Helping the grade 12 students improve their sense of responsibility to themselves, their families and society through post-reading activities

PART I: INTRODUCTION

So far, we have been caring much about what families, schools and society

should do for children. However, it is also important for students to be aware of

what they have to do for themselves, their families and society. In other words,

students must be responsible to themselves, their families and society. But in fact,

many students not only neglect studying but also often avoid and complain about

their tasks, miss deadlines, break the disciplines, and even blame others for the

mistakes and failure. They are more and more materialistic, selfish, indifferent and

emotionless. Therefore, it is undeniable that they are becoming more and more

irresponsible.

As a high school teacher, I have learned that one of the six pillars of character

education is to be responsible. However, educating sense of responsibility at my

school has not been really effective. One of the most basically causes may be that

responsibilities are usually taught theoretically with little practical application. In

addition, it is not focused on in every lesson they learn in classes. Whereas, it is

obviously possible to educate students' sense of responsibility through different

subjects such as: Civic Education, Literature, Biology, English,… A question is

raised is how I can teach my students sense of responsibility while our teaching

methods mainly focus on language skills. In addition, my students are at the grade

12 when the GCSSE exam is coming soon and the teachers try to teach the

knowledge that help students to get good marks in their tests and exams. It means I

have to improve my students' sense of responsibility through teaching knowledge

and language skills.

As a matter of fact the post-reading stage of a reading lesson is often confused

with the closing of a lesson. So, teachers usually use classic post-reading activities

to make sure that the students have already comprehended the text. However, I

learn that at the post-reading stage students are not studying about the language of

the text and they are not comprehending the text, either. At this stage students are

supposed to apply what they possess. Post-reading activities are expected to

encourage students to reflect upon what they have read, which takes the students to

their real life situation. So, post-reading stage is potential to apply the activities

which help improve students' sense of responsibility to themselves, their families

and society. By this way I can combine teaching language skills with

improving my students' sense of responsibility without time-consuming.

For the reasons above, from the beginning of the school year 2018-2019, I

have carried a study which has changed the ways we used to teach post-reading

with the topic "Helping the grade 12 students improve their sense of

responsibility to themselves, their families and society through post-reading

activities". Hoping that with these experiences teaching post-reading at my school

will become more flexible and our students will be more responsible to

themselves, their families and society.

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PART II: CONTENT

I. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1. Sense of responsibility

1.1. Definition of responsibility and sense of responsibility

Responsibility is defined as the state or fact of having a duty to deal with

something or of having control over someone; thestate or fact of being accountable

or to blame for something; the opportunity or ability to act independently and take

decisions without authorization; a thing which one is required to do as part of a

job, role, or legal obligation. Responsibility is the burden someone is obligated to

fulfill in order to meet a particular need. Someone’s level of meeting his

responsibilities shows how trustworthy he is, particularly if he consistently meets

his responsibilities.

A sense of responsibility is an awareness of one’s obligations; it’s like doing

what we suppose to do. It can be defined as a general conscious awareness; "a sense

of security"; "a sense of happiness"; "a sense of danger"; "a sense of self".

1.2. List of responsibilities every student should fulfill

Students are expected to fulfill some key responsibilities before they leave school

and start a new life. They are:

- Responsibilities to themselves

- Responsibilities to their families

- Responsibilities to their school

- Responsibilities to their community and society

2. Post- reading activities

2.1. Definition of post-reading activities

Post-reading activities are simply activities done after while-reading activities

are completed. At this stage the students are in a temporary change of state or

condition, that is, they now know something they did not know before. The task of

the post-reading stage is to integrate or synthesize the read material into one's

knowledge base of the topic. Students need to make the material their own.

This can be achieved through a variety of means employing writing, class

discussion, visual representations, and physical demonstration.

When the while-reading stage is completed, the students are expected to have

obtained new information from the text. This should bring about a change of some

kind such as they would know more, or think or feel differently from before.

According to Nuttall (1996: 164) when intensive work in a during-/while-reading

stage is completed, general comprehension must be intended to. At this stage, the

students should be able to evaluate the text as a whole to respond to it from a more

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or less personal point of view. They may be asked to agree or disagree with the

author or the characters in the text; relate the content to their own experience;

connect the content with other work in the same field; discuss characters, incidents,

ideas, feelings; or predict what can happen afterwards.

2.2. Benefits of using post-reading activities to improve the students' sense of

responsibility

- Teachers can educate students' character through teaching language skills

- Students recycle what they have obtained from the text

- Students go beyond the text and enter the real world, equipped with the newly-

obtained information.

- Updating the problems that are closed to the students' real life and working

together to find out the solutions as their responsibility.

- Students can well prepare for an independent life in the future.

- Students learn to be responsible for their actions, choices and decisions to

themselves, their families and society.

- From post-reading activities, the students are developping themselves to achieve

automaticity, meaningful learning, autonomy, willingness to communicate,

interlanguage, and communicative competence.

2.3. Some principles for choosing post-reading activities to raise students'

responsibility

- The activities must connect the topics of the reading texts with the

responsibilities that students should fulfill.

- The activities should keep all of the students involved and interested.

- The activities should help the students develop their communicative skills.

- The activities should make students think of what they have to do in the real life.

- Teaching the sense of responsibility may make students boring so the activities

should be challenging and interesting enough to attract their attention and

stimulate them to take part in.

- To be suitable with the time limit of post-reading stage, the length of each

activity is about 10 minutes

II. SITUATION ANALYSIS

1. Situation of students' sense of responsibilities at my school.

My school is located in the mountainous area of the district. Therefore, there

are many difficulties in the teaching and learning. Most of the students at my

school live far from the district center and come from low-income families. In spite

of the difficulties, the students are given a chance to go to school. In recent years,

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due to the objective reasons, the number of students applying for my school has

been decreasing, which makes the enrolment seem to be too easy for the students.

It may be a cause of the fact that the students hardly make any attempts to learn,

they are becoming lazier and lazier.

As a matter of fact, the students are very irresponsible to themselves. Their

sense of learning is too low, which causes their low learning results. In the class,

they often talk or do private things, do not pay attention to the teachers' lectures.

Many of them do not do homework and prepare for new lessons before class. The

situation of unpunctuality, skipping class and cheating in tests or exams is quite

frequent. Especially for the grade 12 students, although they are going to take the

GCSE exam, they seem not to worry about their studying. They probably think that

their teachers will not let them get bad marks and they will be able to cheat in the

exams. They seem to be waiting for their luck, so they hardly make effort to study.

In spite of their low living conditions, the parents try to buy electric bikes for

their children to go to school instead of going by bike. Furthermore, the students

also own expensive and modern mobile devices, which makes them neglect

studying. Some of them use smart phones sneakily in the classes. Many parents

complain that their children are attracted to the smart phones all day; they neither

do housework nor study at home. They spend their time on mobile devices instead

of others activities such as reading or playing sports which help improve their

health, knowledge and life skills. They care more about the status and problems in

social network than about what they are facing, their parents or other family

members. As a result, they are impacted negatively from some information in

social network. It can be said that they lack responsibility to both themselves and

their families.

In addition, they also lack the conformity with the law. In spite of the

obligation, most of them go to school by electric bike without wearing helmets. It

is not until they arrive at the school gate that they wear helmets in order to avoid

the teachers' punishment. Some of the students even ride motorbike to school

although their age is not old enough. They throw waste in public, even damage the

common property. Besides, many of them refuse to take part in social activities.

They seem to indifferent and emotionless. In short, the young tend to be more and

more irresponsible to not only themselves, their families but society as well. It is

one of the causes that make the students live without objectives or even commit a

crime. There seems to be no way to solve this problem except improving the

students' sense of responsibility.

2. Situation of teaching the students sense of responsibility at my school.

It is said that family is the foundation of character education. It means that

children's character is mainly formed by family education. Besides, school also

plays an important role in educating students' character. Normally, it is considered

that character education is the responsibility of form teachers and the teachers who

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teach Civic Education. Therefore, at my school, it is likely only form teachers and

Civic Education teachers take responsibility for teaching students responsibility.

The Young Onion sometimes organizes outdoor activities which help raise the

students' responsibility. Other teachers mainly teach knowledge in textbook and

some necessary skills that their subjects require the sense of responsibility is hardly

focused.

3. Situation of learning English and teaching post-reading in English lessons

at my school.

As mentioned above, the students’ living conditions have a big effect on the

way students study. Many of them learn English with the only aim to pass the

national GCSE exam, so they mostly focus on studying pronunciation, vocabulary

and grammar. They even feel it hard to remember all the required knowledge for

different exams.

This way of thinking among students leads the teachers of English at my

school to nearly the same way of teaching the language. We always try to fulfill

the knowledge in textbooks to our students. Especially, the teachers who teach the

12^thgrade students often try to provide as many practice exercises related to the

GCSE exam as possible. With the help of modern technology, many lectures

designed by PowerPoint have been given to students. The teachers also use

interesting activities such as games, quiz, role-play…to stimulate students. They

have been trying to apply new teaching methods to help students improve their

language skills consist of reading, listening, speaking and writing. The quality of

the lectures has been considerably raised and it plays an important role in the

results of the students in the exams.

In reading lessons, the teachers at my school often adapt the activities given in

textbooks to make it easy for our students, make the lessons more interesting and

attract their attention to the lessons as well. However, because of our students' poor

ability and long or difficult reading texts, the teachers and students usually spend

almost the time on while-reading activities. Sometime, we hardly have time for

post-reading stage or else we use the post-reading activities similar to those in

while-reading stage to make sure that the students understand the reading text

more. The post-reading activities that are used popularly are related to

summarizing the reading text such as filling the missing words in the summary of

the text, using the cues to summarize the text… or translating the text into

Vietnamese. This helps the students comprehend the reading texts totally.

However, these methods of teaching and learning can hardly help improve

students' character in general and sense of responsibility in particular.

4. The English Language syllabus

The textbook Tieng Anh 12 as well as Tieng Anh 10 and Tieng Anh 11 is

traditional textbook structured with a priority towards theme-based or topic-based

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learning models. The textbook has desirable aim of providing students with a

foundational knowledge of numerous fields, a favorable attitude towards the

English Language, and the four skills generally recognized as building proficiency

in language study: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. In order to achieve

these objectives, the content of the book is designed to utilize themes with which

all students will be familiar. Included are topics related to the student’s social lives,

to sports, to work, and to leisure activities universal experiences. For each topic,

related vocabulary and word studies are presented communicatively. The textbook

contains sixteen units, with each unit presenting five lessons with four different

skills and a language focus. Reading is the first unit in each lesson, guiding

students to key words and phrases of the related topicwhich then become “building

blocks” that enable them to learn additional skills.

The book Tieng Anh 12 contains many topics which are close to the students .

They are about life, studying, job, family, nature and society such as home life,

future jobs, life in the future…but there is no separate part for teaching students the

sense of responsibility to themselves, their family and society. Therefore, although

teaching sense of responsibility is necessary, it is not compulsory.

III. SURVEY

1. Survey and the results

At the beginning of the school year 2018-2019, I have carried out the survey

containing 5 multiple choice questions for 118 students from three classes 12A1,

12B2, 12B4 of my school. The survey was done twice. One was at the first

semester of the twelfth form (before teaching post reading with activities

improving students' sense of responsibilities) and the other was at the end of the

second semester (after using these activities). The table below shows the result of

the survey for first time.

Questions

Answers

Before using the

activities

1. Do you think how important sense of A. Normal

42%

35%

23%

27%

55%

18%

9%

responsibility is?

B. Important

C.Very important

2. How often do you think about your A. Rarely

responsibilities in your daily activities?

B. Sometimes

C. Usually

3. Do you find it necessary to be taught A. Unnecessary

sense of responsibility in the class?

B. Necessary

51%

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C. Very necessary

A. Little

40%

30%

62%

8%

4. Do you learn much about sense of

responsibility through your English

lessons?

B. Normal

C. Much

5. How much is your sense of

responsibility to yourselves, your

family, school and society?

A. Little

41%

45%

4%

B. Normal

C. Much

2. Findings from the survey.

The survey shows that before using the adapted activities, most of students do

not care much about responsibility. Even though they know responsibility is

important, they often act without thinking about it. Most of them consider that they

should be taught responsibility in the class. However, every English lesson they

learn often mainly focuses on knowledge and language skills. As a result, they are

little aware of their responsibility to themselves, their family, school and

community.

IV. FINDING SOLUTIONS

From the analysis above, it can be said that our students' irresponsibility is

very worrying. However, teaching in general and teaching English in particular at

my school is mainly focused on knowledge and language skills. It is high time for

us to educate our students' character as well as sense of responsibility through

English lessons.

Post-reading stage is the best choice for the solution because it is a good

chance for the students to connect English lessons with their real life. Furthermore,

based on the topics of the reading texts we can create many different activities to

teach different responsibilities. In addition, we also can apply many different

activities for each reading lesson depending on what responsibility we want to

teach our students. In short, post-reading stage is potential to apply the activities

which help improve our students' sense of responsibility.

The topics of the reading texts in Tieng Anh 12 textbook are very familiar to the

students' life, so I have used post-reading stage to carry out the following activities.

These are some suggested activities which I have applied to improve my students'

sense of responsibility to themselves, their families and society quite effectively.

1. Activities to improve students' sense of responsibility to themselves

1.1. Sample application 1 - Unit 4: School education system

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• Aim: Help students realise the importance of self-study and cultivate their self-

study ability.

• Suggested activity: Making a plan: Make a self-study plan to prepare for your

GCSE effectively.

• Time limit: 10 minutes.

• Preparation:

- Teacher: Prepare a sample self-study plan.

- Students: Prepare posters and pens for group work; find out self-study

methods.

• Procedure:

- Divide the class into groups of 6-8 students.

- Ask them to discuss how to make a plan.

- Give students some suggestions: To make the plan, you should determine:

WHY

WHAT

HOW

WHEN

SELF-STUDY

PLAN

WHO

WHERE

✓ Why to study? (Goals)

✓ What to study? (What subjects, lessons…)

✓ When to study? (Time available, schedule…)

✓ Where to study? (Studying environment, courses…)

✓ Who may help or study together?

✓ How to study (Studying methods)

- Show students the sample plan as a model.

Sample plan:

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SELF-STUDY PLAN

▪ Goals: - Pass the GCSE exam with 30 points

- Pass the entrance exam with 25 points (Math: 8, Literature: 8, English 9)

▪ Core subjects: Math, Literature, English

▪ Optional subjects: History, Geography, Civic Education

▪ Time: in the afternoon, at night, at weekend

▪ Studying environment: at home, online

▪ People to ask for help: teachers, classmates

▪ Studying methods:

- Pay attention to the lectures.

- Determine the weaknesses.

- Highlight the important pieces of information.

- Set a schedule to study at home.

- Share learn experience with friends, classmates.

- Ask the teachers about what we have not understood yet.

- Study the references.

- Download necessary documents and sample tests.

- Attend some online courses.

- Learn from different media.

- Practice doing tests.

- Keep away modern devices when want to concentrate on studying.

- Each group makes a brief self-study plan.

- After 5 minutes, call some representatives to present their plans.

- Ask other groups to give comments.

- Teacher gives feedback

- Ask the students to make their own self-study plan at home as their home work.

The following pictures illustrate the students' activities and their production:

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1.2. Sample application 2 - Unit 5: Higher education

• Aim: Raise students' awareness of equipping themselves with essential life

skills.

• Suggested activity: An interview: Interview your classmates about their

preparation for the life after school.

• Time limit: 10 minutes

• Preparation:

- Teacher: Prepare 5 questions for interviewing, an interview record sheet,

handouts, and a poster of the example.

- Students: Think about the goal they set for the life after school, what may be

challenges and some necessary life skills they should equip.

Questions for interviewing:

Question 1: Are you going to continue studying with higher education or finding a

job after leaving school?

Question 2: What university/ job would you like to apply for?

Question 3: What are you preparing for your life after school?

Question 4: What do you think may be challenges you will face in your new life

after school?

Question 5: How can you overcome these challenges?

The interview record sheet

You

Your friend

Goal

University/Job

Preparation

Possible challenges

How to overcome

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• Procedure:

- Deliver the handouts to the students.

- Ask them to fill in their information about themselves first.

- Ask each student to find a partner, use the questions to interview and fills in the

interview record sheet.

- Teacher shows the example:

You

higher education

Banking Academy

Your friend

Goals

a job

University/Job

Preparation

a worker

- study hard to pass the

GCSE and the entrance

exam.

- study to pass the GCSE

- study vocational education

- improve knowledge

- equip some necessary life

skills such as: decision

making, communicating,…

- equip some necessary life

skills: decision making,

communicating,…

Possible challenges - money

- accommodation

- applying for a suitable job

- accommodation

- independence

- new relationships

How to overcome

- get student loans

-improve time and financial

managing skills.

- get an on-campus job

-be independent and sociable

- get on well with people

- willing to learn.

-be independent and

sociable

- get on well with people

- take part in social

activities

- take part in social activities

- After 5 minutes, call some students to report their interview's results.

- Ask other groups to give comments.

- Teacher gives feedback.

The following pictures illustrate the students' activities and their production:

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