I had an epiphany when I was marking my students’ work yesterday.

I was struck by how some of them wrote exactly the way they spoke. Which was a great glimpse into their minds because they wrote a personal recount entirely in the present tense.

Intrigued, I consulted Gemini:

I used to think my students didn’t know how to code switch between Singlish and English.

++Now, I believe that** their lapse into the present tense is actually a sign of interference from their mother tongue. In Malay, there is no need to change the base verb tense.

So, I think in order to better their writing, we might need to change the way they speak. Since they use the same informal register for both speaking and writing, we can help them develop code-switching skills. For example, after the Google Meet meeting, I helped Rifa’ie with his diary entry. I got him to narrate his sepak takraw match first. After I corrected him a couple of times, he naturally adopted the past tense for the rest of his entry.

Building on this, I propose that our speaking assignments next term could incorporate a story-telling component so that students could practise speaking in the past tense.