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.

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.

Cheryl Hogue Smith explores the assumption that basic writers do not have the necessary critical thinking skills needed for college courses. She argues that they do; they just don't know how to control and organize their thinking onto paper. She examines the two different goals that students have in regard to the approach they take for learning. Ultimately, Smith concludes that basic writing students have the thinking skills needed, they just need to be taught how to harness those skills and be metacognitive. I found this article to be very interesting because Smith was able to get to the actual root of the problem and explain why basic writers are basic writers. I really appreciated the explanation of the difference between the two goals--"learning goals" and "performance goals." I believe that if a teacher can grasp this concept and utilize it in the classroom to assist the "performance goal" oriented students to become "learning goal" oriented, I think that the students will benefit a great deal and become much better at taking their thoughts and putting them on paper. Additionally, I loved the "Revision and Metacognition" and "Steven and Charlotte: Evidence of Metacognitive Revision" sections! I think this way of revising is a great way to help develop a students critical thinking skills in regard to how they present their thoughts onto paper.

Apparently the link on this isn't working. Here it is again, I hope it works: http://ehis.ebscohost.com.mantis.csuchico.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=20&sid=fbc21340-0df1-41b8-934a-01f3805e708d%40sessionmgr15

In this space leave a 4-5 sentence summary and response to the article. Do your best to tell us not just what the article argues but how it could be useful for us in ENGL 431. Then use tags to categorize the article for us. (When you're in the blue screen, choices for tags will appear below; once published, they'll appear as gray squares above) That way, as we become more interested in particular concepts or issues, we can easily find all of the articles tagged with those specific terms.

The author explores using podcast to get students work on research paper. The professor believes that podcast can help students form group study and really engage in preparing and writing the research paper. From the whole article, the podcast can be considered as a long-term project and send students into groups to study. The podcast group creates a community for students to discuss and revise the research topic; in this sense, students in the group study as co-learners and engage in one another's research paper. This article is again about an invention strategy, podcast, in academic settings. Podcast is done in the group working environment, so this strategy requires creating a community of practice to get students engaged in a common topic---research paper. Even though students' topics are different, they still can help each other and engage in others' success because the requirements for the research paper are the same. I believe this would be a good way to scaffold students to deal with research paper; still, this strategy requires careful designs and attention from professor, and professor works as a facilitator to support the students' learning and practicing in the group work.

This article is stresses the importance of the cultural component as a part of language learning rather than subordinate to it. It separates "cultural awareness" from "intercultural capability" in which the later is understood as "engaging learners in developing the capability to exchange meaning in communication with people across languages and cultures". Then the article goes on to give an ambiguous solution to revising L2 learning assessment. The article is short but it offers good insight to that fact that schools assess language as merely a descriptive code.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Franci Washburn argues the importance of a student using the ellipsis correctly. However, the focus isn't just on this seemingly simple and low-priority aspect of writing, she focuses on the fact that students who use the ellipsis correctly tend to be paying attention to the smaller details in writing and are more apt to be critical thinkers. She uses this example for noting the huge importance of paying attention to small details "Often, it isn't a major, glaring error that loses an investor a million dollars in the stock market but rather the failure to read the fine print on a stock prospectus . . . " She's right! It is incredibly important to pay attention to details or read the fine print; this seems to be a skill that is becoming more and more rare. Even though this is a short article, it had a pretty big impact on me. I've always been baffled when instructors tell their students that grammar doesn't matter (yes, even English professors have said this). I think that paying attention to grammar and punctuation helps a student to learn to look at details. However, having said this, I do believe that when revising a first or second draft of a paper the correction of grammar and punctuation should be held off because the content of the paper and the expression of thoughts and ideas are what should be focused on.