The low proficiency of English language among students extremely effects the nation as it can hinder the nations aspiration to become a developed county by 2020 (Yunus,2014) To illustrate further, As Malaysian form one students progress in learning, primary school students entering into secondary school always tend to feel overwhelmed especially those students who are weak in their English proficiency. It effects mainly their writing and indirectly their speaking too.
This is because, they tend to have to do more challenging descriptive writing tasks and when writing tasks becomes rapidly hard, majority of students with low level of English proficiency are unable to score in writing.Form one students with low level English proficiency often faced hardship in fulfilling the needs of descriptive writing tasks that becomes harder and harder. The writing component for English paper in UPSR is fully guided with notes and students need to write only a minimum of 50-100 words . However the descriptive writing for English paper in PT3 requires form one students (13 years old) to write one non guided essay (80 words) and a semi guided essay (120 words). As a result, PT3 writing format really test students proficiency level and students with poor proficiency will score poorly in their descriptive writing test (Khoo (2010) )
Furthermore, many low level proficient form one students will either try to attempt to answer or just give up completely the writing tasks.. To illustrate further due to lack of proficiency, most form one students mainly experience ‘writers block’(Neda,2012) whereby when low level English proficiency form one students do not have the language proficiency they are unable to communicate their ideas and thoughts in speaking and writing effectively. Studies show that successful writing performance in the language classroom needs learners to be highly proficient in English (Mohd Zin & Rafiq-Galea, 2010).
I described proficiency here because it related to the topic of children speaking and writing.
Teachers, sometimes you do want to introduce sounds to children. To make them hear how native and non native children speak and pronounce certain words and sentences. I always use this website audio to present to my students different voices of children speaking. I even downloaded it into my computer as a zip folder. It is scripted so students will hear same sentences in different voices.
One of the activities I do with my students is that, I play the audio and ask them to differentiate is it native or non native. And normally the do guess it correctly. It is extremely fun.
I would love to share my resources with teachers.It might be beneficial to teachers as well.
Please click the link to view the resources; https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iJpiCsTs6HbABf7HYi5nelVin67Ud1dc?usp=sharing
References for the picture: freepik.com
References for the sources: Children speech recording englishchildren_.zip
Comments
Post a Comment