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I found this guide quite interesting since it broke down several areas of a composition course suggesting what could be down in each instant of the classroom curriculum. > I focused more so on peer groups and peer revision. (starting at pg. 12) The article mentions that students could bring in multiple copies of their paper so the entire class can read it (in groups and/or individually) and further discuss it in its entirety together. > I really enjoyed this idea especially since I've practiced it in some of my classes here at Chico. However, the only drawback would be of course the expenses and extent of resources the student/teacher/school has. However, this practice could help with distinct revision instead of quickly overlooking an assignment (peer revision is sometimes not taken seriously by students for them to care enough) on the projector slide and/or taking home a fellow peer's paper home to "revise." Also in revising as a group rather than pairs helps students actually gain different perspectives and open doors to their own knowledge received and practiced within the exercise. Along with such a revision process... can come about peer discussions. Sometimes, teachers forget to put into practice discussions following peer reviews. This allows students to further understand where the comments are coming from and how they can take away information to their advantage in revising the assignment.

I thought this article was a good fit on the path I, believe, I will be taking for my inquiry project ----- student efficacy within an English workshop. The article, written by James Williams and Seiji Takaku, covers the basis of workshops much like Rodby and Fox did in our packet article; however, the article instead of focusing on the structure of workshops focused on the students' efficacy and the effects it may have in order for a workshop to function as it was intended to - to help students better their composition skills in and outside of the English classroom. The article also mentions research done on students within "remedial" workshops and realized "...students had self-efficacy beliefs that did not match their writing performance .... their overestimated sense of efficacy was related to a lack of appropriate, correctional feedback in high school as well as to the tendency among high school teachers to praise and reward students for merely participating in the writing process rather than for producing good work" (3). I thought this statement was interesting because I find it to be true, especially in my experience with not only my internship at PVHS but also with my experience, this year, in Eng 30 workshops and my tutor sessions with second language learners. Sometimes educators focus on participation and the actual process of completing an assignment rather than making sure the student is adequately learning and putting into practice what is being taught/learned. The article also acknowledges the workshop characteristics that may affect students' self-efficacy in the first place. "In the U.S., the majority of writing centers rely on peer tutors" (4). "Some staff include graduate students, but only 3% of 4-year public universities employ professional tutors, that is, persons with an advanced degree" (4). This was a keynote since it reflects on the Casanave article from our class packet ---- to what degree can a peer be considered an actual peer

The article written by ERIC (The Educational Resources Information Center) which I must assume is a part of George Washington Univ. Washington DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development is a broken down "checklist" of sorts. It addresses six different concerns with grading student's writing. One such concern is one I think we all might have asked ourselves at one point in time, "Why do professors need to construct effective writing assignments?"(3). The answer given to the question was interesting in that it pushed hard for effective peer reviews. While some peer review is helpful the article did address the fact that most students are unaware of how to give effective peer review. The basics of the article concerning peer review are that professors need to help students learn by example and explanation. I thought it interesting as well that the article addressed how professors can avoid giving a grade that they will have to defend after the fact, a problem for professors who grade writing without a series of rewriting stages. The solution offered is, that's right, stages of rewrites with the professor holding off giving a grade for as long as possible. One important idea brought up in the article is that "…the writing assignment should include necessary information about audience and purpose, the two pillars of writing."(3) I often wonder how we focus on the first and not the second. As the article states one of the pillars of writing is purpose, yet we seem to habitually focus on the audience and not give student's a purpose for their writing.

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.

Mitra places computers in walls all over the world to see how children with react and how they can learn from them. The results are amazing. Children are able to use the internet to learning answers to questions not even in a language they can understand. They work together with peers to browse the internet and research based on their background knowledge even if it is slim to none. This proposes a huge question....do we need teachers to teacher certain things or can students figure out the answers and test the same if not better by working with peers using the internet?

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.

This webpage is presented on the Texas A&M University website. It is all about low-stakes writing, and how it helps the students develop their ideas and write more freely. It beings with a description of low-stakes writing, and the ways in which a teacher would have this type of writing in their class (including how to grade, types of assignments, etc). The web page stresses the importance of feedback on the students' writing, and also says that the feedback can come from a number of sources, not just the teacher. It suggests responses from peers, the writing center, or the student themselves.

This study focuses on colleges with first year experience programs and whether or not having these programs be main faculty led is beneficial. It explores the idea that have upper classmen take part in the first year experience by interacting with freshmen would make the transition process easier because the first year students would connect more with peers than teachers. In the introduction it says that 'more than 68% of 2005 high school graduates entered some form of post-secondary education within 4 months of graduation' but more than 40% of these students fail to complete college and that most students will drop out within the first 6 weeks.

Li, Xuemei. "Identities And Beliefs In ESL Writing: From Product To Process." TESL Canada Journal 25.1 (2007): 41-64. ERIC. Web. 11 Mar. 2012. This article explored the differences between first language culture and second language culture in an attempt to fill the gap between them. It offered some really insightful notions on the connection between both western and eastern current learning norms and their historical developments. Li points out that western learning can be traced back to the Socratic ideologies; which were to question yourself and others, be skeptical, and to form self-generated knowledge. Li says that Eastern education is based on Confucian ideologies which is a more "humanistic" approach that taught to achieve social harmony by being "reproductive" rather than analytical and to focus on correctness instead of originality. The article also conveyed the idea of the importance of authority in the classroom and explained that students of Eastern cultures place high value on their teacher's position. It explains their indifference to "micro-processes" such as peer critiquing. The article was about 20 pages, but all of the good information is in the first part, the "Background of the Study. The rest is pretty much just a repeat of everything mentioned in the first part. It was a good and insightful article. I would recommend it (at least the first part).

this article sound good...i think i will use it later.

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 article, "Listen While You Work", discussed the benefits of listening to background music while working in a language arts class. The article listed the benefits of doing so which are improving retention and memory, an increase in attention levels, extending focused learning time and expanding thinking skills. The teacher gave few rules for listening to music while working but insisted that the students listen to the same CD from the beggining to the end of class and keep the volume down so peers arn't disrupted. Recently, it was discovered that the corpus callosum, located in the brain, increases in size when humans are exposed to music. Communication is then increased bewteen the two halves of the brain which increases learning efficency. 

This article focuses on the relationship between students and teachers and how students feel about the way their teachers act. They gathered information by conducting surveys and focus-groups in an effort to truly understand how what students think about their teachers, and how their relationships effected the students' achievement in school. They collected information from three different sources: special education, general education, and honors education. The results for all three were incredibly similar with some slight differences in what the students focused on. In general, the students responded very amiably to teachers who demonstrated respect and caring for their students and conveyed high expectations of them. It became clear that students were very aware of the amount of effort teachers put in to connecting with their students and the amount of work the teachers put in to the class. In many cases when the teachers told stories, demonstrated respect, and tried to relate to their students on a personal level, treating them as humans and peers rather than subordinates, the students were not only more engaged in the assignments but they admitted that they grew fond of those teachers and their classes. The article was incredibly interesting to me because of the fact that they focused on the students' perceptions rather than the teachers'. I've read many studies that interview teachers and discuss what the teachers think they've effectively conveyed to their students but it is rare to really see how students feel and think, though it seems to me that the students' opinions should be a larger focus because they're the ones who are trying to learn. This article has made me realize that what a teacher says is not always the most important aspect of effectively teaching information, but instead, what really matters, is the way they say it and the way they make their students feel.

In this TED talk video Dave Eggers is talking enthusiastically about free tutoring centers where students receive one-on-one attention from either more experienced peers or teachers who volunteer to go to these centers at least two hours a week. He backs up the need of having individual help by research data (I would be interested to see the primary research) which say that 35-40 hours a year one-on-one attention students can get one grade level higher. The first center was opened to offer help in English and writing. Although there was an issue of trust at first to visit the center, with time and some advertising the center got packed with students. They even published their own writing in a form of a book, which is inspiring as it honors their work, hardship, creativity and thoughts. Now they have 1400 students in the center and they want to grow nationwide. Also, they have a website (http://www.onceuponaschool.org/) where there is somebody to show guidance to those who are interested in starting their own learning center in their town (for their public school students). To me, this is a great idea to inspire students and keep their motivation going in a particular subject. I wonder if they have done research and found out students of what achievement tend to go there, is it possible that those who are already into writing, science, languages, etc, are the ones visiting these centers. I also wonder if the volunteers who are there to help receive any kind training about certain methodology or ground rules.

This is an article by Frank Mcguire on (obviously) different strategies that are supposed to empower students and build confidence in their writing. The article starts out with the quote that we have all heard before, "It's so hard to put my thoughts on paper." The strategies listed include how to effectively implement a writing journal, the structure of assignments, discussions, positive feedback, peer tutoring, etc. The author goes through specific ways to make each of the strategies work, in order to create an effective and fun classroom environment.

This is an article that looks at a Chinese immigrant teenager who uses online text based communication in English with a transnational group of peers. The study specifically focuses on the effects of the use of English online in regards to the individual's self-identity. The article discusses how the globalized online community shapes literacy and cultural belonging. The article explains the benefits of online literacy in a foreign language to strengthen ones ability and understanding on the L2 language. The online format also allows L2 learners a less intimidating forum to practice their L2 skills.

Nature writing This particular article deals with a post-composition era that still resides in the university. Writing is depicted as a means of a disconnection between different experiences that students often times find themselves bewildered. This goes along with the argument against writing from the stimulation of reading: writing, for example, a response to a piece of reading in an anthology might be interesting, but it does not provide the original experience for the writer. By the time something is put into words, it makes a specific connection, or a specific rhetorical stance towards that thing. Reading, then, becomes a re-interpretation of a text, not the original experience wherewith the text is from. What this paper argues, then, is to take students through the original experience of actually confronting the scene of nature itself: what is there, what is constituted, and what can be written. Traditional texts in nature writing include the following: Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Joseph Krutch's The Desert Year. The course would include times dedicated to the reading of what is emphasised on style of writing, technique of writing and different elements of style. By then, not only would the students learn the value made by the originality of experience, they also learn the value that writers put into writing. It is not an exaggerating thing to say that such is the writing experienced by a writer. Peer critique is one of the crucial aspects of the course where students will give feedbacks on "perception, emotion, evaluation that includes both efferent and aesthetic considerations". At the end of the course, the value(s) in perception will be a lifelong skill, which in time develops into a tradition.

"Understanding the Gap Between High School and College Writing" compares the different levels of writing between high school student and college students. The article found that the two groups of teachers, high school and college, have extremely different views of the students' level of writing. While 36 percent of the high school teachers believed their students were well prepared, only 6 percent of college faculty thought the students were well prepared. The article examines how first year writing courses can be organized to help the incoming students more by surveying the students' writing history and getting a detailed account of the common or not common assignments from their senior year of high school. Often, the assignments and skills expected in college were not yet developed in high school students, including criticizing a written argument, providing peer feedback, and turning in drafts. The article concludes with ways in which first year writing classes may be improved, as well as examples of the different types of needs that have to be met.