Having such a long experience in the field of developing individual as well as collaborative writing processes especially through computer interfaces, most of the questions of the interview will focus on enhancing students’ English writing skills.

Question One: focuses on 'Lack of Motivation' .

Question Two: focuses on the role of English teachers to build his students' confidence.

Question Three: tries to highlight on strategies that help weaving listening, reading, writing and conversation together.

Question Four:  is important for English teachers within Independent Schools, as it deals with the curriculum standards and how to implement them.

Question Five: deals with the use of ICT in developing students' writing skills.

Question Six: deals with the idea of  'Collaborative Writing', its importance and its impact upon developing students' writing skills.

Question One:

First of all, let’s deal with basic issues faced by most of the English teachers in the State of Qatar, which, by the way, are widespread issues throughout most Arab States. The major impediment facing teachers while trying to assign their students any writing reports, essays or researches is the ‘Lack of Motivation’. Most students are still grade-(exam) oriented. They lack the real joy of discovery that creates the atmosphere of information sharing.

Answer One:

One shouldn’t think this is a problem in Qatar or the Arab world alone. Motivation in writing is a significant problem in the states as well.  We should remember that writing is at the core of academic literacy and, of all the communication skills, is least practiced at home. Deborah Brandt of the University of Wisconsin did a large interview study of Americans’ childhood experience with reading and writing. Many of her informants remembered reading fondly, because they were listening to stories spoken or read to them on the warm lap of their parents or grandparents. But they had no such good memories for writing. They remember writing as sterile exercises practiced in school, with no intrinsic meaning to them. Their image of writing in school reminded them of the painful shot in the doctor’s office—a distasteful thing to do but somehow necessary medicine!  This is consistent with the findings of other researchers who report that first and second grade students often come home in tears asking their parents why they must write. If students only experience writing as short responses and drills they could have easily spoken or dictated off the top of their head, they will never understand how university educated people “live in” and “enjoy” the written word. In the face-to-face world, we use language for basic survival.  But if we run into special problems or challenges that are not routine and that require deep and sustained thinking, thinking that we can’t produce spontaneously or even in one sitting, we are far better off writing in order to learn how to address the situation. Writing lets us “think things through” in a way that spontaneous speaking cannot. That is why writing is a capstone of the communicative literacy required for university preparation.

 Students may also ponder why they must read, especially if they come from a home of non-reading parents. But if their parents are readers and read to them at bedtime or other special moments, they can often appreciate the magical gifts, the worlds opened, by the written word. It is no secret that Doha is not a strong reading culture, so reading and writing need equal and constant motivation in Qatar.

 To motivate students to read and write is to link these school-based skills with the world of experience they already know, control, and care about.  In the states, this linkage is referred to as “authentic” writing experiences. Authenticity in the writing classroom means giving students writing assignments that help them address situations that challenge them to experience reading and writing as a way of “figuring things out” for themselves as well as for their readers. It is writing that requires the student’s full engagement.

 What about the basics of vocabulary, spelling, grammar and punctuation? Glad you asked. No one gets addicted to reading and writing English by learning the basics. Rather, students who succeed in the basics more often than not do so because of their growing addiction to reading and writing as integral parts of their lives.  Attention and the basics are thus not incompatible. They are vitally linked. Indeed, they must be integrated throughout the K-12 curriculum.

 How, practically, can we integrate them? This is particularly challenging in an English curriculum where English is not the mother tongue. Various studies of bilinguals suggest that we can still use the mother tongue (in this case Arabic) to good use. For the Arabic student who does not speak English at home, the basics of English are essential and must play a central role in instruction up until the time a student feels comfortable expressing intentions in the language. Students must have a large enough “active” vocabulary and syntax in English to express intentions that are meaningful to their experience. They need to retrieve English words and sentence patterns with enough unconscious ease and speed so that they can start thinking about their readers, not just about their sentences. In Doha’s new standards, the shift from practice in words and sentences to practice in audiences and genres starts around the 6th grade, where the rudiments of genres of writing are first glimpsed and practiced continuously through to 12th grade.

 Still, I don’t think we should wait until middle school before we ask students to start experimenting with English as writers. To motivate the basics in K-6, especially for the Arabic speaker, there needs to be close integration between the new English and the new Arabic curriculum. When K-6 English teachers assign writing exercises in English, they should expect students to rely on Arabic words and syntax to make their way through a full English sentence. They should encourage this language mixing, certainly in the student’s first or second drafts, because it respects the student’s expressive intentions, and its leaves time for the teacher and student (in second and third rewrites) to investigate together how an English sentence can be made to capture the student’s original intention as best as English can.

When students take pride in expressing their own ideas, they can understand as never before how errors of word choice, syntax, and punctuation really matter. Errors of writing are like turbulence on an airplane. They make a text a “bumpy ride” for the reader. However, rules of vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation don’t set a course or direction for the reader. Only the writer can do that, based on the worth and creative power of his or her ideas. We need to work with students on their ideas, their flight plans, for readers.

Question Two:

According to the National Commission of Writing: “ Writing is learning. Writing competence builds confidence, which readily turns into creativity and fun….”  This may be true but in practice, writing needs confidence. For students learning English as their second language ‘confidence’ is something that has to be built first to have the courage to write. Lack of confidence is one of the main dilemmas teachers have to deal with. How can a teacher enhance his students’ confidence to begin writing even a couple of sentences or paragraphs. 

Answer Two:

I’ve already addressed some of this question a bit in my first response. Let me go deeper. At Carnegie Mellon, writing is listed as a design art, on a par with visual design, architecture, music, and engineering. Design means the creation of products that require open-ended creativity. Creative design always depends on some rules for their grounding. In writing, there are rules of apt word choice, grammar and punctuation to reduce the reader’s turbulence. But there are no such ready-made rules to decide the experience for the reader the writer will plan and pilot in a draft. In creative design, the designer is faced with a great deal of choice and creative freedom.

For the student writer, this degree of choice is horrifying. The student would like to know what the teacher wants, write it up quickly and be done with it. That is far more secure than the reality, but it’s a false reality the English teacher unwittingly supports if he or she teaches English ONLY as workbook exercises with right and wrong answers.

 To write, the student needs confidence to be sure. What can teachers do to provide it? In the states, there has been a movement known as the National Writing Project, designed to address this question in part. The idea is simple: Any writer, no matter what level of experience, knows that writing is a form of risk-taking and needs to be reassured that the purpose of criticism is not to isolate the bad from the good writers but to help everyone improve their writing. Improving at writing is a lifelong skill that doesn’t stop with schooling. Even teachers can improve. What better way to teach this lesson than to have the teacher him or herself write alongside students and take the same risks? NWP teachers model for students the risks and rewards of writing. They help students understand that writing is hard for everyone and that even teachers need second and third drafts. NWP teachers teach students the rules of constructive criticism, which requires a classroom atmosphere that is supportive and relaxed.  I agree with the NWP philosophy, but also recognize that many teachers may find it impractical to write out assignments with their students.

 Whether the teacher participates or not, at heart in the NWP philosophy is the notion that the teacher must be a “coach” as well as an “evaluator.” To be sure, teachers need to evaluate and grade. But this role should come into play only at the end of the process, when the student has submitted a final draft. The “coach” role requires supporting the student throughout the intermediate drafts and providing constructive feedback.

 My greatest joy as a writing coach is to help students “find their voice” as writers. Finding voice requires a careful alignment of many elements. Students need to have developed a message they have worked hard on and believe powerfully in; they need a sense of whom they are writing for and why their readers would care about this message; they also need a sense that their language is as polished as possible, sparing the reader any turbulence. When students recognize that teachers occupy the coaching role, encouraging open-ended design and “voice”, they will often let down their defenses and work toward a writing product that begins to build their confidence.  Students must earn confidence through the quality of their work. But without teachers showing confidence in students from the first day of class, there will be no catalyst for students to give their best effort.

Question Three:

Listening, reading, writing and speaking are basic language skills. You are basically interested in the writing skill. In the context of trying to enhance the English writing skills, how is it possible to weave all these three skills together. Are there any strategies that you can suggest to achieve that?

 Answer Three:

Absolutely. Any of the four communication modalities sharpens the other. So speaking sharpens writing and writing sharpens speaking. Writing is always adding new information that a reader, hopefully, welcomes. And the assessment that the writing is new can only be determined by reading what has been said before.

 While I talk about writing more than the other modalities, I can’t imagine a good writing course that doesn’t also teach listening, speaking, and reading in an integrated way – just as the new standards prescribe. As part of every writing assignment in my classes, students give an informal statement of what they will be writing about and take feedback from other students. Students later on do a formal class presentation to preview what their text is about. After they hand in their drafts, we project them on a central computer screen and read them out loud, making it possible for every student to read the drafts of every other student.  Speaking, listening, and reading are thus essential and mutual reinforcing components of writing in my classroom. If I talk mainly about writing, it is only because writing is the only one of the four modalities to leave a permanent record behind of the student’s work. Every well-designed writing assignment should leave the teacher with a record of how well the student has written, which is also an indication of how well the student has read, listened, and spoken in class.

Question Four:

According to the Curriculum Standards of English for grade 8 for instance, a student should be able to:

• write about imagined situations

• state plans or intentions,

• review options,

• express possibilities and consequences (wishes, aspirations, suppositions, hypothetical situations or problems to be solved, dilemmas and conflicts).

 When a teacher now reads that, he/ she will most probably need help in support in finding out the following:

• Is there any kind of priority list

• Which of these skills would most probably lead to the next

• How long would it take for average students ( who can understand, recognize and actively use 1600 words – the aim is to reach at grade 8 : 2100 words) to grasp and build competence in a skill like expressing possibilities and consequences.

Could you give us a brief answer to these concerns.

Answer Four:

I could propose a linear sequence for teaching these skills, but I’d only be guessing. However, before setting a priority of what to teach first, I would first concern myself with making sure that students are being given assignments that make these cognitive skills concrete to them. My English vocabulary is greater than 2100 words,  but even I find talk of imagined situations, hypotheticals, suppositions and so forth somewhat scary. If they are to learn these skills, students must have assignments that help them recognize them as natural extensions of reasoning they’ve already learned to do in their daily lives. More specifically, the assignments need to be designed within what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the student’s “zone of proximal development.” This zone bridges the familiar and the challenging. If writing assignments call upon skills that lack familiarity, students won’t be able to connect to them. If, on the other hand, the assignments lack challenge, students will write what they already know how to do (e.g., I supposed there was a piece of candy in the refrigerator and I ate it to stave off the option of staying hungry) and not advance their academic-cognitive understanding of these skills.  So rather than ask, which cognitive skill comes first, I would rather ask, which assignments or assignment types will guarantee that students can learn to bring the cognitive skills they regularly use at home and apply them appropriately into the transformed world of school.

This is very abstract, I admit, so let me give a concrete example. At Qatar Academy last year, 9th grade students read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Students were asked to write about the duality of good and evil and whether both reside in everyone. The weaker papers summarized the plot and showed that Stevenson had indeed showed good and evil to lurk in one man. The stronger papers drew examples from homelife (eg. how my parents sometimes call me an angel and sometimes a devil and does it make sense for me to be both?  Can I generalize this to everyone else I know? What examples from my own experience can help support my answers to this question?  Can I use my answer to make a response to Stevenson and what HE was trying to get across about the good and evil in people by writing his novel?).  This series of questions suggests a sequence by which students are able to transform questions raised in their everyday lives into academic questions. The superior papers I read showed significant signs of this cognitive-academic development. The authors of these papers were well on their way to understanding what it means to ask and respond to an academic question. The less successful papers hid their reasoning and gave dry plot summaries with little elaboration. I doubt if it would have helped these students much to give them isolated exercises in formal reasoning. What they needed was instruction in how the reasoning they already know to do can be extended and elaborated into academic reasoning. The fact that some students made this connection on the Jekyl/Hyde assignment is a very good sign for how well it was developed. But, as teachers, we must continue to work on our assignments so that they enhance the cognitive development of all of our students, not just the gifted few.

Question Five:

How is it possible to make the best use of ICT in schools in favor of developing writing skills of students especially in preparatory stage ( grade 7-9).

Answer Five:

If ICT means information and communication technology, I can answer the question. Let me start with what can be done NOW. The Internet is already an amazing source of information for the language user. New sites are being put up every day that are relevant to the everyday teacher. Let me just furnish you with two “musts” that have proved durable and stable websites for me. The first is Purdue University’s On-Line Writing Lab (OWL). It is located at http://owl.english.purdue.edu. There you will find superb on-line handouts that support teaching composition, professional writing, and academic writing, grammar, style, punctuation, tutoring in writing, and responding to writing.  You will also find handouts for teaching the writing process, the research process, and citation methods. The OWL also hosts open-forums for teachers around the world to exchange notes about how to operate a writing lab or writing center. Most importantly, OWL maintains a page on the best Internet resources for teachers that gives you a reliable and updated view of what’s the best out there on the Internet for your teaching needs. And so, if you are well-connected to the OWL, you will be well-connected.

My second invaluable source is www.onelook.com, which allows you to search English words across 931 on-line dictionaries. You will find that different dictionaries handle different words differently, and if you are teaching vocabulary, your students can find it fascinating to know the actual (often surprising) range of things a word can mean.  Like the OWL, where from one site you can get a good glimpse of other quality sites to visit, www.onelook.com, lets you experience the best of on-line dictionaries on the Internet. If you are like me, you will find yourself making attachments to specific dictionaries for their particular strengths. For example, onelook helped me see that Microsoft’s Encarta on-line Dictionary, www.encarta.msn.com, is the best on-line dictionary for my students because it uses very plain language to explain word meanings and it gives definitions in order of their actual frequency of use.  A useful assignment for a teacher teaching vocabulary is to start each class discussing a “word of the day” that students have been given at the end of the previous class.  In preparation for each word-of-the-day discussion, you assign two or three students to consult www.onelook.com, and have them cut and paste definitions from different dictionaries that seem to them somewhat different.  Collect the different definitions at the beginning of each class and then hold a 5-10 minute discussion about the different “angles” of the word that different dictionaries may bring out. Take the important academic vocabulary word “democracy”.  Encarta’s first definition is “free and equal representation of people.” But the Online Etymological Dictionary tells us first that democracy comes from the Ancient Greek demos (common people) and the Greek kratos (strength), meaning “strength to common people.” Encarta focuses on the objectives of democracy (freedom and equality) while the etymological dictionary focuses on the historical roots of democracy (the people have the strength to decide for themselves).  Such exercises help students see that knowing a word means more than rotely memorizing one paraphrase for it, but seeing the word across many angles of interest,  angles that are often  involved in the long history in which humans (not just English speakers) have used bits and pieces of the word we use today.

Now let me move from technology you can use today for your individual classrooms and technology for the future, as a way of bridging classrooms. One of the most important uses of technology in Doha, I believe, would be to create a data-base archive of student writing for the entire K-12 system. The archive would be fast, efficient, and easy to use. It would support long-term assessment studies of the rate and success of implementing the new standards over years and even generations of students. Microsoft in Qatar and Carnegie Mellon in Qatar are eager to collaborate on such a database project for the SEC. Why is such a project important? The new English standards specify levels of achievement in English at each grade level. But they don’t specify concrete examples of the student texts that actually exemplify this achievement. Now that Doha has wonderful new English language standards, the entire network of teachers in the independent schools needs to be trained, year in and year out, on the texts that students are writing and their relationship to the new standards. Teachers need to discuss student texts in professional development workshops and come to agreements about which texts meet the standards and which don’t. 

 The only way for the English standards to become real is for the English coming out of the Doha independent schools to be publicly archived (while protecting the anonymity of the writer), as one archives books in a library. This allows a teacher in the 7th grade to know what kind of English 12th graders are currently producing. And it allows the 12th grade teacher to know the English currently being written by 8th and 9th graders. Judith Langer at the University of Albany, the state’s leading expert in the making of excellent schools in the English curriculum, has found that the openness and transparency of standards across grade levels is the single most important factor in assuring a strong English language curriculum. Archiving technology relies on a sophisticated computer network whose purpose is to bring together and strengthen a human network of teachers.

 There is also useful technology that affects teachers and students more directly. Compared to other countries in the Arab world, the TOEFL scores of students coming out Qatar are low. Doha students need extensive training in timed, high-stakes writing, and in the format of the American 5-paragaph essay, on which the TOEFL writing component relies. My guess is that many teachers in Doha may not be fully familiar, or comfortable, with this form of essay writing. So the teachers need to be trained as well as the students. ETS has its own technology for training students in this form of structured writing. As part of a technology proposal that Carnegie Mellon has submitted to the Qatar Foundation, we would bring the ETS technology into the schools of Doha, first to train teachers, and then to train students.

Only a small fraction of writing is timed and conducted under high-stakes conditions. Teachers in 7th grade and up need to motivate students with more open-ended assignments. As writing assignments become more open-ended, it is harder for teachers to develop effective prompts and good grading rubrics for them. My colleagues and I at Carnegie Mellon have been developing technology that analyzes samples of student writing and in a few seconds provides information about the sample that can be useful to teachers seeking better prompts and grading rubrics. We would use this technology in teacher training workshops. Teachers would submit a batch of student essays before the workshop took place. And in the workshop, we would teach teachers what the computer analysis revealed and what prompts and grading rubrics might be useful based on what we discovered.

Question Six:

What are your main suggestions to develop collaborative writing processes, bearing in mind that this kind of activity is still new to most teachers and will not be easily accepted at first.

Answer Six:

Show students the “acknowledgements” section of any book, where authors get to thank all who made the book possible. Let students know that every author relies on an extensive support group to make any significant piece of writing possible. If the text is co-authored, the collaboration is even more visible. Collaboration can take many forms. The simplest is when students work in groups as part of pre-writing, and then draft on their own. Students can also be assigned to work in groups as peer-editors, making suggestions to one another about how to revise their individual drafts. More challenging is when students themselves work in teams to co-author texts. This means the collaboration must endure during the drafting phase. And once student groups write together, one must establish whether there is a leader of the group who gets the final say or whether there is a more democratic free-for-all about whose decisions get to stick.

I write probably more than you wanted to know to emphasize that “collaborative writing process” has many meanings and it’s important to understand from the start which definition you are trying to support for your class and why. Regardless of definition, it is challenging for teachers to support “collaboration”, whether in Doha or in the states. As they should expect in the states, teachers in Doha need ongoing professional development, with special seminars on supporting collaboration.

The good news is that the teacher’s role of “coach” that I emphasized earlier is fundamental to supporting any definition of collaboration. The coaching role means that, first and foremost, you are trying to make all your students successful, not simply evaluating which of your students will be successful and which won’t. When you support collaboration, you are trying to make a team successful. This is what coaches do anyway. Putting yourself in the role of coach will make it that much easier to take in what good professional trainers have to offer when they teach teachers all the various techniques available to support collaboration.