Group items tagged

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.

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 study of second and fourth grade students examines student attitudes toward writing. The study suggests that the culture of high-stake testing has placed teachers in a bind that forces them to teach writing aggressively, which takes the fun out writing. The younger the students are, the authors claim, the more positive their attitude toward writing is. The older they are, the more likely they are to come face to face with these higher stake environments and the more negative their attitudes will become.The study actually has fourth grade students meet with and tutor the second grade students in writing in order to measure the positive or negative affect of tutoring on writing attitudes. I was especially drawn to the passage that said, "Some self-efficacy researchers have suggested that teachers should pay as much attention to students' perceptions of competence as to actual competence, for the perceptions may more accurately predict students' motivation and future academic choices." (182).

This article is about a study that was conducted in Texas that was trying to determine the relationship between students' agreement/disagreement with a "university-wide writing competency graduation requirement" and the scores students got on the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test. The article discusses how important writing is in college and explaines that "writing ability is used to communicate thoughts, including what is learned and is a critical element of a college education." The study was conducted to see how important college students believed writing to be; to see if writing is as important to the students as it is to the educators. Educators see writing as a way to gage how knowledgable a student is on a certain topic. Writing competently and critically is seen as a necessary skill to have as it is the way students are able to prove they know and understand what they are being taught. The results of the study weren't all that surprising; students with high THEA scores agreed with the writing graduation requirement and students with low THEA scores disagreed with the requirement and expressed a desire for less college writing. These results aren't surprising and the article notes that the study wasn't aimed to be "an indepth formative or summative self-evaluation of undergraduates ' writing experiences" but was more about getting information and feedback from the students. The study pais close attention to the students' attitudes towards the writing requirement and graduation requirement and challenges college students faced with their writing and then looked at strategies to combat these challenges. The article could be interesting to get information on how students think about college writing, the challenges they face and the difficulties they have.

In this article, L. Brent Igo researches the differences of both the competence and the beliefs views (two views which constitute self-efficacy) across three educational levels (high school juniors, college freshmen, and college juniors). He explores the idea of motivation for students to adequately learn. "Students who are confident in their ability to be successful on a specific task are likely to be motivated to engage in the task." Students are less likely to be engaged and interested in fulfilling an assignment when they lack confidence in that what they know is actually useful to completing such a given task. The nature of the task as well as an individual's prior experiences can determine one's self-efficacy within the classroom. --- this could be because of past experiences within previous classrooms and/or the lack of proper teaching/feedback from previous teachers. A teachers' feedback could also affect a student's perceived competence - the way in which the feedback is structured or what it focuses on could explain why students don't pick up on certain areas of composition as much as others.

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.

I ran across this article last year while browsing through journals in the library and thought it was humorous. I thought of it again when we read Bartholomae. In this article by Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer, the authors first set out to define what bullshit is, then discuss the ways in which bullshit is an aspect of academic rhetoric. The humorous (and most likely intended) irony is that all the while they are writing in a very traditional academic style which is, in and of itself, often associated with the very claims of bullshit they are examining. The main idea is that it matters not whether the content of the bullshit itself is true or false, but that bullshitters misrepresent themselves and their intentions (375). Eubanks and Schaeffer examine various types and purposes of bullshit, as well as various reasons one might engage in bullshitting, including representing a 'constructed self', gamesmanship, pleasure, reputation and superiority. "To sum up, prototypical bullshit has to do with a purposeful misrepresentation of self, has the quality of gamesmanship, and . . . is at least potentially a lie"(380). In the second half of the article, the authors examine academic writing, determining what features make it prototypical and how those features might be construed to be bullshit. One important aspect is the use of jargon, which seems to many non-academic readers to merely confuse for the purpose of elevating the author's status. "Often academic writers could be clearer but prefer to serve up something that sounds like bullshit" (382). They point out that students imitate this style in their own writing, and are rewarded for it. In addressing the issue of audience, the authors make a statement that is very reminiscent of Lave and Wenger's communities of practice in Situated Learning: "much academic publication, especially by young scholars, aims to qualify the author for membership in a group of specialists" (382). As we discu

This article addressed the all to common problem of second language students being placed in mainstream English classes well before they have developed second language proficiency. These students are then expected to compete with their fellow peers who have developed proficiency since childhood. This article confronts the issues students face transitioning from ESL classroom environment to the mainstream environment. According Harklau the importance peer interaction and socialization should be used as tools to increase second language proficiency. Peer interaction and peer editing can help students develop a level of comfort and proficiency in their second language that is often missing in mainstream classrooms.