W 105 F

At the beginning of the semester students had to take new courses which were very important for their later studies and examinations. One of them was Writing and Research Skills course. The aim of this course was to introduce and involve the students into different reading and writing styles and to help in studying how to write an essay and a research paper. On the first class students were given the syllabus of the course from which they could see which topics they would deal with and what they would do in the whole semester. When I had to choose a topic I would write about in my research paper assignment, I decided on the characterization and evaluation of the course and tasks students were given and they had to solve since the spring semester began. I would like to see, whether the course was useful for me and for other English majors or not.

After choosing the theme I started to work on the work methods with the help of which I could see how the tasks done in the class and at home (in-class and take-home assignments) influenced writing skills of students taking the course. I collected some Portfolios of my mates, so that I could see how they wrote about different themes, how they developed from the point of view of writing topic sentences, developing paragraphs and all the rest of it. I also made interviews with students, they told me about their ideas and thoughts about the usefullness of the course, how it helped them in improving their essay writing skills, what they found interesting and what they missed, what was not discussed in details.

I talked to many people and according to collected information the Writing and Research Skills course really did help to the majority of university students. The biggest development can be seen on the field of writing topic sentences and developing paragraphs. Students also made quite an effective progress on the level of sentences. Mainly in the last weeks of the semester they did various activities which were focusing on the sentence, as the lowest level of speech used in a written work. While practicing they seemed to understand the secrets of this field as well.

To make a classification we need to know more about each task, so that we could compare them with each other and we could evaluate them.

At the beginning students started to develop their skills in academic writing by reflecting on various reading styles. They had to read two essays from a book called ‘Seventy-five Readings’. Basically the first one written by Zinsser was the more effective one, as it spoke about the difference between two men’s style in writing. The cause of this difference was based on their professions, one of them being a writer the other one was a doctor, who writes only for the sake of fun, to entertain himself. After reading these essays students got a short extract of each. They were asked to fill in the gaps within the two paragraphs. They had to do it in order to realize how differently every person reads. It was depending on student’s character. By doing such a predicting activity students saw that in most of the cases people used different words for the same gap. That showed that everyone had different impressions while reading a text, every person understanded it in a different way to some extent. During the next class students got the opportunity to discuss the two essays in whole. The above mentioned Zinsser essay, ‘The Transaction’, introduced the students to their next topic which was writing styles.

After discussing the essays students read, they used metaphors in order to understand the structure of writing an essay. One illustration of this was the process of taking pictures. When photographing a person also needs to find a topic, to focus on it and to develop it. Landing of an aeroplane is similar to the former process as well as to essay writing.

When working on a written composition or paper you must begin with the basic elements, which are the first sentences of paragraphs. They must be effective, clearly showing the point the paragraph will be about. With the help of a worksheet students learnt how to make a topic sentence impressive, what information or data it should contain, how it should be constructed. All this was done in the class, so students could immediately discuss this problem, as it was the most important part of the paragraph students were dealing with in the following classes.

Students understood that a paragraph has to be unified, it has to focus on the problem indicated in the first sentence. They wrote short one or two paragraph essays, just to develop this skill. While doing this an other skill did improve as well. One of the tasks was quite interesting. Students received several sentences in connection with the death of the two famous American presidents: Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Students had to choose some of those sentences containing information about the two tragic events. They had to compare them and include them in a short paragraph. This task served for making the students to use already known information and to make it interesting for a reader.

Students did enough practicing exercises to learn topic sentence and paragraph development. The next theme was building of revesion skills. There were two assignments connected to this purpose; an in-class two paragraph essay and an essay on tape. The point in this activity was that all students had to read their essays after finishing them in order to see and correct their mistakes; grammatical, lexical and structural as well. They realized how important it is to scan the text to avoid inaccuracies such as repetition, flat expressions, unorganized paragraphs, misspelled words. They discussed everything in the class.

A special technique for revesion was a take-home assignment: an essay on tape. Students had to write an essay about a given topic and then they recorded it on a tape. That was good for making sure that students did really revise what they had written down. Most of them revised it more than once, because they wanted to be sure about the correct pronunciation, correct grammatical structures and things like that. Students also could have a picture of their performing skills. This activity was not only useful but funny and enjoyable at the same time. The fact that the average mark of the group in this task was really good strengthened the students in their decision that they always have to revise everything they submit for some purpose.

Activities done in the first half of the term brought the group of students to a very special task, which was group writing. They were given a sheet with ten topic sentences which included all the different themes they were doing in the class and at home by that time. Students had to choose one of the ten phrases, then they had to look for people among their mates who chose the same sentence. After that they formed small groups with two or three in some cases maybe four people, but that was the most. Their task was to think of the specific sentence and write a paragraph about it. There were groups who chose the same topic sentence, but it was all right, because then they could at least compare the two works and they realized that there were different things in them. They found different things to mention as their interest varied. While doing this writing students had to cooperate with each other, share their ideas, come up with their own thoughts in connection with the topic, which was good again, because they could speak free, not being afraid to be laughed at by anyone else. Everyone could bring valuable and important opinions.

Then students had to choose one more topic sentence and work on it individually. Afterwards they had to discuss it with each other. That meant that everyone did something on his or her own, but then he or she got the chance to correct it, to complete, to give more details to it. In the next class students could see the work of the group in total. The tutor summerized it and they discussed the whole essay. As a next take-home assignment each student got a copy of group writing activity’s result and they had to write an introduction and also a conclusion. In addition they also received as a task to complete still incomplete paragraphs and sentences, to connect paragraphs and so on.

An other method for developing reaction to other people’s work was a two-page long essay with a title ‘Why Do We Play Soccer’. It was an essay written by the tutor to reflect on certain errors. It was full of all kinds of mistakes. The main problem was lack of focus on the topic. There were sentences which did not belong to the theme at all. Students’ task was to write a reaction on this masterpiece. They had to include all their doubts about the essay. As an end of this assignment they had to submit their reactions, they changed them among each other and took home for editing. Peer editing was very effective, as the students could read other people’s essays and they could write their ideas about them.

In the last three weeks of the term, students worked with different worksheets. They were reflecting on parallelism, run-ons and comma splices, pronoun problems, sentence fragments, dangling and misplaced modifiers, semicolons, sentence logic, avoiding wordiness, writing an introduction and a conclusion and many more important issues, which can perhaps cause difficulties to students while writing an essay. All these problems were properly discussed and illustrated with various examples.

As the top of the course students had to submit their so called Portfolios. This was a mixture of different papers and worksheets, they were working on during the semester. They had to put all the drafts in it and submit them to the tutor who could take a look at everything again and write down his comments and evaluation. By doing this he was able to see if students had made any progress in their writing style, developing paragraphs, in completing topic sentences and if so in what extent they could utilize learnt and practiced skills. He also reflected on specific parts of the Portfolios such as topic sentences, paragraph development, vocabulary, appropriacy of grammer and punctuation.

The last and biggest task is this research paper assignment, where students have the opportunity to show their skills once more and to summerize everything that they have learnt from the beginning of the term.

If we want to make a conclusion about those fourteen weeks we can say that the course has almost totally meet its goal. Students could learn all the important things they will have to utilize in their future studies at the university and maybe later, after finishing all their studies as well. Now it is their task to develop their skills to an even higher level. But they can feel a little bit better when they think of the proficiency test, which will be the first real barrier they must get over with the help of their knowledge.