The study being presented was a quasi-experimental action research study on the effectiveness of C. Lynn Jacobs' “Cubing” technique to improve the writing skills of recent immigrant ESL and former ESL students.
It should be noted that while many schools have strict guidelines concerning informed consent in experimental procedures, action research projects are a notable exception. Because such studies are conducted while a class is in session, they are not considered true experiments because while a true experiment is performed under controlled conditions with as few variables as possible, a classroom, as ever teacher knows, is practically a three-ring circus of variables. Informed consent is not required because the purpose of any action research project is to find more efficient ways of teaching – and isn't that what every teacher should be doing in class anyway?
The research questions for the study as originally planned were as follows:
- Will the group of study participants show improvement in writing skills?
- What modifications, if any, will be necessary to use a methodology on a collegiate level originally designed for high school students?
- Will the group of study participants show a similar improvement to enrolled students who are native English speakers?
- Will the group of study participants show improvement similar to enrolled students who are long term English learners?
- Will the country of origin of the study participants affect their progress towards improving their writing skills?
- Will the gender of the study participants affect their progress towards improving their writing skills?
In a class of 25 students, six were originally identified as recent immigrants for the study. Unfortunately, by the time the study began, two participants had dropped the course – one officially withdrew, while the second stopped coming before the study began. The four remaining study participants have been given the pseudonyms Carlos, Sarah, Caroline, and Paula.
Carlos is a freshman student, approximately 23 years old, from Cuba. He has been in the country for about four years. His primary language is Spanish, although his spoken English is nearly fluent, though accented. His writing, however was disorganized and riddled with a wide variety of spelling and grammatical mistakes.
Sarah is a 20 year old Freshman from Columbia. She has been in the country for about 6 years. Her primary language is Spanish, although she is also nearly fluent in English. Her writing already showed a strong sense of organization, but her grammar, especially when under pressure, was inconsistent.
Caroline is a 25 year old woman from Cuba. She has lived in America for about five years. Her primary language is Spanish, and her spoken English is heavily accented, although understandable in conversation. Her early written work was above average, with only minor organizational and grammatical errors.
Paula is 21 years old, Colombian, and moved to America approximately three years ago. There was little data available about her written work, as her attendance was spotty towards the beginning of the semester, but began to make more of an effort about two weeks before the study began. She was quiet and reserved in class, and remained so throughout the study.
The class was an entry-level composition class, designed to give new students an introduction to academic writing. The class met once a week, on Wednesdays from 6:00 – 9:30 PM. The first hour of class time was set aside as a writing workshop (although in truth, the lab is only available for 45 minutes), where the students would work in a computer lab on an assignment of my choosing, which would be in some way related to the readings and topics of either that week or the previous one. The remainder of the class period (7:00 – 9:30 PM) was spent in a classroom, discussing writing patterns and techniques, and discussing essays which exemplified those patterns. Approximately halfway through the lecture period (about 8:15 PM) the students were given a 10-15 minute break, and return to complete the lecture.
This scheduling, while necessary, proved to be less than ideal for the format of the class, let alone an action research study. Traditionally, the lab period comes at the end of the class, after the lecture period, but cannot be done for evening classes, as it is apparently not possible to have a lab assistant (required for all lab work) remain at such a late hour. This scheduling quirk led to issues which adversely affected the data, which will be discussed later.
As discussed, every class session began with a computer workshop which is to provide the instructor with a sample of the student's writing, in order to ascertain how well the student can write about a given topic within a time limit – as the WPT Exit Exam is timed, the students are to grow accustomed to operating under a time limit. Such assignments are small and simple – There is no length requirement, and no more than 3-5 paragraphs on a given topic was generally expected.
(Here is where the class scheduling first worked against the study – students are notoriously tardy. While I cannot fault them for circumstances beyond their control – most excuses center around work schedules, family obligations, rush hour traffic, or combinations thereof – it means that many students are often entering the workshop late, and are forced to operate under a more restrictive time schedule.
More data was to be collected through the “Formal Essays” assigned throughout the year. A Formal Essay was a larger homework assignment, assigned approximately every 2-3 weeks, for a total of six essays throughout the semester. A typical Formal Essay was expected to be anywhere between 450-700 words. During this study, Formal Essays 4 and 5 fell during the study period, and Formal Essay 6 was scheduled the week after the post-test, and was originally intended to be included in this study.
Unfortunately, students are also notoriously bad at meeting deadlines. Students have been known to hand in essays a week or two late (which skews the research data), or not at all (which eliminates it completely). It was a near class-wide omission of Formal Essay 6 (only three students remembered to hand it in on time, none of which were study participants) that forced FE6 to be removed from this study.
In the classes leading up to the experimental phase, six students were identified who were recent (within the last five years) immigrants. With surveys not a legal option, students had been encouraged to include as much detail about their own lives as possible in their essays. For example, I mentioned that one of the key elements of good writing was making connections – often to their own experiences. From the beginning, I reminded my students (as I always do) that their own life experiences can provide material for in class discussion, computer lab journal entries, formal essays, or even the Exit Exam itself. In this way, I was able to glean information about me students without running afoul of legal issues.
Once my ideal students were identified (and two of the original six had dropped the class), I administered the first of two practice tests to the class. The test consists of a short article, and a question the students must answer based on the article. The students had 90 minutes to write an essay answering the question, being sure to refer to the article at least once. This practice test (PT1) served as a pre-test for the study. A second test, scheduled later (PT2), would serve as the post-test.
The week after the practice test was administered, I began the study by emulating Jacobs' own strategies. Jacobs began her work by having the students write a timeline of their own lives, making a list of ten important events. I instructed my students to do the same thing during their lab period, emphasizing that this weeks lab assignment was not to be handed in; this was being done for their benefit, not mine.
The lecture portion of the first class with a description of the cubing technique – without mentioning Jacobs' research or that any sort of study was being conducted. I reminded the class that Formal Essay #4 was due in two weeks, but that I was departing from the original assignment on the syllabus and changing the topic – I wanted them to choose one of the events from the list they had just made of their lives, and discuss that event, using the cubing technique.
I explained to them what cubing was: rather than use one dominant pattern of writing, which most of the textbook's assignments call for, I wanted them to use six patterns, devoting approximately a paragraph to each one, to discuss or describe the event they chose to write about. The six patterns (which I copied from Jacobs' own study) were as follows:
- Describe – give a brief but detailed account of what happened.
- Connect – is this event like anything else you'd experienced or heard about before?
- Compare and Contrast – For this step, I asked the students to compare their thoughts and feelings about the event as it happened to how they feel about it now, and discuss what has changed.
- Analyze – Why is this event on your top ten list? What about it makes it important to you?
- Apply – what have you learned from this event? How can you apply what you've learned to your life today?
- Conclusion – summarize your final thoughts about the event.
For each week once the study began, students were assigned to read select essays from the course's required textbook, Patterns for College Writing (Kirszner &Mandell, 2010), and class discussions would be guided to have students look for cubing-like techniques used by the authors. Because each chapter of the text was based on a particular writing style or pattern, the essays of that week would be themed around a dominant pattern – for example, one week's essays were centered around cause-and-effect, while another week's essays were comparison and contrast. I made sure, whenever possible, to point out to students (or have them search on their own) various places where an author used a different pattern, preferably one that students had previously discussed in a previous week and would be able to recognize. “See here? He's describing a process, step by step. Now, in this paragraph, he's narrating a story,” etc.
Paragraphs, I pointed out, were the key. A good writer uses paragraphs to separate ideas from one another, and thus is able to organize their ideas in a way easy for a reader to follow. Often too, I pointed out to them whenever applicable, a paragraph was a good sign of when a writer would switch from one pattern to another. There had been a tendency among students (both native born and ESL) to forget to divide their essays into paragraphs, and instead write a single, nigh-illegible block of text. If nothing else, it was hoped that cubing would break students of this habit, which usually resulted in an automatic grade of F for an essay.
Graded essays and lab work was usually given back after the break period, where I would briefly speak to students, give a quick explanation for their grade, point out any recurring problems I'd noticed, and offer to stay after class if the student had any questions of problems with their writing – sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, none ever did.
The entire study, from the pre-test to the scheduled FE6, took a total of eight weeks, with one week off for the college's spring break. As the weeks went on, quantitative data were compiled in the form of assigned essays, and notes were kept detailing classroom activities and students' reactions (particularly study participants' involvement) every week.
It all looked simple enough on paper, but I was in for a wild ride.
References
Jacobs, C. L., (2008). Long-term English learners writing their stories. English Journal 97(6), 87-91
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