Sunday, April 26, 2015

My Free Time Task

Everyday, after my class and daily job, I always work in the my garden. I grow some kinds of vegetable. I like doing it because it can help my family a lot from buying some from market. As we've known, vegetable we have bought every day are now safe for us to consume. Therefore, I choose to grow some vegetable in my own garden.

I feel happy to do it, and I never tired whenever I do it. In addition, it make me exercise every morning before I start my daily class and job.



Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Improving Writing Skills in Rural Areas

I would like to share my ideas about how we can make improvements in secondary school English classes in Cambodia. I am, however, going to focus only on classes in rural areas. If we look at how people get their education, we will find that people in this country can get a good education so that every student has the chance of improving their abilities. English now is used more commonly in English classes and students in Phnom Penh can read, speak and listen in English quite well. On the other hand, if we look at the students in rural classrooms, we will see that they are not good in English, especially when it comes to their writing. Therefore, I would like to explore ways of improving the English writing skills of students in Cambodian rural secondary schools.


How can students’ English writing skills be improved in Cambodian rural secondary schools?
While I was studying in secondary school, my writing was very bad even when writing a small paragraph. Not only students in my class, but also students in other classes around Cambodia have the same problem, because they have never been shown how to develop their English writing skills. It is not easy to define the reasons for this situation even though this problem results in negative consequences for every rural secondary school. Let me describe to you what kind of English writing activities I have experienced in my own secondary school classes.

The kind of writing activities I was given by our English teacher at secondary school only focused on a small amount of writing, such as fill in the blanks and joining sentences together, and there was not too much of that. For example, our teacher asked students in my class to read the text from the book. After that the teacher would ask us to write what we could understand from it.  Unfortunately, that activity sometimes didn’t help students because without help from our teacher their English limited their understanding. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the class so much, because I could understand the English quite well. For instance, when our teacher divided the questions, I was very active to solve the problems by understanding them and was able to help the other group members to write the correct answers. Sometimes I felt very angry with them, because they relied on me all the time. 

The best English class I have ever seen was in grade 9. The teacher gave us a very enjoyable time in the class, although we only studied on Monday and Friday. When I attended his class, I started to like English. In his class, we focused only on reading and some writing, but not too much. The reasons he did it was the students' lack of Basic English. When we had written work, we just skipped it. This causes us to lack writing practice. 

From my point of view, to help students' improve their English writing abilities, English teachers need to follow these simple points. First, teachers need to teach the basics of English to us from the time we start in grade seven. Most of the students in the rural areas do not have the chance to attend English private school. If we could read with understand, we would be able to practice our writing more or less. Next, teachers need to help students increase their vocabulary and work in groups practising making sentences using those words. In addition, even though we may make grammatical mistakes when writing these sentences, our teacher should encourage us to do it very frequently, and give a reward to the students who make the best sentences in order to increase motivation. Moreover, the teacher in our class need to enforce class discipline, because we can sometimes be lazy. So we need teachers who can be strict, but at the same some encourage us. 

To make bring about improvement in grades 8 and 9 is very important. Because all of us in that class were still young, we need to practice and improve our English writing ability. I think we need to make the class more enjoyable by giving students opportunities to write on free topics. That is, topics that students select for themselves from time to time. For example, we can write about our personal experiences, interests and feelings. Another way to improve our writing abilities, is for the teacher to use pictures, including picture stories. 

It would also be good if our English teacher could take us to the school library to do research for our English writing. Of course this will depend on whether the school has a library. If it doesn’t maybe as English teachers we could at least try to start a class library. After all, the more we read, the examples of writing we will have as well as ideas for writing.
From my point of view, if I become a teacher of English, I have a mission to teach in the rural area. My mission will be to make my class more active, especially with regards writing.  To start with the basics of English writing, I'll let them enjoy writing using different techniques. Firstly, I'll make them to write a sentence correctly, by practising very often in class and also for homework. Secondly, when they are working in class, they can discuss in pairs or groups what they want to write.  Thirdly, I will tell them to read something in their textbook in preparation for writing on a free topic. Doing this repeatedly, I hope students will improve rapidly. 

However, I will not give them more assessments which can put pressure on them because they are very young and they seek for happiness in study.
In order to make my students work hard, I need to do some things. Firstly I need to make clear and effective lesson plans in preparation for all my classes. Before the class starts, I need to prepare every lesson and do research in support of what I'm going to teach, especially using the basic techniques of writing. 
 
Moreover, I should use strategies by make all my classes become learner-centered. Before having a class, I need to figure out the main easy way to make my students feel very excited. Such as letting them describe in sentences or paragraphs an animal or something they like the most. When they write from their imagination, they will be able to write a lot. Afterwards, I will read out to the class some of the best essays. This will encourage the students who have written and also entertain the other students in the class.  

There'll be some problems which I will face, especially the way I reward scores for my students’ writing. To solve this problem, while I'm teaching my students, I will focus on three basic points. Firstly, I will encourage them to use their imagination when they write about their topic. Secondly, I will help them to write proper paragraphs. The last is how to use grammar to help my students write more effectively. Beside this, I will ask some students to share, by reading their text to the class, what they have written so that everyone can see what she or he has written about.

Finally, I am very sure that all these strategies that I will use can make student in my rural class improve their writing a lot. I hope that what I am going to teach will be accepted and supported by the head teacher. I also hope that after they study with me, they'll improve their writing, which is very important for their studies.  They can develop their abilities if they become better and better writers. 

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