Teaching Writing Using Five Little Words Technique

It's widely known that among other English skills, writing is the most difficult one for teachers to teach and for students to learn. The difficulty increases if you are teaching the skill to junior high school students, just like me :). When it comes to writing section, well, I should admit, I must prepare myself to not only spend much of my time reading the writing students made, but also to the fact that mostly their writing is grammatically incorrect.

If you are anything like me, I am sure you must wonder about what you should do to help them write better and hence help yourselves spend less time to correct their writing. As a matter of fact, examining students' work is the most uninteresting part of teaching profession. Well, if you are among teachers I am talking about who are looking for strategies or techniques to help students write more effectively, the following technique I use in my class may be helpful. I name the technique "Five Little Words".

Five Little Words Technique Applied
I invented the technique while I was examining students writing in which I found that students tend to make more grammatical errors when they are trying to make longer sentences. When the sentences they made is shorter, the quantity of errors they make decreases significantly. Based on this finding, I assume that limitting the number of words in sentences students make will be useful to help them write better.

Following the assumption, I began to think about how many words each sentence should contain. Three, four, five, or six words? Initially I took three as the limit assuming that three word senteces consisting of subject, verb, object (e.g. I read books) are common and reasonable. However, I then thought that even though they are reasonable but such sentences not so natural since usually students write not about themselves but also about their relatives (My father read that book). More commonly, the subject and the object of sentences students made consist of more that one words. So, I decided that the most rational limit is five words consisting of subject (max, two words), verb, and object or complement (max, two words), hence I name it "five little words technique."

After the decision about the number of words in each sentence is made, it's now time to apply the technique in the classroom. The instruction I gave to students was as follow: "please write your experience in the last holiday. Remember, your sentece must consist of maximally five words, no more." Of course, since my students is at the early stage of English learning, meaning that they will not understand the instruction given in English, I translate the instruction to their first language.

The result? Well, it's magic. And you know what it means.

Teaching Writing Using Predicted Vocabulary Technique

Teaching students (especially those non English ones) to write is one of the most difficult tasks in English Language Classroom. No matter what level of education students are at, from elementary up to college students, when assigned to write, generally they will feel discouraged. It is not because they do not know what they want to write. It is because they do not know how to express what they want to write.

In case of college students, this may mean that they do not know the correct structure of the assigned essay (thesis statement, supporting ideas, etc.), they are just not sure about the correct diction which should be used. All of this will make students respond negatively to any writing assignment given by the lecturers.

In my case (remember, mine are junior high students), this mean that they do not know the words or vocabularies they should use to express what they have in mind. If they want to write about their 'visiting grandparents' experience, for example, they do not really know that they should use the words 'went, yesterday, last week, visited, arrived, rode, grandparent, family, etc' (remember, English is a foreign language for my students which means that they think in Bahasa Indonesia and then translate their thought into English). With this fact in mind, you may imagine how difficult it is to teach my students to write. Well, that's also what I thought when I first taught them. But now, that's not a big deal for me since I have invented and used a teaching technique which so far I think effective to teach students how to write. I call the technique as 'predicted vocabularies technique' or PVT for short.

Predicted Vocabularies Technique Explained
Before discussing how I used Predicted Vocabularies Technique to teach writing, let me first explain what it is. In PVT, students are given a task to write about particular topic. Instead of looking up the English words in dictionary by themselves, students are provided with words (pronoun, noun, verb, preposition, adjective, etc) which the teacher think are closely related to the topic given. What students need to do is just to write what they have in mind and use any appropirate words given by the teacher.

Predicted Vocabularies Technique In Practice
Even though this technique can actually be used in almost any type of writing text, I usually use this technique to teach writing recount text (text about students' personal experience). Here is an example of how I use this technique in my classroom.

The first thing I do is to choose appropriate topics to be given to students. One of the common topics related to recount text is Holiday. So I decided to choose 'spending holiday' as the topic which students should write.

After having the topic, I should predict vocabularies which students will need to write the text. And based on the topic given, I predict that students will need the following words 'last week, ago, went, arrived, with, etc.' With these words I predict, what students need to do is just to think about events they experienced in the past and pick any suitable words which I have provided.