errors. The original story reads as follows:
Streaker is a mixed-up kind of dog. You can see from her thin body and powerful legs that she’s got a lot of greyhound blood in her, along with quite a bit of Ferrari and a large chunk of whirlwind.
Nobody in our family likes walking her and this is hardly surprising.
Streaker can out-accelerate a torpedo!
(Strong, 1998:1)
In Chapter 6, an analysis of the boys’ written submissions is presented in greater depth.
boys used the space provided in their workbooks for their mind maps and stories.
Image 3 and 4: Template for learners to complete in their workbooks Source: DBE (2015a, p.89-91)
Looking at the templates above, they are colourful and contain images and the mind map has clear prompts. On the next page (in template) space is provided for the learners to write their final versions and there is a space for the teacher to sign and
date. As mentioned previously, the mind map worked well for the boys in School A, as the prompts were clear, helped to direct their thinking and most boys completed their mind maps. However, in both schools, there was no feedback provided on the learners’ mind maps. Both teachers walked around during this stage, to maintain discipline and to check if the learners were working on task, but they did not comment on what the learners were doing in terms of the organisation of their ideas.
Ms Chetty (School A) asked the learners to write three paragraphs of only four to five lines each, but the space provided for them to write their neat final stories allowed for the writing a longer story. Furthermore, no template was provided in the workbook for learners to write their drafts, which could also have included guidelines and space for editing. This may have been viewed by the learners as something separate or extra that their teacher expected them to do. The teacher is only expected to sign and date the final story. There is neither a space for the teacher to provide meaningful feedback, nor is there a rubric for marking the essay.
Thus, when I analysed the boys’ submitted efforts with their teacher’s assessment, I observed that Ms Chetty corrected all the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, at the end of a few essays wrote comments like “good”, “scary”, “please check your work”, or “good account”, and signed in the space provided. These comments were not a clear indication of what was good, what ought to be checked, why the story was a good account or how the boy managed to achieve the scary element. The boys did not receive effective feedback but, they could still benefit from the teacher’s spelling, punctuation and grammatical corrections to avoid making the same mistakes in different contexts in future, assuming they went back and read their essays with her corrections and that they were able to understand why she had made them.
Formative assessment in School B was both written and oral, and individual and collective, in that Ms Naidoo corrected individual learners’ spelling and punctuation errors, but she often involved the whole class in the correction process. An example of this follows: “Now Nonthando, uh, Nomfundo, now that you have written paragraph one let’s go back and look for errors right. Give me your pen, circle that one. Right, spelling error (reading learners paragraph)… (to the class) right guys please stop whatever you are doing! Please spell the word ‘given’.” Summative assessment in
School B was similar to School A. Ms Naidoo corrected all the boys’ spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. The emphasis placed on correcting these aspects could be based on the teachers’ own schooling experiences. Both teachers explained that when they were at school, when marking their writing efforts, there teachers corrected all their errors in red pen and gave them a mark. Ms Chetty said that her teacher used codes like ‘sp’ to indicate spelling errors and when they received their work back from their teacher they had to write any words that were incorrectly spelt three times in their spelling books. When asked if their teachers used rubrics and provided written feedback about their strengths and areas of development, both teachers said that their teacher wrote comments like ‘excellent’ or ‘poor spelling’ and no rubrics were used. Interesting to note in that this boy’s final submission was the same draft without any corrections made as per the whole class editing.
As their work had not been edited in School B, there were many errors. It is interesting to note that the boy whose work Ms Naidoo had edited on the chalkboard with the class had submitted the story with the same errors that the class had corrected. In other words, the boy simply submitted his draft instead of writing a neat, final version with the suggested necessary corrections. Despite this, she signed the books, dated some, wrote “well done” on one boy’s story and “very good” on his mind map, and used question marks to indicate that work was incomplete. Here again, the boys did not receive effective feedback that could have helped to improve their writing in the future. While analysing the boys’ books, I noticed that when writing on previous occasions, the boys were given a typed template to write their stories, together with a marking rubric, illustrated in the figure below:
SCHOOL B PRIMARY SCHOOL TERM 1 TASK 2
GRADE 6 A B C NAME
DATE
ENGLISH HOME LANGUAGE NARRATIVE/DESCRIPTIVE TEXT
Text achieve
purpose Uses
appropriate text structure
Uses appropriate Language features
Planning and use of the writing process
Language structure and conventions
Total
3 3 3 3 3 15
Figure 10: School B template for writing Source: Learners’ books from School B
According to Ms Naidoo, this rubric was prescribed by the school for IP teachers to use to assess the learners’ writing efforts. She also said that the use of this rubric made her marking load easier. A rubric should also be designed to provide learners with feedback about their strengths and how they can improve their writing. The above rubric is vague and would require the teacher to provide written comments as well. For instance, if one considers the first of the assessment criteria: ‘Text achieve purpose’
which counts for three marks. Awarding a learner one or two marks for this would mean that the learner would need to interpret the mark and try to determine whether their writing achieved its purpose and why it did or did not. On the hand, designing a rubric for each type of writing, customised to suit the learners’ level with descriptors and marks may be useful in providing learners with more detailed feedback. Ms Naidoo elaborated that she only used the rubric to assess pieces of writing which were recorded as formal assessment and as the piece of writing that the learners completed during the observed lesson was “only for practice” (not recorded, formal assessment), she did not use the rubric.
This template rubric includes, “Planning and use of the writing process” and awards three marks for this aspect. It is therefore surprising that the learners did not seem familiar with the stages of the writing cycle. It is unclear why Ms Naidoo deviated from this regular process for the piece of writing that was completed during the class observations, but it was clear that the boys in this class were not very familiar with using a mind map to plan their writing (only one had successfully completed his mind map), writing and editing drafts, and submitting a neat, final draft—all the boys submitted unedited drafts. Yet, when asked about her views on the use of the writing cycle to develop her boys’ writing skills, she said that it was time consuming, but she felt it worked well because “it shows them exactly what to do so that they can complete their stories properly, and they enjoy it.” However, the data from the boys’ books reveal that the way Ms Naidoo approached the observed writing lessons did not necessarily work well as the boys were unable to meet her expectations. Adding to this, their lack of concentration during the lessons and the haphazard way they approached the written work (mind maps, drafts and final submissions) could indicate that they did not enjoy the writing as much as their teacher thought they had.
Ms Chetty also found using the writing cycle time consuming but added that it was demanding on her in terms of the marking load as she had to edit their draft and then mark their final submissions. However, she explained that she used it because it was a “department requirement” and felt that “with practice the learners will get used to what they need to do.” She further stated that it really helped her boys because they
“battled to express themselves and made a lot of mistakes, so at least I can correct the mistakes when I am editing and when their work comes for marking, it is not too bad.” In classes with large numbers, providing feedback at each stage and then marking all the final submissions may be overwhelming for the teacher, especially if learners do not have the academic competence required for peer editing.