I first arrived in Korea to be a kindergarten teacher in early 2010 with minimal experience with young children and no background or training in education. Private kindergartens across the country are filled with teachers just like me, and we all struggle in the classroom for our first few years. These schools provide little to no formal training, so I attended a CELTA certificate course in 2011 and enrolled in the M. Ed. program at the University of Missouri. Pursuing professional development helped me become a teacher at a well regarded private kindergarten in an upscale area of Seoul. I have been teaching four and five year old first year students at this school for three years. There are currently twelve wonderful students in my class this year. I consider it to be the most successful class of my short teaching career. Despite my positive assessment of the class, some areas of teaching have still been problematic for me.
Developing student writing has been the academic area of greatest difficulty for me since I began teaching kindergarten EFL students over four years ago. To teach speaking and listening, Total Physical Response activities that get students moving around are fun and engaging. Role plays and information gaps force students to speak with each other to work towards a goal. A combination of sight word and phonics practice, story time, repetitive reading, and cooperative reading activities develop reading skills surprisingly quickly and keep students motivated. At the end of previous school years though, my students still felt uncomfortable writing in their own voice. Heavy reliance on teacher models was evident even among students at the top of the class in other language skills. Students who could spell words out of context and arrange a set of words to make a grammatically correct sentence were hard pressed to create a lesser sentence on their own. On top of my inability to address writing skills as a teacher, the school curriculum does little to encourage first year students to develop the ability to write in their own voice. Handwriting and reading comprehension prompt response are the focus of first year writing skills.
When reflecting on my difficulties developing student writing skills, I came across the Writing Workshop model as a possible solution to my troubles. Initial research showed that Writing Workshop is typically employed in elementary aged, native speaking classrooms. Some research had shown Writing Workshop to be applicable to native speaking kindergarten classes, while other research showed elementary aged ESL students also benefited. My teaching context was not represented in the research I found. That led me to ask the question:
How do EFL Kindergartners Engage in Writing Workshop?