Teaching Writing from Scratch at Schools

Image Peggy_Marco

Last week, while my junior high school students were doing research with their netbooks, one student started jumping up and down, exclaiming “OMG!” He’d just received an email that he’d passed the Eiken Grade 3 test. After class, students told me they were happy and relieved to have passed. It’s an accomplishment for them and although our school doesn’t require Eiken achievement, it’s highly encouraged.

Non-Japanese teacher’s roles

In Japan’s junior and senior high schools, the roles that non-Japanese English teachers, especially ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) fill, vary so widely that there’s no way to generalize about what they do. Some might find themselves relegated to reading passages aloud while others are integrated into classrooms by skilled JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English).

One scenario that non-Japanese English teachers may find themselves in is a division of skills - JTEs deliver the grammar and vocabulary while the non-Japanese teacher is tasked with teaching productive skills. In the school where I teach, the non-Japanese teachers focus on writing.

Writing Tasks on Tests

Three standard tests used widely in Japan assess writing. MEXT’s Course of Study indicates that English instruction should provide students with opportunities to express their thoughts and opinions. The test authorities provide samples of Eiken, GTEC, and TEAP, where you can see writing prompts and model compositions.

Getting Started

One cultural point to bear in mind when you start writing with junior high school students is that the paragraph convention is not the same across cultures and education systems. Your students may be asked to write reports or reflections「感想文」on topics and experiences in Japanese, but they're not necessarily exposed to the typical paragraph style expected of English writers and readers.

A commonly used writing organizer is the hamburger - the top bun is the topic sentence, the meat, lettuce, tomato, etc. are the support and detail sentences, and the bottom bun holds it together with the concluding sentence. The organizer is described well in YouTube videos, by university writing instructors, and in college writing centers. It's used at all levels of academia.

For junior high students, superimposing a model paragraph on a hamburger organizer is a great way to introduce the convention. It's also an opportunity to pre-teach the vocabulary they need - reason,  first, second, finally, etc. Alternatively, you can present the model and have the students exercise their dictionary skills to define the words.

Many teachers scaffold the hamburger writing task based on the Eiken convention which asks for a topic sentence and two supporting reasons. You can give your students a fill-in-the-blanks handout with the topic sentence. For example, prepare the handout with "My favorite subject is..." and prompts for support sentences starting "First,..." and "Second,..."

Manageable Bites of the Hamburger
Your students may still be stuck for what to write, especially at the junior high grade 1 level. After all, they're still learning at the sentence level. Some solutions are to get them talking about the topic with their peers first, then brainstorming ideas in Japanese, and finally writing using the organizer.

Some test writing prompts are harder than others, demanding more of the students' vocabulary knowledge. When we do more challenging topics, our students collaborate in pairs or groups, each student looking up words they want to use in their dictionaries and contributing a support sentence. Sometimes their collaborations are way over the specified word limit and the students gain confidence seeing their long compositions.

An Audience of Classmates
When they've completed and corrected a paragraph composition, we don't just score and file it. We follow it with presentations in pairs or groups. The students listening to the presentations get some confirmation when they hear content similar to their own composition, and, we hope, inspiration when they hear a different perspective. 

It's gratifying to see a tangible product of your students' efforts and gives teachers some confidence that students can succeed on the challenging writing tasks on tests.