would provide both the teacher and students with a common and visible mental representation to discuss. The thrust of the writing class was to help them develop the following elements in their writing:
a thesis statement = topic + (controlling idea 1 + controlling idea 2 + controlling idea 3)
a topic sentence = topic + controlling idea
coordinate = explains the controlling idea
subordinate = examples of controlling idea
only one idea per paragraph
This decision was also supported by the students`; first assignment where these faults were very evident. A sample of it is shown below (all samples shown are with the permission of the students).
Assignment: Develop a Topic Sentence about Polluting the Environment.
Support it with specific examples in a paragraph.
Nowadays, following with the development of industry at every corner of the world, pollution caused by the factory effects even breaks up the food-chain in natural environment on the land. For building up a factory, it has to cut down the woods of a certain area. Some animals lose their living place. Plants previously in the area disappear, that means the food sources of plant-eating animals decrease and it will caused their death. After the number of plant-eating animals decreases, meat-eating animals will decrease in number too. Trees act as important role in air-filtering and temperature controlling. After being cutted down, dust in the air will increase, gas of carbon dioxide increases and the temperature around the area will increase too. Some animals and plants cannot adapt themselves to the changed environment. They will eventually disappear from there. That means, there is a lose of food-sources of some other animals and a lose of food consumers at there.
The topic sentence for this paragraph was that pollution was caused by factory emission. Rather than explaining what elements in the emission caused pollution, his