Teaching English writing to Bangladeshi young learners

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to find out the techniques that are being followed for teaching English writing to Bangladeshi young learners. Additionally, the effect of the applied strategies on young learners’ writing skills. This study was conducted following the qualitative method which included teachers’ perception regarding teaching writing, co-observation of two writing classes, and analysing students’ class works and exam scripts. The researcher selected purposive homogeneous sampling for choosing four English medium teachers and five Bengali medium teachers as participants to collect data. From the collected data it was found that various types of strategies such as discussion sessions with brainstorming and elicitation, providing interactive worksheets, guided writing, independent writing with picture description, story mapping, visualisation with videos and pictures, peer feedback, group work, and pair work are done in English medium schools for teaching writing effectively to young learners. On the contrary, in Bengali medium most of the writing tasks are memorisation based, and there are no interactive or creative tasks for students. Furthermore, teachers are not allowed to create or modify their own techniques or materials. As a result, this hampers young learners’ learning. The findings of this study will help the material developers and teachers to take an initial idea and modify them according to their learners’ needs and classrooms.