At the college where I teach, the Braude School of Engineering in Karmiel, Israel, we have changed the curriculum of the required English classes to include writing of paragraphs. The students are high achievers as getting accepted to engineering school requires high grades. Ranging in age from 18 – 28, they are highly motivated to learn. They are required to take two or three English courses, depending on the department but may have to take more if their starting English level is too low. In terms of vocabulary and comprehension, they have little problem handing general and even specialized texts but often initially struggle in writing a simple sentence properly. Yet, in practice, the main challenge in teaching them writing stems not from transmitting the technical aspects of the art but in overcoming the varying degrees of starting ignorance suffered by the students.
One serious deficiency created by the Israeli educational system is the
lack of ability to organize ideas and thoughts.
In order to be efficient with the limited class time and the collective
need of the students, teachers and school administration to achieve high scores
on the Bagrut exam, the Israeli national high school matriculation exam,
similar to the French Bac, teachers tend to feed summaries of the
material to the students. As a result, most students get little practice in
identifying and organizing main ideas. Therefore, when we request a student to
write a paragraph with a topic sentence including three subtopics, many find it
difficult to hit the nail on the head, i.e., write a topic sentence without any
distracting elements. The issue is not their English, which is generally quite
good, but instead the lack of skill in identifying the essential elements and
expressing them. It requires significant work by both the student and teacher
to overcome this obstacle.
Engineering students often are victims of the European academic
distinctions in high school. It appears that science track students are
supposed to be expert with numbers and formulas but don’t need to know how to
communicate while humanity track students must know how to express themselves
but are not required to understand science. Both assumptions are entirely false
but so are many other assumptions of traditional education systems, frequently
based on 19th century ideas. One of the results of this tracking is
that many science students seem unaware that spoken and written language differ. It is necessary to reiterate several times that written text is expected to
strictly comply with the rules of grammar, syntax and flow as well as employ a
wider and higher variety of vocabulary. These students tend to write as they
speak and often fail to understand why that is not acceptable. For example,
they suffer from the ubiquitous use of the word and as a connector, a
major no-no in written English. Students whose native language is Russia and
Arabic have an increased tendency to insert the period at the end of the idea
regardless of how many subject-verb combinations precede it. Again, only
frequent feedback can create the awareness of the singularity of written communication.
Lastly, as most Israeli high school students write so few compositions
in their own language, they have no awareness of the writing process. Granted, it is more difficult to write a nice
sounding sentence in English because it is a non-homogenous language, i.e., its
roots are derived from many languages. Yet, as I tell my students many times
and create long deadline to reflect, there is no such things as good writing,
only good rewriting. Under extreme pressure from the heavy load of the first-year
engineering program, they initially tend to write a first draft of a paragraph
and believe they have completed the assignment. Only after several “bloody”
paragraph feedbacks (from my corrections) do they start to apply the various QA
techniques I suggest for polishing. Once again, these intelligent students lack
understanding of the writing process and must be taught it.
Thus, writing, a new “can-do” task mandated by the Ministry of Education
and Council of Higher Education in Israel, involves more than teaching English
as a language, whose level varies significantly. Just as significantly, it
requires an increase in the students’ understanding of the whole writing
process, regardless of language, in terms of logic, form of expression and
process. The key to achieving this goal is, fortunately, practice and feedback,
which involve hard work by all parties. I personally de-emphasize grades in the
practice stage in order to encourage students to go beyond their comfort zone.
Strong feedback, including praise for successful elements, is the engine for
change and improvement, however painful that may be. Furthermore, the rod
should not be spared as students need to grasp and internalize that negligent
(not poor) work will result in harsh but constructive criticism. In other
words, the teacher must explain the rules and guidelines thoroughly but expect
students to apply them. The reward for everybody’s hard work is a good grade on
a final project in the short term and attainment of an important life skill in
the long term.
The basic difficulties faced by these engineering students are not a
result of a lack of intelligence but instead lack of training. As such, it is
possible to overcome their lack of background and instill an understanding of
organization, language and process through practice and caring. I am proud of
the progress made by my students in the last 13 weeks despite (or maybe because
of) the Zoom teaching. They worked hard and learned how to communicate a
developed idea in English clearly and succinctly despite their initial writing
blocks. Chapeau to them.
* Always include a picture caption to allow the blind to enjoy. Picture - Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/OpenClipart-Vectors-30363/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=157581">OpenClipart-Vectors</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=157581">Pixabay</a>
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