“Written conversation” in teaching

张 弛

“Written conversation” in teaching

张 弛

“Written conversation” as an effective carrier of Ideological Education in Colleges , is face scripts through books with written language for two-way communication between the teachers and students ． This paper presents that “written conversation”, is the effective tools as an auxiliary means of teaching and improves the teaching level of teachers． the paper is also aim to analyze the advantages of “written conversation” by citing specific examples．

written conversation strategy teaching method

With the invention of writing, the progress of written conversation has been taking place around our life. This kind of silent conversation also becomes more and more vital in teaching activity, especially to teachers. The Written Conversation strategy was developed by Bintz and Shelton who discusses a teacher research project designed to use written conversation as an instructional strategy to integrate reading, writing and social studies in a middle school. This new teaching strategy could cultivate both students and teachers in classes.

One of the merit of written conversation is the “omniscient perspective”, which means all students and teachers could take part in all kinds of activities. For receptors, differs from the oral conversation, which just few students could communicate with the teacher, written conversation made whole class engaged with content skills and knowledge. For the teacher, written conversation is a good way to get feedback, to supervise teaching quality and to guide teaching correctly. When he asks students to handout their summary or answer sheets, he could realize the general level about learners performance. Thereafter weak spots of learners could be accurately diagnosed. Then the teacher could do some strengthen training and weak turnover to help students correct timely. The teacher must realized that nobody is going to help students more than him. And he should know each and every one of his students in a personal and professional way. Thus students-teacher interactions form a virtuous circle by written conversation. While the written conversation could be used in all activities such as writing, reading, even speaking. When teacher gives a reading material Shadow of the Dragon then he promote the question“What is happening with Sang Le?” And then the students could write their conversation according to the stressed sentences, after dong this, teacher could let students read their conversation. Thus students’ reading, writing and speaking abilities are greatly trained.

In order to cultivate research teachers, except proclaiming to build a corporative relationship between students and teachers, written conversation between teachers themselves is also greatly acquired.

Another merit of written conversation is a good way to make self ref l ection. Take writing a teaching plan for example, before the class, the teacher can use it to anticipate the teaching effect. After the class, the teacher could write down his own ref l ection on the teaching plan. Then he learned which teaching step should be improved or what mistakes should be avoided. During this progress, the teacher is, actually, communicating with himself. Finally, his professional ability has begun to be accumulated according to a systematic plan. The trickle became a stream; and the stream has become a torrent.

Thus, written conversation has the great value of improving teaching quality, helping teachers’ specialty development. And the growth of teachers and students followed a kind of compound-interest law, which was greatly enhanced by the invention of written conversations.

Reference:

[1]ICC： Characteristics of Effective Instruction in Literacy．

[2]夏汝．How To Be A Good Teacher[J]．第二课堂：英语版,2016(10)：37～37．

[3]Bintz, William P．, and Karen S． Shelton． Using Written Conversation in Middle School： Lessons from a Teacher Researcher Project[J]．Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,2004(06)：492～507．

（作者单位：西华师范大学外国语学院）