Prof. Feng's speech

This afternoon, Prof. Ho-ping Feng gave a speech on "Teaching EFL Writing to Senior High School Students in Taiwan: Theories and Practices." It's a very well-organzied and informative speech.

Most important of all, she provided some sequencing activities for developing students' writing competence as follows:

Freshman year in high school:

1. Controlled exercises--sentence making (words, patterns)

2. Translation

3. Journal

4. Summary/Response/Reflection

Sophomore year

1. Controlled exercises--sentence making (words, patterns)

2. Translation

3. Journal

4. Summary/Response/Reflection

5. Picture wriitng

Junior year (Senior year?)

1. Picture writing

2. Exposition description

3. Description

4. Argumentation

5. The strategies for making transition between two genres.

Also, she gave some suggestions on providing feedback:

1. Controlled exercises: Accuracy is focused.

2. Journal/Response: Fluency is focused. Teachers don't need to correct grammatical errors; instead, they just give response. By doing so, they can lower students' anxiety and thus encourage the students to write more.

3. Focused feedback: When giving feedback, teachers just make some selective error corrections, for example, the verb tense.

4. Teacher-led discussion of the common mistakes.

Ms. Feng emphasized the importance of giving positive/encouraging feedback and comments.