Group items tagged

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 article explains one way to help students explore materials when students need to develop an effective thesis for their profile essay. The professor asks students to do general everyday freewriting related to the topic (an unusual place). Although the author doesn't show all students' freewritings, the only example shown in the article shows a developmental track of how a student explores his/her ideas and write the thesis. It is a process that the student finds and writes the thesis, and it takes time to complete the process. The author posts an invention to help students start essay writing in academic environment. There is no formal rigid writing pattern but a way to help students get into the topic and object; students will use writing as a thinking tool to think and critique the object when they get more information about it. My question is that this invention strategy can be considered as a project for a teacher but an activity in writing process for students. It takes time for teachers to think and design and for students to really do it. There should be more unpredictable problems, so teachers should pay more attention on this strategy.

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 article describes the results of the four OLE (Optimal Learning Environment) approaches to teaching writing used at four different bilingual special education California schools. These approaches include: (1) interactive journal writing: teacher leads dialogue with the students by providing written responses to their daily journal entries. The teacher's responses serve as a model for writing as well; (2) Writers' Workshop - "students go through planning, drafting, editing, revising, final drafting, and publishing each time they produce a written product", i.e. their own class book; (3) expository writing as a process; (4) combination of brainstorm writing, model webbing or mapping the story they have just read, non-interactive journals. The authors emphasize the importance of engaging the learners into the informal creative writing process to increase the intrinsic motivation. They state that often in classes with bilingual students there is a high amount of pressure to speed the students' transition from writing in L1 to writing in L2, which triggers the students' anxiety and reluctance to write. The results of the 10-week experiment in different educational settings showed that OLE program activities significantly decrease stress and increase writing productivity. According to the article, OLE is based on "sociocultural learning theory", and makes use of task-based interactive creative activities. Students are supposed to collaborate while working at their writing (= communities of practice). Writing is considered as a continuous ever-changeable life process. It always implies dialogue (with the teacher, classmates or oneself - in case of non-interactive journals). Response The idea of interactive creative writing is beneficial both for heritage learners, and ESL learners, who often do not feel at ease while writing in L2. Having experienced difficulties in writing in the past, they tend to produce limited quantities of clichéd patterns that lack spo

I like how in your article it state what kind of studies they did. They did Interactive journal writing; Writer's Workshop; OLE; and a combination of journal writing, brainstorming and planning, and spelling practiced for individual group. I think that just using one method from here might help a lot but if a teacher use two or three methods here, then the L2 would improve even more. But i don't know...it's a good article.

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.

Profess Groff, at MIT, took on the topic of classroom technology and the classroom environment. It is an older article, but she looked at the integration into the learning processes of student and the ways to judge a successful device in the learning process. One point, is that instructors need to assess the effects of a device early-on, so that an effective integration plan could be implemented before the likelihood of it hindering the learning process. I would agree that in the past this was a simple solution even though there seemed to be a lag in the educational system to integrate these devices. Now, however, the rate of development of new devices seems to be making the lag even more of an issue. The end of the article details the main obstacles to learning, the classroom and new technology in the classroom; and they mostly relate to the teacher. Students have no problem keeping up with the newest device available. This then brings me back to the idea that an effect plan in the school and teacher training needs to be employed.

This article dealt with an interesting look at the revision process and shortening sentence length. It talks about the restrictions one can place on themselves during the writing process. In this case, Hunley found many of the students writing greatly improved with this one exercise. Some students found the exercise to be helpful, while others said it disrupted the flow of their writing.I thought it was interesting and very relevant to sections of English 030. I have noticed that the kids in the section I am working in have had some problems with run-on sentences and an exercise like this would be really helpful. Any tip we can give people on how to improve the writing process is a good one, even if it doesn't help every single person.

Patrick Hartwell discusses the value of teaching formal grammar by reviewing its history as a fundamental building block to the development of good writing. By determining a set of definitions for grammar Hartwell shows that the process of absorbing correct grammar usage occurs within native speakers naturally by exposure to the language; even young children are able to use complex grammatical structures with skill. Yet when sorted through the scientific lens and broken down into categories and labels the study of grammar cannot explain how learning the component rules of language will prove valuable to overall writing ability. Instead Hartwell suggests and I agree that "one learns to control the language of print by manipulating language in meaningful contexts, not by learning about language in isolation, as by the study of formal grammar" (125). Language, Hartwell says is "verbal clay, to be molded and probed, shaped and reshaped, and, above all, enjoyed" (125). So language is play dough; it is supposed to be fun; it should not be something you do because you have to, but because you want to; you do it because you like to do it; it is about process not product. What can tutors/teachers do that can encourage students to view writing not as a means to an end, but as a valuable tool of expression, a concrete manifestation of focused energy that is representative of an individual's attempt to express? This need to express is at work on us all of the time; our survival depends on it. That is not an exaggeration; a closed mouth does not get fed. By funneling our thoughts into words, even if the result is an approximation of the truth of our energetic pursuits, there is still a result. Words do work on people because people feel. Maybe some of the frustration that freshman feel is a result of the heaviness of the rulebook; certain grammar rules affect student grades, certain constraints are imposed by the teachers rubric and the teacher as well a

So pretty much this article emphasizes the idea of the connection between the flow of writing (creation and invention) and excercise. The mentioned excercise that helps resolve writer's block is running, but the article also hints at aerobic excercises in general can help cure this issue. So long as the physical excercises do not require "attentional processes" but rather allow the mind to 'free' itself, high-exertion work outs can hold benefits to get those creative juices flowing.

Although this article deals more with the creative writing process, I thought there were some really good tips for overcoming writer's block. It goes over a few instances of when students got stuck with writing and offers suggestions on how to change it. It explains why students experience writer's block with creative writing, which I find to be reasons true of academic writing. It would be useful for our class to review the tips it gives and use them when helping students who are currently stuck in their writing processes.

Although this article discusses getting past writer's block for creative fiction writing, I still think that some of Smolens ideas are worth mentioning. His major focus is time. Smolen suggests that writers should give themselves a minimum amount of time to write in a session--just to get ideas flowing. In addition, he suggests that writers ask themselves questions about their environment. Where do they write and what makes their writing focused or distracted because of where they write? What sorts of noise occurs that promotes or reduces the flow of ideas when composing? After each timed writing session, Smolen states that writers to leave their paper and go walk around or visit a new environment for a minimum amount of time. This will help bring in new "fresh" ideas that may help the writing process during the next session. I think Smolen's suggestions of balancing your time between writing and taking constructive breaks can be useful for moving past writer's block, especially giving yourself timed writing sessions and breaks. this gives an external structure on how to compose that may be beneficial to those who feel that they should sit all day, staring at a blank computer screen, hoping to get past their writer's block if they sit there long enough.

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.

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

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 is a long talk, but you can skip to the comments about education by selecting the chapter. I started watching from Chapter 14 "Media Literacy". Chomsky discusses training of learners by preparation limited to passing the next test. His anecdote of a student who asked a question that a teacher did not have time to answer speaks to the overly structured framework that education exists in. Instructors are required to cover a specific amount of material which means that creative restructure of the class process is marginalized. Yet situated learning is a self creating process in which members should be able to contribute equally to the form and content of the class, especially in a democracy. A country that values equality and tolerance should have institutions that incorporate those morals into the practice of education. To return to evaluating the source, Chomsky has written Miseductation which criticizes the methods of the school systems in America and how they contradict patriotic values by generating conformity and non questioning submission to authority. Chomsky touches on the treatment of students as vessels to be filled with the most important thinkers thoughts until the test day, which obviously is not valuable learning. IN his discussion of the Nobel prize winner he points out that the information age and the role of technology can yield a benefit if used in a 'cooperative effort' (e.g. education) to come to terms with the knowledge that is available.

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 (

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.