W 023 F

Introduction
The basis of this paper is an observation of one of the Writing and Research Skills classes. The students of the English Department of Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, have the opportunity to take part in a course where they can improve their writing skills.

The main aim of these lessons, lead by Horváth József, is “to enable the students to present their ideas, opinions, and observations in personal narrative and descriptive essays, as well as to formulate a manageable research question and develop a small scale project”. Students have to “read and learn about the content, structure, and presentation requirements of academic writing”

In my research paper I will analyse that who that person is (or people) who made that lesson active I observed.

Method
I recorded one of the lessons on tape. I used this tape to make notes, then I analysed the lesson from two aspects. First I observed the utterances among students, and among the students and the teacher. As the title of this particular class was Assembling a paper, I observed how much the tutor succeeded in fulfilling his plan, and what devices he used so that the students could form an idea about the process of producing a research paper.

Results and Discussion
The class took place on the 24th of November in 1998, in one of the classrooms of the English Department of Janus Pannonius University, Pécs. The number of participants were 16, out of 17, plus the teacher.

The first aspect I analysed the lesson from was the frequency and the character of the utterances made by the students. (See Figure 1. on the last page.)

Seating arrangement in the classroom is shown on Fig. 1 which also shows the directions of speakings. Students first took place in a way which did not provide good visual contact with classmates, so the teacher initiated a better seating system. The numbers represent the people who had participated in the lesson.

It is obvious that four students made comments unasked at least four times during the class. When we compare this with the number of participants, we see that the group had only four relatively active members, which is only 25 percent. The most active person during the lesson was HJ himself. He put questions, encouraged the students to make comments, and he required answers. The evidence for this is that there were questions each member was expected to answer, and besides, six students were individually asked to answer questions.

Though students had the possibility to ask questions, only two of them (12.5%) lived with the opportunity, that two who made the most comments as well. It means that in reality these two students took part actively in the class only. I would like to call the reader’s attention to the fact that only three students made a short conversation among themselves connected the topic of the lesson.

As far the teacher, there are two things which are worth mentioning. He did not take seat at the desk but moved his chair and sat closer to the students. Even when he stood up, he remained at the same place. Thus, during the lesson he did not move a lot (there is one exception which I will deal with later on), only between his chair and the whiteboard, or between the chair and the desk. This way students could pay more attention to him.

The aim of this class was to show the students how they should work on their research paper and to give a pattern to them. The ninety minutes of the lesson was built up in such a way that by the end of the class the students could form a clear idea about their own research papers.
The methods HJ used to make the students understood how a research paper should be produced were quite simple but effective. At the beginning of the class one of the students was required to tell the others how she would build up her research paper. When the process that she described was not correct, HJ corrected it. Then he asked the group if they had already decided the topic for their research papers. Out of 16 students 11 answered ‘yes’, two said that they were still thinking and three did not answer. To make the process clearer, HJ illustrated it on the whiteboard:

find a topic research question choose method
? .
-study topic 'street'
-gather material
previous rp.
clear, answerable
Fig.2 - the process of making a research paper

The question mark represented the research question. The line before it symbolised the process of arriving at a solution. The arrow was to show what else has to be done after making up the research question. To make sure that the illustration was clear enough and the students understood it, HJ asked for their opinion about its clarity. No one said that it was confusing. Four people found it clear, and the rest (12) said that it could have been better but it was OK.
HJ’s devices to present a good and a bad introduction were more effective. As he acted out two scenes he needed to move more than before. With the first scene he represented good introductions. He acted out a man who enters a ballroom and immediately knows where he is and can follow the events. This scene was to symbolise that effective introductions should be written in a way that the reader knows what to expect. To show bad introductions, Horváth József acted out another scene which was much more shocking: he had himself pushed into the classroom by one of the participants, so he had a big fall. With this example he wanted to teach the students that introductions must not be built up in a way that the reader cannot know what to expect.

At the end of the class he handed out a sheet of paper to every student with the title: Research Paper Checklist #2. On the sheet there were nine questions about the research papers. The students had two minutes to fill them out. Answering the questions the participants got a relatively clear idea about the process of the production of their paper. To question number 8 students had to answer with 'yes' or 'no'. The question was: have you studied the department guidelines? Thirteen people gave the answer 'yes', one said 'no', and two did not answer. This means that as it was an earlier task to do, four-fifths of the group had prepared for the lesson.
In the last five minutes the task for next time was given to the students by HJ which was to write the first draft of their research paper.

Conclusion
The majority of the participants went prepared to the class, but most of them remained passive in that hour and a half. The lesson became active because of HJ’s devices, energetic teaching method and the group had two members who helped HJ with their comments and questions. As the other classes during the semester were more or less active than the one dealt with in this paper, this research paper and the results of it can be applied only to this particular class.