How did this project start?
I've been teaching EFL at the Department of Languages and Cultures at Universidad de La Sabana, in Chía, Cundinamarca. Most of my students have often been teenagers and young adults, who attend the regular courses seemingly because it is a requirement for their own majors.
As a teacher, I enjoy teaching English but I find that most students at university, in all the levels, make little improvements in their EFL levels. Threfore, their proficiency results are usually poor, especially in the development of the writing skills, for whose preparation they are expected to develop two or three projects along every course.
For the last two semesters I have taught English to the first level students, and I see that one of the reasons why results in writing are poor, is because they have not acquired adequate tools to enhance autonomous learning, and in consequence their practice is vague and artificial. We as teachers expect that our students manage to write coherent texts in an hour lesson, but they usually end up solving them at home, using their translators and other additional resources, instead of developing learning strategies that really help foster their wtiing skills.
When reflecting upon this fact, I feel seriously concerned about trying to identify an adequate learning strategy that encourages my pupils to use all the material they learn during their EFL lessons to develop their writing tasks in a meaningful way, and eventually they can do good quality written texts by themselves, and increase their abilities even in the other skills.
Looking for the appropriate strategy, which my students can apply along with the other parts of their learning process, and that provides practice in a natural way is the final purpose of implementing an action research project with my false beginners at LS university, and the reflections, analysis and conclusions upon this issue is what this journal is going to gather.
Initial Procedure
July 28th
The current week of the process that is going to be carried out has as a main purpose showing and teaching former and new students all the ICTs and other resources provided inVirtual Sabana, the platform used at LSU, to develop virtual learning and independent work through virtual learning guides and many other web 2.0 resources, so that then students can replicate their own productions by using these tools in the following ways:
1. For sharing their own thoughts and findings regarding the everyday lessons development, in all aspects such as gramar, vocabulary, learning strategies.
2. For uploading their independent work tasks in a public forum so that all the students in the same levels can share their products, use them as samples, and get and provide feedback to their peers, and reinforce their own knowledge.
3. For using the ITC tools suggested at the beginning of the course as a way to improve the layouts of their writing productions.
4. For solving online exercises and quizzes.
Regarding the use of the strategy that is going to be proposed by the teacher, students will have some different web devices to use at the moment they want to improve the final drafts of their compositions, so that they have an attractive layout and media to share with the course and their peers.
August 6th.
The application of the Writing Diagnosis Entry Test has made evident that, even though most students are false beginners (one of them is a true beginner -Diana M, another student is a blind young man who has a basic knowledge of English but cannot develop any kind of writing on his own, does not know brayle and depends on his own reader laptop, but doesn't carry it to the class, for security reasons), they cannot remember most of the main concepts that they require to express their ideas.
During the introduction of the entry test, most remained quiet and when I asked them if they had understood some responded 'yes' and others nodded. However, when they had their papers in their hands they did not remember the meaning of several words they required to solve the task.
L (a girl), was very outgoing and formal. She dared to ask what she did not understand. JF (a 16 year-old man) felt confident to ask even into Spanish most of the things he had to do, he felt anxious and could not follow the directions when reading. Like him, W (the oldest in the group, he seems, younger than 28 years old), C (a very young girl, 16, may be?), they asked 'teacher, cómo se dice?, teacher, cómo tengo que hacerlo, teacher, dime si así voy bien. Teacher, puedo usar diccionario?
I had to tell them that today, because it was an entry test to be used as a diagnosis, dictionaries were forbidden.
