Critical incident

Building up self-confidence in the learning process

It was February 2004 when the principal of the language school where I had been working for a year, summoned a beginning-of-year meeting. After outlining some general goals to be achieved that year, the headmistress mentioned the urgent need to strengthen and further develop students’ writing skills, especially at intermediate and upper-intermediate levels. The results of students’ written productions in the final exam of their preceding course of studies, had revealed serious gaps that demanded immediate action. Several students had had to re-take their exams because their pieces of writing were below standard. I was going to teach an eight-student upper-intermediate class that year and we were going to have lessons on Mondays from 5.30 to 7.00 in the afternoon.

When studying at Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) College, I had read about the use of journal writing as a technique by which students could express their feelings and thoughts without constraints and, as its entries were not always meant to be corrected, students could overcome their fears and use writing as a means of true-to-life communication. Therefore, I decided that the implementation of journals in the course might prove to be a priceless starting point from which to immerse students into the world of meaningful writing.

The first objective I set in this process was students’ recognition of their diaries as actually belonging to them, not to the teacher or to the language course. So I asked them to give each notebook a personal touch that would make them different from the rest. Great was my surprise when the following week students enthusiastically came up to me with their journals ornamented with personal pictures of friends and family; some students had even decided to give their journals a name!

I understood that at this point I had to diagnose problems and difficulties. This is why, as an opening entry, I asked students to write me a letter, which I was going to answer back, describing how they felt about writing. I wrote down some questions on the board to be used as a guide. What do you like/dislike the most about writing? How do you feel when you have to write something? What is your experience as regards writing in Spanish? are examples of this.

An analysis of students’ comments revealed that their main difficulties lay in not having enough ideas to express – phrases such as “I have no imagination” or “I never know what to write” being most frequent – and in not knowing how to organize their productions. Hopefully, the latter difficulty would be dealt with in class since the textbook we would use did teach how to write a report, an article or a letter of complaint. What I really needed to supplement, though, was the what to write stage of the process. And again, I found the solution in journal writing. However, this was no bed of roses. Students still complained extensively when asked to write. So I had to implement different strategies to motivate them and make them enjoy what they were doing. I used story-telling a lot and then asked them how the story would have been different if . . . Or I made them choose a character and write the story from his/her perspective. I sometimes used different mood musical extracts to foster creative writing on the basis of a given sentence.

Little by little, students started to achieve better results in productions and, in subsequent open letters I asked them to address to me, mentioned how their self-confidence and taste for writing had increased. Their final written performance that year improved substantially and they did very well in the final exam. But I also grew, I became a different teacher. I learnt that building up self-esteem and self-confidence is sometimes the only skill students need to become successful users of the language.