top of page

Constructing a conversational classroom to stimulate students' interest in expression

Nakajo Ayami【Japan】

The purpose of writing is not only to narrate facts, but more importantly, to express true emotions. By describing emotional changes, readers can feel genuine emotions. Good articles can move people with emotions and resonate with them. In actual composition teaching, although teachers repeatedly emphasize that writing should have genuine emotions and specific descriptions of details, students are unable to mobilize their emotional experiences and feel like they have nothing to write about,

According to constructivist learning theory, in order for teachers to become helpers in constructing meaning for students, they should pay attention to stimulating students' interest in learning and helping them form learning motivation. Learning is not a passive reception of information stimuli, but an active construction of meaning. Students actively select, process, and manipulate external information based on their own experiential background, in order to gain their own meaning. External information itself has no meaning, meaning is constructed by learners through the repeated and bidirectional interaction process between new and old knowledge experiences. In writing, we should try our best to make students interested in writing and willing to speak and write. Starting from three strategies: creating a relaxed atmosphere for writing classes, conversational classroom teaching, and targeted teaching evaluation, can greatly stimulate students' interest in expression.

1、 Create a relaxed classroom atmosphere for writing assignments

Firstly, the theme of the composition should be carefully considered and refined by the teacher, especially avoiding detachment from students' actual lives, rigid values education, narrow thinking and life perspectives in writing. The questions of "why did I write this article" and "what is the ideological value of this composition" often confuse students. If we are discussing topics that students are interested in, then naturally students will have something to say. For example, when discussing writing topics centered around people such as teachers, classmates, parents, and family, students will have a lot of experience and naturally have more content to say. If students are not required to praise or even criticize, their thinking will be more active.

Secondly, we should downplay the seriousness of the composition class and introduce it through situational contexts to alleviate students' psychological pressure, especially by not requiring them to write a full word count. Instead, we should start from students' existing knowledge and experience to enhance their perception of life. Personalized experience and feelings are important criteria for determining the intention of an essay. Through appropriate prompts, students can be encouraged to think divergently, release their emotions, and find the "pearls" hidden in seemingly ordinary materials.

2、 Conversational classroom teaching

Conversation based classroom teaching is a highly interactive and generative process that uses communication to drive thinking and thinking to drive expression. In a relaxed atmosphere of teacher-student conversation, if time permits, teachers can ask multiple questions about a certain topic, and students will unconsciously explain the main parts of the question in a specific and exciting way. Teachers need to preset multiple perspectives on the topic when preparing for class, enhance students' language expression ability, and improve their thinking agility, organization, and depth through continuous transmission of verbal information.

Conversational essay guidance can comprehensively cover students' essays, weekly journals, fragment exercises, and in class essays. It can consistently run through various writing stages such as drafting, face-to-face evaluation, mutual improvement, and upgrading of students' essays. It can flexibly use teacher-student conversations, student student conversations, teacher to group or individual representative student conversations, and make reasonable use of various time periods and means such as classroom, break time, self-study, online, WeChat, etc. It is free, flexible, and highly operable, and can be integrated into regular essay teaching anytime and anywhere.

3、 Targeted teaching evaluation

Targeted teaching evaluation is reflected not only in the in class essay reviews, but also in the written reviews of student workbooks.

After students practice writing in class, they should be evaluated immediately. The evaluation should focus on the teaching objectives rather than being comprehensive. For example, if this class is a side description exercise, then only this point should be evaluated. Students' typos or awkward sentences should not be used as evaluation points for this writing class.

For teachers, grading students' essays is a time-consuming and laborious task. Generally, it takes a week or even longer to complete and distribute a student's essay after a single assignment. During this period, students' expectations for the new essay are completely eroded. Psychological research shows that people have an expectation period for things, and after the expectation period, they lose their genuine curiosity and longing, becoming indifferent and indifferent. Students who have just finished writing their essays always want to know their grades and the teacher's evaluation the most. At this point, if students' psychological expectations are not met in a timely manner, it will reduce their enthusiasm for writing. We can set aside one or two minutes before Chinese class to read students' exciting clips and ask them to guess the author of the clip,

In this way, students can maintain their expectations for the composition, and when it comes to the actual evaluation, they will be particularly serious and read the teacher's evaluation very carefully.

In short, creating a relaxed atmosphere for writing classes, conversational classroom teaching, and targeted teaching evaluations can eliminate students' fears and concerns about writing, help students broaden their thinking, diverge their thinking, and effectively fill the gap between "students' existing experiences" and "the experience required for this writing character". In specific communicative contexts, students' abilities to awaken, activate, experience, process, transform, and recreate life can be enhanced, and they can learn to transform "external life" into "inner life" and feel life. In this way, students are not afraid that they cannot write genuine emotions and discover life.





ISSN: 3066-229X  E-ISSN:3066-8034   Copyright © 2024 by Reviews Of Teaching

bottom of page