Teacher Diaries – Ms. Jo
TweetWhile it might be a trend that our language ability is increasingly assessed based on our competence to read practically, literary texts are still irreplaceable for transforming their readers into empathetic and introspective individuals. A helpful guide would be one that focuses on approaching a text thematically and technically, and elicits students’ responses to literature through their own creative writing.
This P2 Critical Reading and Writing class has been working on becoming more mature and diversified readers and writers in the past five months. Students have progressed from reading various text types critically to, now in the middle of their one-year course, developing their own style in writing with different focus each week.
In this particular lesson, students were focusing on learning the art of narrative writing, and worked to build a story by showing and telling through dialogues. They had to show personality traits implicitly through character interaction. While they might still need help with the spelling of more advanced vocabulary, they showed careful consideration for their diction and pace in their self-directed writing.
Each student in this class has their own strengths and we strive to amplify their spectrum of talent according to their ability and interest – be it the naturalness of dialogue, extensiveness of vocabulary or complexity of sentence construction. These students are of no doubt developing their own eloquent style of writing. In the rest of the course, they will continue showing their communicative skills and reflective mind beyond their age, taking wide steps towards mastering the language that has given life to so many cultures, including what will be theirs.