The Cambridge University Press Teacher Research Programme was launched in 2014 with the aim of inspiring and supporting English language teachers worldwide to better understand their own practice and foster learning among their students and fellow teachers. In this 3-part series of short blogposts, Cindy James, a teacher in the 2015 programme, explains how she got started on her project, what she learned and how she adapted her research plans along the way, and how she finally drew together her findings and learnings from the whole project.
Part three:
Before the research started, my students had very little interest in writing. They found no joy in it. My intention was to change my students’ perception and attitudes towards writing. I wanted them to find writing enjoyable. The main intervention strategy that I used in this research was utilising what my students love most – mobile phones and the Internet. I used these to make writing activities more engaging for them. My students used their mobile phones to create stories and prompts for story-writing; they used WhatsApp to share stories and get feedback from one another; and they used the Internet to publish their stories on the class blog. The next stage in my research was to see whether all these interventions had an impact on the students’ attitudes towards writing.
Before conducting the interventions, I asked my students to write brief reflections about writing and how they felt about it. I found out that most of my students’ reflections contain words like ‘difficult’, ‘hard’ and ‘dislike.’ Writing was mainly associated with examination tasks. While the interventions were going on, I asked my students to reflect on their experiences. This time, I could detect more positive words like ‘enjoy,’ ‘interesting’, ‘funny’ and ‘creative.’ The reflections also showed that some students were beginning to acquire the ability to analyse and evaluate a story. They could state why they like a particular story. Towards the end of the research, the students could describe the process of writing a story in their reflections. The reflections showed that they understood the steps that they had to take. The students were beginning to understand the process of creating stories, and they were starting to be more open about learning how to do it well.
In September, the students sat for the national examination. As soon as the official result was released, I made a comparison between the students’ grades at the beginning of the year and the grades in the national examination. Out of 31 students involved in the research, 28 had passed the examination. There were no A’s at the beginning of the year, but in the national examination 4 of my students managed to get an A. The number of B’s increased from 3 in January to 10 in the examination. The percentage of passes had increased from 83.9% in January to 93.3% in September. The percentage of passes for the English paper improves by 14.94% compared to last year (the best in 3 years).
Were the interventions successful? I believe they were. My students’ attitudes towards writing appear to have changed and their writing skills to have improved. More than 90% of my students passed the national examination. And that was not all – my students participated in a national-level writing competition for the first time and three of them won the top spots! Our school also received a computer from the organiser for submitting the biggest number of entries among participating schools (30 entries).
My students spend most of their time creating and sharing stories now. Our current project is compiling all of my students’ stories into a book, which we hope to publish in March.
Through the research, I learned that the most meaningful and effective learning can happen when students’ engagement is at its optimum level. Anything and everything that a teacher wants to achieve in her classroom can be achieved if students are engaged. I can bring all the latest pedagogical approaches, teaching strategies and sophisticated tools into the classroom, but if I fail to find out what engages my students and use it effectively to help them learn, I am going nowhere. As one of my students puts it, “Teacher, you’ve helped me learn what I need to learn by making me believe that I really want to learn it.”