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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

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.

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.

The article describes language teacher preparation in the use of learning technologies. Three focus group interviews were held with 28 pre-service teachers; 9 in-service teachers were interviewed, and a post focus group interview was held with student teachers after they completed their field teaching experience. The article continues on by describing teacher response to technology in the classroom. In correlation to that idea is that of the effect of technology to the students of ESL classroom. This article demonstrated that if a teacher is not adequately in the technology at hand then they will not use it. If a teacher is not using it the neither will the students. To prepare a teacher is to prepare the teacher to prepare the students. It has a cyclical effect.

This study addresses the levels of writing that are done in high school to prepare for college writing courses. This study assesses whether or not these activities of writing are adequate in prepping students for college. The questions asked are: What types of writing do high school teachers assign? Do high school teachers apply evidence-based writing practices? What adaptations do high school teachers make for struggling writers? What writing assessment practices do high school teachers apply? Are high school teachers prepared to teach writing? Do high school teachers believe that writing is important beyond high school? Do high school teachers believe students possess and will acquire needed writing skills?

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.

This article acknowledged the proven benefit and developing healthy and positive student-teacher relationships on the students' cognitive and social development. It focused on the potential use of dialogue journals as a way to generate unintimidating one-on-one dialogue between the students and teacher, and how the use of such journals could not only strengthen student-teacher relationships but also potentially benefit "at risk" students.

The author inquires about why students dislike writing. Bricker presents a case in her inquiry that addresses the student's problem through one on one discussion. Her case lifted the student's aversion to writing by showing him directly that he was able to write without realizing it. This article really brings to light the importance of identifying negative attitudes towards writing and paying close attention to the student's psychological reaction to writing. In doing so, teachers can adjust the dialogue to get a more eager response to write from students having difficulties with writing. One significant idea presented in this inquiry is allowing students to write what they want to say rather than what the teacher wants to hear. This gives teachers and future teachers a big clue as to what possible circumstances prevent students from writing and ones that encourage them to write.

This paper is and interview from the teachers who teaches academic writing to post graduate students and EFL students. It provides the teachers methods to bring up an academic piece to the students so that the student will understand the purpose of the paper. Through a series of lectures and example, the teacher works on having the student find evidence and state their point of view. It's mostly on the things that most of us should know, such as a paper should start with an introduction, have body paragraphs and conclusion and don't use the word I think, I believe etc. in an academic paper, but us quotes and supporting evidence.

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.

From Tong: This paper is and interview from the teachers who teaches academic writing to post graduate students and EFL students. It provides the teachers methods to bring up an academic piece to the students so that the student will understand the purpose of the paper. Through a series of lectures and example, the teacher works on having the student find evidence and state their point of view. It's mostly on the things that most of us should know, such as a paper should start with an introduction, have body paragraphs and conclusion and don't use the word I think, I believe etc. in an academic paper, but us quotes and supporting evidence.

I found this video actually looking for an informative video about students liking writing ---- goes to show that most students "hate" writing for multiple reasons. Many of the reasons in the control of educators. Teachers have the power to change the negative connotation students interpret writing to be - just an assignment, no further significance to, no interest to write ---- students should enjoy writing <<< school stems from learning through writing and reading ---- students want to write on things that interest them not pedagogical theories and research assignments. Students like to learn through their own eyes - students enjoy different genres of writing. Teachers have the power to enable their students in finding their interest in the writing realm. However, students should know the general rules and process of writing whether it be a narrative or research assignment, etc. Also, (as a teacher comments within the movie) - students don't always take blogs or social-media oriented writing forums with interest since self-representation is then transmitted into a educational institution. The video also covers the public's views on possible preventing of "writing hatred." This video also reflects the concept in the Casanava article in our class packet - teachers need to work on getting students immersed in writing through allowing their personal knowledge be combined with the values and lessons deemed by the institution they are writing for.

This article focuses on the effects student-teacher relationships have on students' academic functioning and their level of disciplinary problems. It combines research from previous studies and combines first-hand research to develop an understanding of the differences between disruptive and non-disruptive students. They put a strong emphasis on how the research is conducted because the researched that they gathered was largely based on questionnaires and they proposed that interviews, or Teacher Relationship Interviews (TRI), could provide much more extensive and useful knowledge of the true interactions among teachers and students.

This is a video I found on YouTube discussing freshman composition. The video's main focus is to get the students' perspective on the class and to discover what it is that they are wanting to get out of the class and how they view the class in general. The students that were interviewed explained how it is hard to be themselves in their writing and they get caught up in trying to make their writing cater to what the teacher wants. One student, discussing her writing, says she feels she has to "alter it to fit the teacher" and that in class, they aren't writing for themselves but writing "for the teacher." The video goes into detail about the purpose of freshmen composition, it gives examples of all sorts of paper assignments and guidelines that the teacher wants to be followed. Students were then interviewed on their perspectives and noted that the guidelines were helpful and kept them on track. Others felt it could be a little stifling and hard to be themselves in a paper. The video went on to explain how writing is different from any other class because it is an example of the students' own identity, their ideas. There's a sense of vulnerability to it that is not seen in other classes like math or history for example. I found this to be interesting, I wish the video had gone into a little more depth but I liked seeing the freshmen's perspectives. It would have been better if more students were interviewed too. Definitely something worth checking out though!

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.

The authors discussed to common occurrence of teachers "bending over backwards" for their NNS (Non Native Speaking) students, especially when evaluating surface errors. The study in this article seemed well orchestrated. It presented a variety of English teachers with six compositions: two from native English speakers, two from Danish speakers, and two from speakers of Thai. These students however were not real and the "student profile" assigned to each composition was constantly rotated. The results found that NES (Native English Speakers) were judged more harshly because "they should know better". The northern European, the Danish, students were pretty neutral. The Asian, the Thai, students were given the most leniency. I found this article interesting because it gives insight to the impact that teachers' grading has on the development of ESL students' writing proficiency.

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 is an interesting article of a professor describing how he strayed away from the typical freshman comp syllabus to teach a class that would be relevant to the students. He used a current event (the Immigration Debate) that was especially relevant to his students; the majority were Latino/Chicano and lived in Southern California. He starts the article by giving a history of the immigration debate which isn't important to what we're studying. But then he starts talking about his class at the bottom of page 20 (that's where the article starts to get interesting) and describes how he planned his lessons and writing assignments to be centered around this debate. He tried to make the class interesting for the students and wanted them to feel like they were really learning something. The students had to write a series of essays describing what side of the issue they were on and they had to back up their reasoning with sound evidence and support. Hale describes the work as "challenging assignments that focused on critical thinking and argumentation: (26). All of this led up to a final research paper they had to do which the students would have an easier time doing because they already have a wide range of knowledge on the subject which Hale says "helped to prepare the students to write their research paper" (26). After all the articles the students had read they also had "a good databank of sources to back them up" (27). Hale also describes how this take on teaching was helpful to him as an educator. This was a subject he was very interested in and he notes that he "was tired of placing such a huge firewall between my classroom and my outside activism" (27) so by making his assignment something he was interested in, his enthusiasm would get the students interested too. He states that "the immigration debate engaged my interest as a teacher in a way that standardized assignments did not" (27) and I think this is an important thing for educators to consider when ma

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.