Group items tagged

Luberda's essay is a preliminary overview of his experiment in applying cognitive science to writing. Luberda suggests that the most applicable elements of cognitive science for teaching writing and composition come from linguistics. He also suggests that in teaching writing and literature, students may be accustomed to learning terms, dates, facts, and test-taking, while others receive a vague understanding of literature. In light of the teaching structures he used, the writing and analytical skills the students acquired were independent of the literature in their course. In using the cognitive approach, Luberda structured writing and literature courses within the context of differentiating relations between language change and writing acquisition. In reading the positive results of Luberda's experiment, I noticed a few implications for teaching writing. One advantage of applying linguisitics and the cognitive approach is that students learn why they write the way they do and raises awareness to the writing structures they use. The other advantage is the ability for students to "say what I mean" and incorporate accuracy in their writing when communicating meaning. This would mean that even when students are intentionally manipulating writing structures within various genres, they are learning to communicate "what I mean" without being submissive to directness. There was one negative result of the experiment where a student stated "I don't believe this course has helped me improve my writing skills. In high school I was taught how to write analyze books and then write papers about them using solid grammar, intense vocab, thesis statement and a well thought out conclusion. I do not believe I learned how to improve my papers. I am still on the same level of writing as I was in high school." I find this to be interesting in relation to teaching writing because it suggests that cognitively, we strive to use writing structures differently or advance our writing by chan

The Cognitive Revolution article takes into account the various psychological theories applied in the field towards language. One particular theory called into question by Miller is behaviorism. Having been a Behaviorist himself, Miller examines his previous biases about language in relation to Chomsky's theories of grammar. Miller finds that in adopting Chomsky's view of grammar, we bring the mind and cognitive process back into our understanding of language. In relation to grammar, Miller states "The grammatical rules that govern phrases and sentences are not behavior. They are mentalistic hypotheses about the cognitive processes responsible for the verbal behaviors we observe." This article is really helpful in providing teachers information about where some of our language theories come from and how they have shifted in practice after behaviorism. I think the most important point here is to not make the same mistakes with behaviorism as done in the past. The assumptions of behaviorism applied in the teaching can have some devastating consequences in student writing. Since teachers have the potential to exploit the cognitive processes using stimulus and response, it's possible that teachers may or may not be aware of the consequences if they happen to instill negative writing habits and attitudes in students using the assumptions implied in behaviorist theory. Having the definition of grammar rules Miller states, it provides teachers a working definition and inquiry to better understand how we form grammar rules, and what strategies students are using to apply grammar and form rules of their own.

This study occurs over a period of eight years and follows 55 secondary teachers as they take part in professional development in cognitive strategies approach to reading and writing and then implement those strategies in their classrooms. The cognitive strategies approach, an intervention program developed by the UCI Writing Project, focuses on how readers and writers construct meaning from and with texts. This approach suggests that teachers provide systematic and explicit guidance in the cognitive strategies that are utilized by effective readers and writers. The authors state that the "aim of the project was to help students develop the academic literacy necessary to succeed in advanced educational settings," (275). Students were placed into two groups, the "Pathway students" who received cognitive strategies interventions and the control group. According to the study "pathway students not only grew more from pre- to post-test, but also wrote better essays on the post-test and received higher scores than their counterparts in the control classes," (289). http://www.evernote.com/shard/s88/sh/ebcc6b46-f96b-4912-adfe-880d00e4c81e/2b3ed2a99dda281a4071c0fc3d20b990

Becker's article discusses the various models researchers have used to blueprint the cognitive process writers use during revision. The discussion associated with these models came from Becker's inquiry on why novice writers have negative attitudes towards the revision process in comparison to more experienced writers. The goal of this research was to make explicit the most effective and efficient cognitive strategies teachers could use to help novice writers improve their revision process. Most of the models consist of evaluation skills and long-term memory associations. I find this article useful for teaching writing in the sense that it has potential apparatuses that teachers can use to motivate students to revise their work. Because revision is an important and sometimes complex part of the writing process, these models may serve useful or may serve as templates for other models to arise when applied to teaching. The important thing here is finding ways to encourage students to revise their work and examine what processes students use to motivate them to revise rather than have students assume their work is already perfect.

This video is a very entertaining whiteboard animation of a talk given at RSA (described on their website, http://www.thersa.org, as "an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today's social challenges") by author Dan Pink (for more, see http://www.danpink.com/about). The question he poses, is "what motivates us?" The common belief that people will work harder for a bigger reward is found to be true only when the work involves simple, mechanical skills. When the work requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, a surprising reversal occurs: the larger the reward, the poorer the performance. Pink states that engagement requires three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though his presentation is addressed to the business world, I think that he's really addressing fundamental aspects of human nature that can be applied in education as well. For example, his claim that crappy products are the result when profit is separated from purpose, can be applied to education as well, when grades are separated from meaningful learning.

Great video and surpassingly simple. We do better work, when we are doing work towards something that interests us and that we are voluntarily invested in. That's not to say that we are invested in it voluntarily from the beginning, but that as we invest ourselves the reward is more personally gratifying. We are made happy by getting better at a task and mastering that task, we are made happy by engaging in abstract cognitive ideas that interest us. Money can not buy happiness, it can only buy a lack of cognitive effort.

Day's article discusses the various beliefs and habits that contribute to writer's block. Many of these beliefs include sets of rules that are heavily rigid and grammatical rather than content. Day suggests that writers that go through their writing with little rigidity and skimming over the editing process while writing is a preventative strategy to overcome writer's block. This article brought into view the point that, most of our writer's block comes from rules that disrupt the flow of writing and content. For the most part, students hang on to rules that are grammatical or structural plans that attempt to perfect writing on the first draft. I think this can be valuable to teachers because when we identify the cognitive strategies preventing students from writing, we can instruct them how to overcome those strategies to develop ones that help students with writing.

After getting past the awesomeness of the fact that the author's name is Magnifico, this article concerns itself with issues of audience in writing. Much of the article is a literature review summing up the current research in the area and how it relates to her future research. Some of the areas examined are the cognitive and socio-cultural analyses of the effect of audience on writing. She finds that the audience can be a source of motivation and that writing with the audience in mind can inspire new comers to ask themselves the same sorts of questions as expert writers, such as what is it that they want to say, to whom are they saying it, and how are they going to convey this message.

This article continues the idea of my previous posts - about codeswitching and language transfer in the writing of bilinguals and heritage learners. It is based upon the experiment investigating formal and informal writing samples of students who possess three languages - Basque, Spanish and English. The authors'purpose has been to explain that although traditional teaching is turned towards monolinguals and native speakers' writing as a model, the perspective of bi- and multilingual writers is different. The authors - Cenoz and Gorter -explore the nature of transfer from one language into another, codemixing and codeswitching, and come to the conclusion that these three factors characterizing bilingual students are not to be treated as separate obstacles but rather as three parts of the one whole that benefits writing while enabling students to widely use resources of different languages. The authors use the term "translanguaging" denoting by it "combination of two or more languages in a systematic way within the same learning activity", and argue that translanguaging contributes to developing and strengthening writing in both languages. The authors propose a new approach to teaching writing to the bi- and multilinguals - "focus on multilingualism" that allows "looking at the different languages of the multilingual at the same time instead of separately". Cenoz and Gorter identify the relationships between languages as complex, yet beneficial for developing writing skills. According to their point of view, multilinguals use the same strategies when writing essay or informal social network posts, yet they incorporate in their writing the elements of three languages not because of limited lexical resources, but for conveying their communicative intent, which they think is better done in a particular language out of three that they possess. That means that multilinguals and bilinguals choose language resources in dependence on communicative purposes in their writing (

This article analyzes the linguistic dynamics of the stylistic literary voice, its bound-factors, and its application. There is definitely a much more technical approach to defining the stylistic voice; but it is actually quite interesting to read about the way in which voice is a matter of "appropriateness", instead of "grammaticality". Joybrato also uses poetical references to strengthen and accentuate his linguistic evaluations; furthermore, his dichotomies of 'literary stylistics' reveal an aspect of writing that cannot necessarily be easily seen. He even mentions the applications of today's technologies and their capacious depth of containing writing. This is article is beneficial to those trying to identify their, and/or helping others, realize their own entity of the stylistic literary voice they contain within their literary composition/cognition. Although the article slightly wanders into the plains of prolixity, I would still recommend extrapolating the information that catches your eye.

This article is about using ellipsis in writing and in creativity in classrooms and books. They start out with how it can leave an audience hanging or getting them to think cognitively about what is being asked on a certain thought. This is in opposition to the traditional teaching methods of lecturing and providing answers to facts. This also helps promote creativity in student and teacher learning in classrooms. The teacher can then also help promote scaffolding the students to the main topic. Using this style helps students to think about why and how they learn and write. The best thing that I got out of this was how this gets students involved personally in learning and helps students participate in classrooms and writing.

Ellipsis defined how?

The article I found articulates the beneficial attributes of tutoring, mentoring, and faculty assistance in the "alleviation of writing anxiety." There is also discussion on embellishing the self-efficiency university students when writing essays.There authors also use gender as a precursor in determining the differences between the efficacy of writing among males and females. In addition to analytical gender studies, the authors also integrate other academic variables such as GPA's and literary composition as a "recreational activity." There is even breathing exercises, methods for relaxation, and interventional aid to students who completely reprehend writing all together. This is article is definitely pertinent to the academically overstressed life of university students; especially, students enrolled in an English course. At a certain point, we all experience unpalatable junctures of unwanted anxiety, that by any means, impedes our ability to academically perform. It is very similar to the dynamics of examination anxiety. A student may have acknowledgments that exceed the finite boundaries of an exam, but cannot access their superior level of comprehension because of their cognitively, suppressive test anxiety. The word "test," "examination," or "dissertation" have become connotatively dreadful; however, replacing these words with academic euphemisms such as "long quiz" or "filling paper words project" could potentially reduce oppressive, academic anxiety-in a sense. Judging by all of the diagrams of everyone's writing process, I'd say the extraneous variety of distractions can all result from, or even cause, anxiety.

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.

For me, it started with some initial ideas from David Orr's book Ecological Literacy, and along with it the argument in his other book Earth in Mind: that all education is environmental education, and the purpose thereof is to increase ecological literacy. What this article sets out to do is to provide a more general understanding of what ecological literacy is (a blend between ecological thinking and environmental literacy). Learning appears in a fusion between three big learning domains: behavioural, affective and cognitive learning, and such a learner is called an authentic learner. An authentic learner is one who "can not only identify relevant dilemmas but also appreciate how their understanding of a scientific concept can influence their decision. The difficult fulfilment of students who face today's education is the highly fragmented status of disciplinary studies (the so-called academia). Ecological literacy sets out not only to introduce students to ecological concepts, but to push them so far as to recognise their place within the current ecosystem. Ecological Misconception Ecology is a strictly inter-disciplinary field of study, which draws concepts from Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Geology. Misconception appears when there is a misconnection between the seemingly holistic view of the general concepts, or a failure to express the necessary link between related concepts. Where does writing come in? Writing, according to the authors, is a reflective process. Students are first introduced to the concepts relevant to an ecological discussion. They are then asked to write three iteration essays to demonstrate their understanding along with their ability to make connections within the given concepts. Since it is important that students go through an extensive study just to recognise their place within the current ecosystem, personal reflection through writing is an essential tool not only to "show", but to connect, and make connections (writing discou

This article acknowledged the proven benefit and developing healthy and positive student-teacher relationships on the students' cognitive and social development. It focused on the potential use of dialogue journals as a way to generate unintimidating one-on-one dialogue between the students and teacher, and how the use of such journals could not only strengthen student-teacher relationships but also potentially benefit "at risk" students.

The goal of the article was to broaden the current understanding of social contexts in education. It focused on student-teacher relationship from the perspectives of attachment, motivation, and sociocultural effects.

A collaborative article of Patricia McCarthy, Scott Meier and Regina Rinderer, this article explores the idea of self-efficacy, or rather a student's perception of their own self-efficacy, in relation to writing competency at the college level.They explain that students who estimate their writing abilities and effectiveness to be quite high perform accordingly, and that this holds also for students who estimate their abilities to be quite low (the Pygmalion Effect in action). While this comes as a surprise to few, these authors further explain that of a few key factors, namely perceived self-efficacy, anxiety, locus of control, and cognitive processing methods, while all affect the quality of writing produced by students, self-efficacy proved to be the strongest predictor of student performance regardless of the other conditions in their studies. Students who become used to a process of accurate and frequent self-evaluation, both of the final product AND of their abilities separate from the product, may develop a more accurate and more proactive view of their writing competence and their later work may reflect this.