DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS FROM ICT CLASS

The following are the stages of the project with the correspondent explanation.

Stage 1.  Diagnostic: 

These results are based on an interview done to the Head of the English Department and a survey answered by some bilingual and English teachers.

    a)  Results of the interview to the head of English Department:

-  San Bartolomé La Merced is focused in a communicative approach, where teachers provide engage activities and meaningful situations in class to facilitate interaction among them.   Besides, the school has an immersion program that allows students to travel to other countries with the purpose of practicing the target language.

-  The four skills must be strengthened in class according to the planning in the curriculum:  reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

-  Intensive and extensive reading are part of the English program in order to develop reading skills.

-  Writing skills are developed taking into account the stage of development of students, learners interests, needs, and age.

-  For sixth grade students, grammar is important according to the stage of development they belong to at San Bartolomé School.  Students are able to write paragraphs in different tenses, extract main and secondary ideas, use connectors, and give details.

-  The strongest skill students develop at San Bartolomé is speaking, since the school has a communicative approach.  And there are two skills students need to develop more:  reading and writing since they are strongly connected each other.

-  English and bilingual areas must work together so as to articulate English demanding with the expectations of other subjects in order to obtain English proficiency in student’s productions.

-  Bilingual teachers are language teachers too, so they are supposed to teach not only content but also language.  In this sense, bilingual teachers should teach vocabulary, tenses to use in specific productions, types of texts students can produce and their structures (lab report, math solving problems, essays, compositions, etc.)

-  Ignatian teaching elements are taken into consideration also in English classes having in mind they are important part of the school philosophy.

b) Results of the survey to English and bilingual teachers

-  The results of the survey concur with the head of the department regarding the approach of the school, since most of them are focused in the communicative one.

-  In the same way, for most of them speaking is the strongest skill students of San Bartolomé have develop due to the communicative approach.  And all teachers mention writing skill as the ability students need to continue developing.

-  All teachers have implemented strategies to strengthen writing skills such as forums, essays, and graphic organizers, but the most common for them are the creation of simple paragraphs or written compositions.

-  The most important element to consider when assessing a text for sixth grade teachers is coherence, followed by cohesion, then vocabulary, and finally grammar structure.

-  During the process of writing, teachers have different perceptions to identify the steps a student must follow in order to create a text.  Some teachers were focus in the structure of the text while others talked about the method they use to get the final production.

-  Teachers consider important to share their curriculum with other colleges since it is essential apply clil, to work English with a content based approach, in addition to have English as a real language connected to a context.  Besides, for most of teachers it is important to understand the English level required in order to develop a bilingual process.

-  Some teachers have shared their curriculum with teachers from the same area attempting to help students to use properly the vocabulary, suggesting ways to improve reading comprehension and resources to understand better the subjects such as videos, slides, readings, etc.

-  Some teachers at San Bartolomé have shared their planning with teachers of other subjects in order to find common points and generate projects as part of the requirements of the school.

-  Although for bilingual teachers is very important to strengthen language skills since they are fundamentals to develop other abilities from each subject such as comprehend information and communicate ideas clearly.  They focus their attention on content in order to follow a program established from the beginning of the year related to their subject in the curriculum.

-  Finally, all bilingual teachers consider themselves language teachers since they have the mission to teach not only their subject but also language structures, vocabulary, and grammar when it is necessary in order to improve production in students and also for a better understanding of their specific subjects.