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For the past few weeks in this class I have generated all of my focus on the identity of the students in Enlish 30 workshops. After reading the article, "Exploring teacher-writer identities in the classroom: Conceptualising the struggle" I a new question has stemmed: how do teacher's identity as writers affect students' progress in academic progress? Authors, Teresa Cremin and Sally Baker from the Department of Education of The Open University suggest "that teachers' development as writers has the potential to enrich writing pedagogy and impact positively on young writers." The idea of teachers writing alongside their students is in my opinion highly valuable because students and teachers have the opportunity to experience the writing process together. In previous articles I have read that relatability between students and instructor are essential to the learning environment. If instructors are constantly writing alongside their students trying to establish/re-establish their identity in academic writing, students can learn easily learn how to do the same through "shared challenges" (9). While English 431 students cannot use this strategy because members of their English 30 workshops come from different sections of English 130 we can attempt to produce similar assignments alongside our students. For example, inquiry assignments are a common goal in most English 130 classes. Similarly, English 431 students must write an inquiry essay. English 431 students could incorporate their progress into the workshop by showing the English 30 students what they have done so far, why they are asking certain questions, how they did something, etc.

Andrea R. Olinger from the Department of Applied Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles demonstrates "how interaction constructs discoursal identities" (273) in her article, "Constructing identities through: 'discourse': Stance and interaction in collaborative college writing." Olinger brings up an important point in this article, "that students often feel a mixture of desire for an resistance to the identities they must take on" (274). The examination of college students' writing demonstrated how these identities are "contested, desired, and resisted" (274). By now English 431 students should have seen some form of writing from their English 30 students. Thus, now we can ask ourselves as well as the English 30 students in what ways do the writer's discoursal identity resist or conform to the expectations of a college writing course? 

Exploring the Role of Reformulations and a Model Text in EFL Students' Writing Performance Yang, Luxin ; Zhang, Ling The article by Yang and Zhang shares the results from a study of a three-staged writing task by ESL students in a Beijing university. The three stages are composing, comparison (of the reformulation), and revising. The students were asked to study and compose, in English, a narrative of a short picture prompt. The short narratives were then reformulated by a native English speaker, but still maintained the student's original meaning. The students then compared the two to "notice" the differences. The article clearly explains the many types of differences between the two texts; mainly language-related episodes (LRE) and content-related episodes (CRE). The students were also asked to compare their narratives with a model narrative. Though the students tended to focus more on the lexical issues, they were able to more clearly relate their current stage of English language learning with that of a native English speaker. This helped them to "notice the gap". I would recommend this to anyone focusing their attention on ESL learners.

This article by Claire Charles of Monash University suggest that boys are not up to speed in regards to "school based literacy competencies," but females appear to be thriving (72). The author focuses on women attending "elite" schools to explore the reasoning behind their success and how their "practices construct femininities" (72). Charles unveils the transformation women go through to find empowerment and translating that into their "reading and writing practices" (72). English 431 would benefit from this article because many of the students in English 30 are going through stages of self-discovery and by comparing genders this would allow us to sees the differences in this journey as well as the differences in their discourses. I'm interested to see how men and women incorporate gender into their writing. Some questions I had about this article were why/how are girls outperforming boys and what does gender have to do with mastering literacy? I hope English 431 students can learn how to bring feelings of empowerment to both genders in English 30 in order to help the students find their own voice and identity in their writing.

This article provides information on the use of WebQuests (a web-based program to help students learn in a variety of subjects) in the classroom. The authors determined that literacy should also encompass digital literacy since the job of a teacher is to teach and prepare the students for a successful and productive life. I was interested in this article because my paper is about using web-based media in the classroom, and while this article certainly covers that, there is a strong focus on students who are learning English. The article states that WebQuests make it easier for students learning English because these programs provide visuals and require participation because they're interactive.

The authors discussed to common occurrence of teachers "bending over backwards" for their NNS (Non Native Speaking) students, especially when evaluating surface errors. The study in this article seemed well orchestrated. It presented a variety of English teachers with six compositions: two from native English speakers, two from Danish speakers, and two from speakers of Thai. These students however were not real and the "student profile" assigned to each composition was constantly rotated. The results found that NES (Native English Speakers) were judged more harshly because "they should know better". The northern European, the Danish, students were pretty neutral. The Asian, the Thai, students were given the most leniency. I found this article interesting because it gives insight to the impact that teachers' grading has on the development of ESL students' writing proficiency.

If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order -- facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table -- the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests. I want to find information on listening to music in the classroom, specifically the English 30 classes. I find the constant playing of Pandora to be distracting and I want to know if it's detrimental to the English 30 students learning, etc. So far I've found issues with listening to music and memorization, but not necessarily as it relates to writing workshops like the one I'm interning in now.

Let's try to stretch beyond CNN reports, which most often are quick and superficial.

The study, "Prospective Teachers' Insights towards Scaffolding Students' Writing Processes through Teacher-Student Role Reversal in an Online System", researches how teachers may better understand the difficulties faced by students and how to facilitate student writing in a classroom. To do this, fourteen prospective teachers enrolled in a three week long, online, computer-supported environment where they would switch into roles as students instead of teachers. The prospective teachers were a group of second year graduate students in a Master's program in English teaching and had been studying English as a foreign language for ten years. Every week, the prospective teachers took on a different role; first as a student writer, then as a student editor, and finally as a student commentator. As student writers, they wrote and posted first drafts of their essays. Then, as student editors, they revised their peers' drafts and provided suggestions. Next, the prospective teachers evaluated their peer editors' suggestions. Finally the prospective students rewrote and posted their final essays. The prospective teachers perceived the role reversal as "a valuable experience through which they were able to understand their students' actual needs and difficulties in writing" (365). The prospective teachers also learned how to empathize with their future students' possible difficulties and will now reflect constantly on their own roles as English as a foreign language teachers and as students.

Unfortunately, I got this article from the library's research portal, so you will have to log in to view it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Investigating the Role of Identity in Writing Using Electronic Bulletin Boards Valia Spiliotopoulos & Stephen Carey This paper details the findings of a study on the effectiveness of using online bulletin boards, in this case WebCT, in a university writing class for ESL students. The study finds that the asynchronous nature of posting online allows students to participate more fully and in ways which may not be possible in traditional class interaction. The authors also argue that the process of forming an online community of English language learners affords the students the opportunity to develop a greater sense of identity as an English speaker and as part of a community of English speakers.

This article was written by Lawrence Musgrove, an associate professor of English and foreign language at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. In the article he talks about a lot of the same problems that we have been touching on in class with concerns to first year English composition classes. After a quick discussion of the issues with English composition, he goes into his proposal for a solution. He first conjured up a metaphor between writing and driving. Bad driving has very concrete consequences, and Musgrove thinks that writing should, too. His proposal is centered on professors issuing students "writing tickets" that can be cleared up by attending workshops, seminars, revising their paper, or any other writing task their professor deems sufficient. While reading the responses posted after his article, I noticed that his ideas drew attention from all sorts of different people. People from all different professions and backgrounds (high school students, business men, elementary teachers, etc) had a variety of things to say. Some people loved his idea, and others heavily disputed it. I found that the responses generated were as resourceful as the article itself.

This source details the author's experience of teaching a course called 'Experimental Writing' to college seniors. Using several chapters from the book Free Play by Steven Nachmanovitch, the instructor introduces the topic of play as an important element of the course. Having read the book myself I think that it is a worthy read, and it has influenced my approach to academic projects by widening my perception of my action as not just reactionary study toward a grade, but play within a field offered by the instructor where success and failure are accepted as process and there is no fixed upper limit to achievement. In other words the writing is can be thought of as a kind of 'funktionslust' a pleasure of doing, not simply an action toward an objective. To create motivation within students requires that they let go of the dire seriousness that school is associated with; school is something to be completed out of necessity not something that can offer individuals new insight to themselves, or the aspects of themselves that have been suppressed by conformity and fear. The author does not entirely endorse the use of Nachmanovitch's text in 'traditional writing classes' because the text discourages many of the elements that are at hand in the traditional approach to teaching (like writing for a letter grade). I chose to be an English major because I felt the most freedom of expression within my English classes; I was offered a choice of what topics to engage with. But increasingly specific expectations from teachers handcuffed my raw creativity. Even so, I think that an increased degree of freedom within writing classes would boost student enthusiasm. The question then is how do we increase the freedom of expression for students of basic writing, where there are necessary modes of measure for the articulation of the chosen subjects (other than simply allowing them to choose their subjects)? To what degree does the rubric shape student identity by for

This article is geared more towards translation but I've found that many of the same principles of translation can be applied when trying to write academically. We are doing nothing more than trying to translate our thoughts and complex ideas and put them into the language of academic writing - usually a foreign language to us. Because I am writing on cultural barriers to academic writing, I thought it would be useful to see how other minds work. In this way we might be more empathetic to our students and it might aid our diagnostics as well. The author, Dirk Siepmann, compares the academic writing of English, French and German. "For a long time the idea has been around that the 'spirit' of a language exerts a formative influence on its speakers and writers" (Siepmann 1). This influence is something that educators need to be aware of when teaching writing. How can you help transition students into a different academic writing culture without making them give up their own? Siepmann also discusses what he refers to as "Intellectual Styles." He calls these the "Saxon", the "Teutonic", the "Gallic" and the "Nipponic". He has derived these terms based on writers' ability to organize thought, target audience, relationship of writer to audience and other criteria. The author also talks about the differences in learning systems and what is expected in those learning systems.

This next article is fairly similar to the last article I posted, but this one is much more assertive and is more of a short, instructive textbook. This article/textbook contains "30 new ideas" for teaching writing, and with each individually constructed idea, your cognition automatically begins to spastically construct new tactics in approaching the students within your designated literary workshop. Some of the ideas include: require written responses to peers' writing, vocabulary building exercises, stepping away from prolixity and utilizing colloquial verbiage, constructing an email dialogue between students, encouragement of descriptive writing (sounds, emotions, sentiments, sensations etc.), establishing a "framing device," introducing multi-genre and multicultural literature to overall strengthen their syntactical horizons. Definitely another beneficial article to the workshop mentors of this English class-the reasons are very obvious. There are even anecdotal passages that share the endeavors of others who have chosen similar literary-assisting/instructing paths. So if you're interested in becoming an English teacher of any kind, add this article to your anthologized conglomerations of instructive, literary resources.

I was reading the first couple pages of your article and i like it. It seems like it will work with teaching ESL learner how to write.

This is quite a small article, but it presents a certain interest as it connects writing with other social practices. I guess this assumption is crucial for teaching because it presupposes writing in the classroom with real-life purposes. The article also mentions interculturality and constant interaction of two languages, which is important when teaching writing to ESL students. The author is concerned about the specifics of effective transfer of literacy skills in bilinguals and heritage speakers. According to Martinez, as a result of traditional teaching, bilingual students tend to write with "conformity to rhetorical traditions in the dominant language" ("backwards literacy"), which creates certain problems with style, thoughts expression, choice of words and sentence patterns (i.e., mechanical transfer of the dominant language features into L2 writing). Therefore, it is necessary to develop "forward literacy", which accepts a non-standard way of writing ("writers carve out their own transcultural paths of expression"). In other words, writing of a bilingual or heritage learner implies constant shifts (transfers) between languages and cultures, and using the multiple resources of both languages in order to create an original pattern. The instructor's task is: (1) to identify multiple literacies (i.e. writing practices) that students possess and / or should possess in their heritage language and their dominant language; (2) to teach the students how to shift without mixing two languages. E.g. in early works of Spanish heritage learners, English norms penetrate Spanish writing: estoy the acuerdo instead of estoy de acuerdo. The shift should concern rhetorical strategies, which reflect cultural and aesthetical values of the two languages worlds, but not grammar or writing vocabulary; (3) teaching writing in the context of multiple social practices and contents While teaching writing, it is important to distinguish between positive transfer of skills already acqu

Wow, i like your article. It state purposely on how to help ESL student to write English better.