Revisiting the Written Communication of 7th Graders: Fore-sighting in the Language Teaching Profession

Abstract

There is a growing interest in language teaching over the years. In the Philippines, it is even more challenging considering the multifaceted conditions baffling language teaching because of the institutionalization of the mother tongue-based multilingual education. Gaining the language background of learners before the instructional implementation gives the language teacher the vantage point of preparing himself be prepared in his tasks. The study employed the descriptive method of analysis to determine the constraints of the 300 compositions of seventh graders from public and private schools in the City of San Fernando. A simple analysis of discourse and rhetoric was also employed to be able to determine the level of meanings of the analyzed manuscripts. The more than 200 compositions were taken from learners known by the researchers and who were willing to write on the subject given to them. The gathering of these compositions started in August as part of the researcher's requirement in their class. The rest of the manuscripts were taken from the seventh graders at Union Christian College as a form of validation of the information gathered from other schools in the City. Generally, the respondents committed robust errors in the use of punctuation marks, capitalization, contraction, and pluralization. Along with grammar, there were highly substantive violations of subject-verb agreement, shifting of gender and person, possessive structure, and tenses of verbs. With semantic analysis, more than half of the analyzed manuscripts were hardly understood because of the problems in syntax. Moreover, a considerable number of manuscripts showed no substance concerning syntax. However, the pragmatics of the compositions show the substance of the messages only the first language interference came into play wherein the writers tended to translate their thoughts from their first language to the third language (English). The result of the study serves a guiding post to future language teachers like the researchers themselves as these provide them with the realities of their future classrooms. It made them realize that being a would-be-language teacher is filled with expectations that for them to help address the challenges in the language classrooms such as their foregoing activity, there is a need for rigorous training to equip themselves with the crafts needed by a language teacher.