Promoting writing skills at Universidade Metodista de Angola: foundation year students
Date
2010-07-29T10:43:35Z
Authors
Neto, Agostinho Filipe
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Abstract
ABSTRACT
The present research study was prompted by the general belief in Luanda that state secondary
and middle schools students are ill-prepared to write adequately in English as a foreign
language. These beliefs are based on the fact that the English Language Teaching (ELT)
system in Luanda has been faced with insurmountable problems since the British Council left
the country in 1997. As a result, students admitted to university perform very poorly.
The purpose of this research was to carry out an in-depth analysis of teaching and learning
writing practices focussed on the Foundation year at Universidade Metodista de Angola
(UMA) in Luanda, in order to find solutions.
The research took the form of a case study and used a combination of various sources of data
collection for the purposes of understanding the problems by using triangulation. The sources
of data were as follows: Individual Audio-Recorded Interviews with all the six Foundation
year teachers and nine randomly selected students; Course Documents such as the students’
course-book (syllabus), the teachers’ book, the students’ workbook and the Sample of
Students’ Writing. The sample of students’ writing included the entrance examination papers,
the assignments and the exam equivalent tests.
The research found out that UMA admits two groups of students: low-proficiency, the vast
majority and relatively high-proficiency, the minority of students. These students arrive at
UMA exhibiting low levels of English writing skills. Their difficulties include grammar
problems with English, poor vocabulary, word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, and
Portuguese interference.
The research study also found that grammar and translation methods are widely used
indicating that other skills like writing are seriously undermined. Findings of this study
revealed that Foundation year teachers are course-book oriented and resort to outdated
philosophies of teaching. Furthermore, the research found that the Headway elementary
course-book is inadequate as it does not emphasise writing and the tasks are not cognitively
demanding. The study concluded that the teaching/learning, assessment and the intended
learning outcomes are not in alignment, and that teachers need pedagogical in-service
training so that they can carry out the teaching of writing more adequately in order to foster
learning. Among other recommendations to help the situation, the study recommends the
introduction of the ‘Process-genre approach’; the designing of a ‘Full Syllabus’ in which the
teaching/learning, assessment tasks and the learning outcomes are constructively aligned.