There is a Written Expression exam for grade 10 students in Papua New Guinea. Students are required to write on given topics.
The problem is that many students can not write essays in the given time. They write two lines and then suck their biros for the rest of the time.
As the teacher, I had to speed them up and have them write quality essays. My first task was to give them topics to be discussed.
These may have come from the 60 minutes program or from stories told by the teacher. The students were learning about the world and being helped to put their ideas on paper. Their general knowledge was being increased.
In class, we made a summary of the story in 10-15 lines. The following day, they would be required to write the story again in 15 minutes. They were learning to write fast in polished English.
The essays would be taken up and checked by the teacher with corrections made. The students would rewrite the story with corrections. Each student would build up a repertoire of polished short essays.
Two weeks later they would be told they had 20 minutes to rewrite a given essay from a month back. No student now sucked their biros after two lines.
There were still new topics from the TV current affairs program. The teacher may tell them a story about some interesting event in the media or from history.
When the Written Expression exam came around, more of the students were able to write short stories in polished English that was being promoted daily. More students ended up with Distinctions or Credits.
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