Teaching Enhancement Grant (TEG)
Congratulations to our CELC colleagues for the completion of the initial phase of the Student Written Errors Project!
Principal Investigators:
Wu Siew Mei, T. Ruanni F. Tupas, Zhu Shenfa
Project Members:
Brad Blackstone, Peggie Chan, Deng Xudong, Happy Goh, Ho Poh Wai, Lee Kooi Cheng, Maria Luisa Sadorra, Richard Seow & Susan Tan
This one-year project, funded by the Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning through its competitive Teaching Enhancement Grant, involved the creation of a corpus of undergraduate and post graduate writing in the university, with the main aim of identifying and categorizing patterns of written errors made in the context of a meaning-focused writing task. A secondary follow-up aim of the project was to survey perceptions of tertiary teachers of English and other courses of the grammaticality and coherence of persistent sentence- and paragraph-level errors. The predominant types of error found in students’ writing were (1) word-based errors involving collocation, preposition and idiomatic expression, (2) errors in punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and typos, and (3) errors in the use of articles and determiners. In the survey, the respondents found grammar and coherence problems which impede meaning much more unacceptable than those which do not. The initial findings of the project can provide empirically justifiable rationale for designing materials using particular types of error. Materials design in this sense is able to address the specific and relevant language needs of the students. However, the survey results pose a very interesting question for materials development as well: Which errors need most attention – those which are most frequently occurring or those which impede meaning the most?
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NTUC Workplace Literacy Programme
The NTUC Learning Hub Project, which involves the assessment, revision and development of NTUC’s Workplace Literacy Programme is the Centre’s first collaboration with an external organization in the preparation of materials for adult ESL learners for the workplace. A team of eight – Luisa Sadorra, KC Lee, Wu Siew Mei, Happy Goh, Chitra Varaprasad, Deng Xudong, Peggie Chan and Lee Ming Cherk – revised and designed the first four levels of the Trainee’s and Trainer’s Manuals.
Significant changes and contributions made to the existing manuals include:
- the re-organization and re-orientation of the manuals, from skills based to theme-based approach. There are established themes that run across all four levels of manuals.
- the design of listening and speaking tasks, a skill area that is lacking in the existing manuals. The team wrote dialogue and conversation scripts which were in line with respective themes. Audio recording was done in-house.
- the addition of a grammar section which includes brief explanations of grammar points, examples and exercises.
- the context of tasks and scenarios which are locally situated.
Through this project, the team learned more about the needs and demands of different types of workers in Singapore. The project was indeed an enriching experience to the team and the Centre.
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