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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order -- facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table -- the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests. I want to find information on listening to music in the classroom, specifically the English 30 classes. I find the constant playing of Pandora to be distracting and I want to know if it's detrimental to the English 30 students learning, etc. So far I've found issues with listening to music and memorization, but not necessarily as it relates to writing workshops like the one I'm interning in now.

Let's try to stretch beyond CNN reports, which most often are quick and superficial.

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.

This article describes a study similar to one that we read about with the 10 UCLA students, except these students in the study are ESL students; something I want to follow with this thread. This study basically shows that L1 and L2 writers had many strategies in common, the main difference being that L2 writers weren't as concerned as the L1 writers in correcting their work, their main focus being, just get it out! We have discussed in class about writing for a specific purpose and how you audience affects your writing; this study shows that ESL students' composing strategies were not inhibited by their purpose or audience.

This article talks about whether or not you should study while listening to music and the types of music that can be beneficial when listening to studying. I'm still looking for information more specific to different types of studying and listening to music, like listening to music in a workshop setting or a lecture/classroom setting.

OK, did it mention writing, though? Find some research more directly related . . .

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).

Noting that most existing studies on bi-literacy have focused on learners whose L1 and L2 share the same script (the roman alphabet), the authors of this study examine the acquisition of Hebrew literacy by children who are already literate in Russian. This longitudinal study compared the reading success of 1st grade students of three groups: bilingual (Russian and Hebrew) who were literate in Russian, bilingual (not literate in either language), and monolingual (illiterate). The study found that that the students from the first group, those who were literate in Russian when they started school in Israel, performed better on a number of reading tasks in Hebrew than the students who started school without literacy in any language (including those who were bilingual but illiterate). From this, the authors conclude that bilingualism does not significantly enhance literacy acquisition but that being already literate in another language, even one with serious structural differences and that uses a different writing system, does aid the acquisition of literacy in the second language.

In May I took the CBEST without studying because everyone told me it was super easy, and that all you needed to do to study for a test like that is breathe. I did not pass one section, which left me heartbroken. I was so hung up on the idea that I hadn't passed such an easy test that I didn't stop to think about why. Of course I didn't study, but I shouldn't have to, I thought. According to this article and the book being discussed, "the brain will avoid thinking and instead try to rely on memory." Maybe I just tried to rely too much on my memories of the material in all those classes years ago, and my brain avoided actually thinking and synthesizing the material. Or maybe I needed to really study. Either way, an interesting read. (Oh, and I just finished retaking the CBEST this morning)

This 2010 article details the findings of a research project by Bitchener and Knoch wherein they studied the effects of corrective feedback for L2 writers. Specifically, they studied how advanced level ESL students in a university level writing class in the US improved or did not improve their accuracy with respect to the use of definite and indefinite articles as a result of different kinds of corrective feedback. The 10 week study seems to show that the accuracy of students who received explicit, meta-linguistic forms of corrective feedback improved considerably over the 10 week study. Those who did not receive corrective feedback, or who only received implicit correction in the form of circled errors with no accompanying explanation, did not demonstrate such an increase in accuracy.

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.

For me, it started with some initial ideas from David Orr's book Ecological Literacy, and along with it the argument in his other book Earth in Mind: that all education is environmental education, and the purpose thereof is to increase ecological literacy. What this article sets out to do is to provide a more general understanding of what ecological literacy is (a blend between ecological thinking and environmental literacy). Learning appears in a fusion between three big learning domains: behavioural, affective and cognitive learning, and such a learner is called an authentic learner. An authentic learner is one who "can not only identify relevant dilemmas but also appreciate how their understanding of a scientific concept can influence their decision. The difficult fulfilment of students who face today's education is the highly fragmented status of disciplinary studies (the so-called academia). Ecological literacy sets out not only to introduce students to ecological concepts, but to push them so far as to recognise their place within the current ecosystem. Ecological Misconception Ecology is a strictly inter-disciplinary field of study, which draws concepts from Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Geology. Misconception appears when there is a misconnection between the seemingly holistic view of the general concepts, or a failure to express the necessary link between related concepts. Where does writing come in? Writing, according to the authors, is a reflective process. Students are first introduced to the concepts relevant to an ecological discussion. They are then asked to write three iteration essays to demonstrate their understanding along with their ability to make connections within the given concepts. Since it is important that students go through an extensive study just to recognise their place within the current ecosystem, personal reflection through writing is an essential tool not only to "show", but to connect, and make connections (writing discou

This article discusses a study that was done to test the level of social adjustment of college freshmen and the relationship between their living environment and gender. Some of the students in the study were in first year experience resident halls and others were not. The study found that males overall had a more successful adjustment no matter what their living environment was and that all students, male and female, in the first year experience halls had successful transition. Also the students in the first year experience halls had an overall better social experience than those who were not in first year experience halls.

This study investigated semantic transfer in second language. The author studied Korean ESL speakers who were asked to perform a semantic judgment task in which they decided whether or not 2 English words were related in meaning. I'm not sure if it's because I did a similar project in semantics or what, but this article is just jumping off the page to me and I feel like I need to share it with others. Semantic transfer from L1 to L2 is so fascinating and I have a feeling I can link this to where my inquiry is going.

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 study occurs over a period of eight years and follows 55 secondary teachers as they take part in professional development in cognitive strategies approach to reading and writing and then implement those strategies in their classrooms. The cognitive strategies approach, an intervention program developed by the UCI Writing Project, focuses on how readers and writers construct meaning from and with texts. This approach suggests that teachers provide systematic and explicit guidance in the cognitive strategies that are utilized by effective readers and writers. The authors state that the "aim of the project was to help students develop the academic literacy necessary to succeed in advanced educational settings," (275). Students were placed into two groups, the "Pathway students" who received cognitive strategies interventions and the control group. According to the study "pathway students not only grew more from pre- to post-test, but also wrote better essays on the post-test and received higher scores than their counterparts in the control classes," (289). http://www.evernote.com/shard/s88/sh/ebcc6b46-f96b-4912-adfe-880d00e4c81e/2b3ed2a99dda281a4071c0fc3d20b990

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.