Making a Beginning Letter-Writing Activity "Real"

By Frank Smith, Khmer Instructor
University of California-Berkeley

Since I haven't received any submissions from anyone else yet, I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a brief description of something I'm currently trying with my Beginning Khmer class for the first time...

The Background

In my Beginning and Intermediate Khmer classes (and in the first few weeks of the first semester of my Advanced class), I have students write “dialog journals”. This is something I learned about back in my ESL-teaching days, and like many of those techniques, I adapted it for Southeast Asian language teaching.

Dialog journals--at least in the way I conceive of them--are an every-other-week writing assignment (at SEASSI, students have to write one every week) which must fill one page, on any topic (with some exceptions--see below), in the target language. Students are told not to spend a lot of time on this assignment; the writing they produce is supposed to represent their current level of writing proficiency in the language: no more, no less. What I don't want them to do is look up every fancy English word that comes into their heads in the dictionary, which as we all know, often ends up being unreadable, when they choose totally inappropriate words that seem to “match” an English term they're thinking of.

The purpose of this activity is that students try their hand at being creative with the language in order to express themselves, but only using vocabulary and grammatical structures they've already mastered (or are in the process of mastering). They can be adventurous (to a degree), but what they write does need to make grammatical sense, at least inasmuch as they're capable of that particular week.

Of course, the first few weeks--during which students are first learning the Khmer alphabet--their dialog journals fall a bit short of, as I like to say, “the great Khmer novel”...their first few efforts are necessarily limited to very basic sentences using sightwords and simple functional vocabulary learned in their speaking lessons. But fairly quickly--especially at SEASSI, where students tend to be more highly motivated than my academic year students--they progress to creative, often humorous commentaries on their daily lives, families, school social life.

To stimulate (and provide some structure to) students who have trouble filling an entire page with text every other week, in recent years I've taken to, beginning about halfway through the first semester, assigning students topics to write their journals on: food, when we're in the food unit in class; family, when we're covering the family unit; writing about the action in various movies we watch (for which they're given extra vocabulary, including the names of the characters). Such topic-assigned journals often get integrated into speaking activities as well, in which they're called up to, say, summarize orally a movie they've already written about (without the written journal in front of them!).

The Initial Assignment

All of this is a rather long preamble to the specific assignment I'm here to tell you about today: practical letter-writing, which becomes the topic for my Beginning students' dialog journals late in the Spring semester.

After going through the basics of writing simple letters in Khmer, one type to a friend one's own age, and another semi-formal type to a respected family member or older person, students are given a dialog journal assignment to write a letter of their own, preferably to a real person they actually intend to send it to. Since about 96% of my academic year students are from Khmer families, this usually means writing a letter to a family member in Cambodia.

This year, I had a new idea. After receiving students' initial letter-writing attempts (containing quite a few typos and some awkward grammar, as could be expected), which happened to be their final writing assignment for the semester, I decided to extend the assignment as an extra-credit “bonus” exercise.

The grading in all of my language classes is done on a “subtractive” basis. That is, all students begin the semester with 100 points (A+). Every time they “do something wrong,” they lose points. This can be from non-health-related absences, lateness, failure to turn in an assignment on time (or at all), not being prepared for class, low scores on quizzes and exams, etc. Suffice it to say that this semester, all of my Beginning students are in need of a few extra points as the semester comes to an end!

The Post-Assignment (for Bonus Points)

So here's the assignment I gave them: edit their letters, incorporating my corrections, and submit the final version to me in an envelope, addressed to the intended recipient in Cambodia. They have until the Monday following the final exam (over the weekend) to do this. If they choose to do so--the assignment is optional--they'll receive 3 bonus points (to replace various points they've lost over the course of the semester), I'll pay the postage and send the letter to Cambodia, and their relatives will actually get to read what they've written.  Here's a page from one student's first draft, with my suggestions for edits:

The Final Result:

Exactly one student (the one who needed the extra points the most!) took me up on the bonus assignment offer. Here's her final revision of the draft you see above, including a photo she included in the envelope she turned in:

And finally, here's the note she gave me with the letter and photo, including the address of her grandmother in Cambodia, which I copied onto the outside of the envelope and mailed:

Hopefully, the letter will reach its recipient, and some actual communication will have come out of this classroom activity!

Feel free to post your questions/observations in the comments section.