I found during both my long practicum and now during my CFE, that students cannot write. They have poor grammar and sentence structure, and often, I find myself rereading a sentence multiple times, unable to decipher the meaning behind the string of words. And let’s not forget that their papers in general lack direction – what are they trying to say, to prove, to argue? Why are kids unable to form cohesive sentences nowadays?

I was working with a Science-1 class here at AIS on their lab reports. They conducted an experiment looking at the various factors that affect the rate of falling of an object. Some experimented with surface area, with mass, with distance, but they all had submit a formal lab report. They were given class time to write their lab reports and while they worked on a google doc, their teacher and I would be also online, reading their reports while they were writing them to give feedback and suggestions. We noticed that none of the groups were writing proper hypotheses, so we had a quick discussion with the class about what is needed for a good hypotheses. However, even with our explanation, we ended up with hypotheses that had the structure of “If….. then…..”. When we told them to write their hypotheses without using this structure, the students were unable to rewrite their hypotheses. Most students were accustomed to this structure, and were incapable of deviating from it. I found that they couldn’t manipulate the language to form varying sentence structures. In fact, some students were actually struggling to form complete sentences in the first place!

I can’t help but wonder about this lack of writing ability in students. I might have argued that it was because these are international students at AIS, and for many of them, English is not their first language. However, I found that even my students at my practicum school in Vancouver were struggling to form grammatically correct and cohesive sentences. I wonder whether this is due to children reading less and less nowadays. When I was younger, any free time I had was spent hunched over a book, exploring the realms of another world. I can’t help but notice that the only thing that I see a child hunched over these days, is a phone. Or an ipad. Or a computer. They are playing games, they are chatting with friends, they are facebooking or instagramming or snapchatting, but they are not reading. I can’t help but think that this has affected future generations and their ability to write well. How can I help my students write better? In the future, I think I would start early in the year and get them to keep practicing writing and writing, and give them plenty of feedback so that they can improve every time. As a science teacher, I don’t want to limit myself to lab reports, but I would want to think of creative and engaging writing assignment (such as one I made during my practicum about writing the story of a sperm cell and its race to reach the egg). I cannot make my students read, but I CAN help them develop their writing skills!