Practical Project Design
> Unit 2 > Practice section
Join Song
Qin, Li Yue, or Wen Jing
Are you with Song Qin? Yes? Start from here now.
Song Qin thinks that it is suitable for her to use the methods
of Socratic Dialogue, Cause Analysis and Questionnaire
to analyze her problem. Do you agree with Song Qin? Which
methods would you like to use?
I'd like to use
.
Song Qin's Socratic Dialogue is fragmented and
incomplete. It's your turn to make it complete.
Reminder
By making a Socratic dialogue, you ask yourself a series
of intelligent questions and try to answer them at the
same time. You often draw analogies to see if there
are fatal contradictions or inconsistencies in your
thinking or to see if you can learn anything from analogies.
What kind of errors do I usually correct?
.
How do I correct them?
.
What do I expect the students to do?
.
My students' writing with a lot of errors in it is like a
piece of cake poorly made, isn't it? I once tried to make
a cake myself, and turned out to be a disaster: the restaurant
chef said that it was as stiff as a piece of rock! What he
did was to give me a piece of cake he made. It was of course
absolutely gorgeous. But he didn't help me to improve my skill,
because he didn't tell me what had gone wrong with me and
why.
.
Through Socratic Dialogue, Song Qin came to realize
that the problem is probably caused by her error-correction
technique. To make sure she moved on to do a cause analysis.
Song Qin's cause analysis
Reminder
Cause analysis, as its name tells you, is to look for
the factors that you think cause the problem. When you
do cause analysis, we keep asking why-questions (why
¡?) and because-questions (Is it because ...?)
The following factors may contribute to the problem:
¡¡The
teacher's side -- Song Qin herself
¡¡The
student's side
¡¡The
class size
The teacher's side -- that is Song Qin herself
Usually
I just gave students topics to write about, with little or
almost no guidance before or during the writing.
The students' side
Students
were used to the traditional classroom teaching and learning,
and they treated writing rather as an exam than a learning
process. When the writing work was given back, they tended
to pay much more attention to the marks they got rather than
the errors corrected.
The class size
My class
size is 65 students.
Song Qin tried to dig out all possible causes. Of all these
causes, she believed that
was mainly responsible for the failure. Although she is happy
with problem analyses so far, she is far from being certain.
She wants to know what her students think about the problem.
So she designs a questionnaire to find it out. She follows
very closely Wing Ling's advice on how to use questionnaire.
Song Qin's Questionnaire
Reminder: How to Use a Questionnaire
1. Choose informants.
2. Work out a list of things that call for students'
opinion.
3. Design a draft questionnaire.
4. Try the draft questionnaire out with a few students.
5. Revise and finalize the questionnaire.
6. Distribute the questionnaires.
7. Collect the questionnaires.
8. Process the questionnaires.
9. Evaluate the findings.
It is your turn to materialize those steps.
My informants will be:
.
I want to find out my informants' opinion on the following
things:
My draft questionnaire will look like this:
Please tick the box next to the answer that expresses
your opinion.
1. How would you like your teacher to help you before
writing?
a. Help us brainstorm the topic.
b. Organise pair work or group discussions on the topic.
c. Anticipate potential difficulties in the writing
and discuss ways to solve them.
d. I have no idea.
Others (please specify)
.
¡
¡
¡
¡
6. After your work has been corrected, do you make the
same errors again?
Yes
No
If your response to Question 6 is No, then please answer
Question 7.
7. What do you do to make sure that you don't make the
same errors again?
a. I try to understand why the errors are corrected
in that way.
b. I usually rewrite the composition, and incorporate
the teacher corrections.
c. I do some intensive practice on the weak points,
looking at the grammar book, and studying the uses of
the words.
Others (Please specify)
.
¡
¡
Teacher's Expectations of the Results
The result of the questionnaire may indicate that students
feel they need preparation work before writing in order to
minimise errors. They tend to treat writing as a test rather
than a learning process, therefore they don't discuss it with
their peers or the teacher when having problems. They do not
usually study the corrections as expected, instead they pay
more attention to the marks they get. They all hope that there
will be some changes in the ways errors are corrected.
Now go to Working Section to do Stage
2 of your own project. If you have chosen Song Qin's project
as your own, you can either copy those parts you did with
Song Qin that you find useful as part of your own project,
or do your own project in your own way.
Are you with Song Qin? Yes? Start from here now. 
What kind of errors do I usually correct? 
The
teacher's side -- Song Qin herself
Usually
I just gave students topics to write about, with little or
almost no guidance before or during the writing.
