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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 an interesting review/exploration by Jill Parrot of Eastern Kentucky University of David Foster's book "Writing with Authority". Parrot explains that Foster's book compares and contrasts the German university writing systems with American ones to examine the effects of each on a college student's confidence and self-efficacy in writing. Foster's thesis begins, "Undergraduates should learn how to write as knowledge-makers, developing the capacities for self-direction, long-term goal setting, and cumulative, recursive task development and writing," thus setting up the focus of the study. He argues that while there are pros and cons to each country's academic practices, the German system's focus on gradual development and self-direction with frequent interaction and discussion in the early stages helps to create a more long-term oriented view of the writing process and to establish the students as authorities on a topic that they may spend a great deal of time with. Without having access to the book itself, this article serves as a very thorough analysis of the text and I found this to be very informative.

This article is about how students have low-confidence in their writing abilities and how that greatly hinders their ability to get through a paper. The author, Christy Martinez, explains how the students haven't been taught or prepared to write well or they don't believe they can write well and so don't try hard because the students don't see the point. Martinez argues that "through mentoring and tutoring, teachers can help students become more confident, engaged writers." The article talks about where writing anxiety comes from and notes a variety of the different types of anxiety that students experience. Martinez claims that high expectations on writing is one of the major sources of anxiety. She also talks about students' self-efficacy and how that plays a major role in their writing ability. Some students believe that they can not write and that they don't write well so they don't even try to turn in a good paper. Martinez then shows the results of a study that focused on predictors of writing anxiety and self-efficacy and attempted to find the relationship. The study took gender, GPAs, and actual interest in writing as a recreational activity into account. The article read more like a self-help column towards the end. The methods Martinez list for combating writing anxiety include "breathing exercises, meditation, and guided imagery." She then goes on to note ways teachers can help students to be less anxious about their writing and to encourage them to try harder.

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

This article reviews how college freshmen's self-perception influences their transition into college life and their academic success. This relates to my research question because I am curious about how freshman transition from a typical high school mindset to a successful college lifestyle. The article discusses the many different factors that influence college freshmen's self-perception and reviews the data that has previously been found on this topic. Then the authors explain how they completed their study and discuss their findings. In the introduction of this article, the authors explain that one of the largest factors for academic success and a positive transition was a freshman's reasons for attending college. If a student had long-term goals and felt that their university was going to be a positive aspect of their life then they were more likely to be successful. I thought that this was interesting because I'm not sure how many of the freshmen in my Engl 30 section have this type of mindset. In the discussion section, the authors review their findings that students' perception of their intellectual ability and ability to make friends was a major influence on their success. Students who have a positive perception of their intellectual ability are more likely to be successful academically and socially. This was interesting to me because some of the students in Engl 30 might question their intellectual ability since their test scores were low. Lastly, the authors mention that students' perception of instructors and/or mentors as sources of support was a positive factor towards a successful transition. This made me think that maybe my Engl 30 students do not see myself and the mentor as sources of support because they are struggling in class, but if we could change that than maybe they would do better and be more successful.

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 introduces several methodologies in order to tackle writer's block. It includes eight different strategies that range from talking to admirable advisors for their opinions on your current writing assignment and genre to listening to music--how even psychologists agree that the creation of writing with the presence of music playing is beneficial to breaking down stumps in the road of writing. I wanted to see if i could find Cynthia A. Arem's book, Conquering Writing Anxiety, in the Library's Research database due to the fact that her book contains "self-assessment charts and strategies to break cycles of both writer's anxiety and writer's block" but this article seems like the next best thing :) I'll find more articles and books on writer's block this week as well.

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.

In this excerpt of Oliver's book, Oliver discusses much of what Rose discussed on "how writer's block comes to be" in our text--therefore, I will not go over those points. My main agenda is to see what sort of techniques Oliver uses in his work to suggest how to move past writer's block. On pages 165-168 Oliver discusses the first approaches to writer's block and then three ways that can resolve writer's block. To approach writer's block, Oliver puts the responsibility on the teachers to figure out if their students with writer's block use too rigid rules when composing, and if so, encourage students repeatedly that "Writing is rewriting" and that editing should be done after writing is complete. These notions Oliver states are very close to "better said than done" tasks, since teachers can repeat such things over and over until they are blue in the face but that doesn't mean the students will take those words to heart and change their composing habits. Oliver then moves on to his three "resolutions" to writers block, strongly putting responsibility on the teacher initially. Oliver offers that teachers should have a 10-15minute discussion with their students, using probing questions to prompt ideas for writing. In turn, the students should jot down notes of the ideas that come to their minds. The point of this is to tap into relevant knowledge for their paper assignments. This sort of prompt questioning can then be used by students on their own time, alone or with friends--the teachers just lay the foundation of understanding for their students on how probe questioning can be useful when composing (shift in responsibility of overcoming writer's block from teacher to student after the excercise is learned and understood). Next, Oliver offers the excercise of freewriting to help open the flow of ideas. He recommends that teachers should give their students 10-15 minutes of non-stop freewriting on their writing topics. Students should refrain from pausing or editi

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 is from the library's scholarly database, you will need to login to view it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article examines the reasons university students have anxiety over writing and/or confidence in their writing. I was especially interested because of the focus on genders. The authors hypothesize that female students are more likely to experience anxiety in their writing because of a difficulty in navigating the power structures that are academic discourse, and that male students are more confident in their writing than females even when there is no difference in ability. The article conducts a study of 127 college students at a public university near the Texas-Mexico border.

This article by Donald Reitzes and Peter Burke reflects a sociological study into college students' perceptions of their college role in relation to their self-concept and identity. It is suggested that for these students their role performance is heavily affected by how well this role is integrated into their identity as a college student, and that students that have a greater sense of identification with their college student status will perform this student role and its accompanying responsibilities better than those who deviate from the student role identity - that is, those who identify more strongly with counter-roles. While this doesn't directly address composition proficiency and mastery, the basic theoretical approach would seem to follow that those students who are encouraged to incorproate their role as writers into their student and general identities would perform this role better and with more zeal than those who feel that this role is a performance unrelated to their fundamental identity.

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.

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 (

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?

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 discusses "how emotions affect the composing process" in academic writing. The author argues that writing assignments that demand "critical thinking and identity shifts" cause anxiety for students, hence why they cannot fully engage in "critical analytic writing" under these conditions. The author suggests instructors need to better understand these conditions in order to help students succeed in academic writing. ENGL 431 would find this article useful because the students we are observing are at stage in life in which identity and self-discovery is central. Therefore, tutors, mentors, and instructors may be able to use these factors to draw connections between "discourse and emotion." Also, if tutors, mentors, and instructors found a way to make themselves more relate-able the students would feel more comfortable in the classroom setting. In turn, by making academic writing, in some way about the students they would feel more comfortable about academic writing assignments.