Week 5

This week was when we started working on the first big writing assignment. Although I had brought students’ attention to it a couple of weeks ago, this was the first time that we started reading the text on which the essay would be based. Again I get the distinct impression that students are not really used to having to plan for themselves how best to use their time. When you give them a month to do something, some of them get all panicky worrying about it and everything else they will have to do that month. If they were given smaller tasks to do, night by night they would feel more in control. But when you tell them they have a month to do a larger task and it is their job to decide when and how to do it, then it is all too overpowering. However, I hope they realize that we will be working together on what I would call “building tasks” over the next couple of weeks and if they put lots of effort into those, when the time comes to actually write the essay, they will already have done lots of preparatory work with lots of notes and ideas.

Having assigned the reading of Tyler’s text for homework, I began the class during which we discussed the text for the first time by getting students’ overall impressions. Initially students approached it quite positively because it was only half the length of the text that they had read previously. However when they got down to reading it two of the sections generally found the text to be more difficult that the previous one. They attributed this to vocabularly and length/complexity of sentences. The general impression in the third section was that this text (Tyler’s) was actually easier than the earlier text because it was “more academic”, more carefully structured and direct. Because of the task we were working on, I gave students what I would consider rather challenging questions on the structure of the text and techniques/devices employed by the writer. In other words instead of focusing on what the writer said, we focused more on how he said it. I got the impression that for many students, this was the first time they had done anything like this. To help guide them towards an understanding of “what” the writer was doing, I provided discussion questions under the headings, micro structure and macro structure. As students worked in groups I found that rather than focus on the difficult questions with which they should be grappling they generally wandered off task and discussed other things – in Turkish of course. Oh what to do? In order to ensure everyone was clear on what they ought to be doing, after about 15 minutes we reviewed possible answers to the first three questions. It was clear from answers suggested that despite having read the text, most students had no idea of what the context of the text was – where it was published, what the text was aiming to do and why it was published where it was published. Students had not completed the task by the end of class and so I had to assign its completion for homework.