I TENOR I
4.2 Triangulating Data from Other Sources
4.2.2 The Impact of Teachers' Response Behaviours on Student Writing
confirmed what one student said to me in response to a query about why she never did any homework. She travelled a long distance to get to the school because of the political violence in her area. The result was that she got up at about 5.30 am to catch two taxis to get to school and then only arrived home after school at about 5.00pm.She said that because she was the only girl in the house, she had to fetch the water, chop the wood, cook the dilU1er and wash up afterwards.
Only then could she start her homework under candlelight. Gladys also reported having to use candles to read by.
Both Bongani, a senior English teacher, and Mandla spoke ofthe effect oflarge classes. Bongani spoke of one year when he had five matric classes and one each in standard six and seven, totalling, by his estimation, about three hundred pupils. Mandla said that this was a reason for the lack of extended writing tasks, and the extensive use of short answer exercises, required by teachers. Both teachers related this strategy to pressures within the system, echoing the sentiments of the teacher who described the crunch-and-carry-on method as a means to satisfy authorities.
Mandla said teachers favoured short exercises because 'they can mark them very quickly, get them back to the pupils, and then give them the next exercise. So with the authorities they would be in the good books, but then pupils are going to lose out in the process'. Bongani, who was exceptional in the school in that he required his classes to write at least one letter and one essay a month, remembers a subject adviser criticising him for a lack of language exercises. Itseems from these interviews that the pressure teachers felt from educational authorities pushed them towards the types ofexercises that would stall their learners' writing development in order to fulfil syllabus requirements. Mandla highlighted another pressure oflarge classes,namely a focus on the successful students at the expense of the weaker ones: 'You would then see that in practice, in schools, with teachers attending to those who are showing signs of progress and then leaving the rest'. This minors Martin's (1989) argument that schools tend to favour those that have the best chance of succeeding, a case ofthe less advantaged students getting less and less ofwhat they need and the more advantaged getting more. There will be more discussion about teachers' responses to these pressures when syllabuses and teacher guides are analysed.
Dumisa's comment on a lack of 'awareness of the importance of writing' and Macdonald's finding of minimal reading and writing experience in the schools resonated with what emerged from students' life histories, from my observations of teaching writing and from students' discussions in dialogue journals. Students in the classes I taught showed little interest in developing the skills of writing despite the high proportion of marks that the essay paper carries in the examinations. In the 1993 and 1994 examinations the essay, on its own, counted for 70 marks out of a total onoo for the whole English examination ofthree papers.My first experience of this lack of interest in writing was when I took students through an essay writing process. I involved them in generating ideas around their own topics through brainstorming and looping activities, followed by selection of ideas and planning strategies. I then gave input and exercises on essay structure and paragraphing. The students were then asked to go and write an essay using the ideas and plans that had been generated. A week later when I asked for the essays to be handed in, two revealing responses emerged. The first was that only four of the thirty four students in the class submittedtheir essays. Questions around this were met with a general degree ofindifference.
In contrast to this, students showed a great dealmore interest in comprehension exercises and decontextualised, fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises. One student echoed the sentiments of the class when she wrote in her journal: 'Why are you teaching us about paragraphs? Nobody is going to ask us what is a paragraph in the exam'. They seemed to see writing essays as little more than a grammar exercise rather than a meaning-makingone. Their attitude seemed to be that,as long as they could cobble together a basic narrative with as few grammatical errors as possible, then that was all they needed to know.
The second response that emerged was that two of the students had changed the original essay topics they had started with.Itwas interesting that they changed these topics to more conventional topics similar to those mentioned as hardy perennials in other learners' LLHs -'My most exciting day' and 'The pen is mightier than the sword'. Discussion with the pupils indicated that they did not feel they could write an essay on a topic oftheir own choice about something thatinterested them. These attitudes indicate what the process approach would describe as lack of confidence in their own 'voice', a rather crippling unwillingness to take risks. Zamel (1985) and Lindfors (1986) provide some insights into the reasons for this and its effects on learners' written communication. Zamel researched the way teachers ofESL learners responded to their students'
writing. She found that the teachers in her study tended to view the learners' texts as 'fixed and final products' (Zamel 1985: 81) and did not give the learners an opportunity to redraft their texts on the basis of teachers' comments. She found that teachers established themselves in an authoritarian relationship to student texts and applied uniform and rigid standards to their students' writing. The result was that ESL writing teachers
misread student texts, are inconsistent in their reactions, make arbitrary corrections, write contradictory comments, provide vague prescriptions, impose abstract rules and standards, respond to texts as final products, and rarely make context-specific comments or offer specific strategies for revising the text. (ibid:
86)
Under these conditions, students are likely to believe that what they want to say is not as important as what the teachers feel they ought to say. This belief, coupled with responses which focus on surface level features of grammar and usage, would reinforce the notion that form is more important than meaning which would have a serious impact on learners' confidence in their own ideas. Furthermore, it is likely to constrain learners' willingness to experiment with language for fear of making grammatical mistakes with detrimental consequences for the development of their communicative competence. Coe (1986) and Spack (1984) emphasised the importance of teaching writers how to generate ideas without worrying about issues of form and correctness in the initial stages of the writing process, as this interfered with the communication process. The response practices of teachers that Zamel identified encourage the idea of worrying about issues of form from the outset. Coe also found that weak writers attend only to surface features of writing and not to deeper issues of communicative effectiveness. The response behaviours of the teachers in Zamel's study are thus likely to place serious barriers in the way of the learners' writing development.
Lindfors' (1986) work with a class of Zulu-speaking students in Kwa Mashu near Durban reinforces Zamel's findings on the effects of the response behaviors described above. In her observations ofprimary and secondary schools in Kwa Mashu and Mpumalanga she found a great deal of writing to be corrected and a total absence of communicative writing. She found fake letters for the teacher to mark; information compositions about comprehension passages;
decontextualised grammar exercises; and learners writing answers to teachers' comprehension questions about each chapter of an assigned set book. She argues that an over emphasis on form at the expense of a concern with effective communication of meaning restricts learners' ability to develop communicative competence. Furthermore, it will result in learners concentrating on avoiding mistakes and not on experimenting with language to communicate meaning.If pupils write only what they can write correctly they are unlikely to develop the ability to use writing to express beliefs, ideas, thoughts and feelings. As an exercise in communicative writing she involved a standard six class in a six-week process of daily dialogue journal writing. She found all the early entries written in simple sentences. Itwas only after a while when the learners realised that she was interested in their ideas and opinions and that she did not correct their grammar that they began to experiment with the language and to write more complex sentences. She found that they began to take control ofthe communication and to determine the topics that were discussed. The more they owned the communication the more complex their language became. Lindfors explained their early reluctance to move beyond simple sentences as the result of an emphasis on punitive marking of grammatical errors and of demotivating, inappropriate writing tasks. Zamel' sand Lindfors' findings mirror what has emerged from the LLH interviews with learners and teachers in this study. As Johnson (1991) argues,
This guidance is not a therapy, aimed at making students more competent in producing clear and correct sentences, but a facilitativeprocess, aimed at enabling them to understand the process of writing and to make them full participants in it (175).