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"This interdisciplinary approach to rites of passage comprises 31 essays by outstanding contributors, including Marie-Louise yon Franz, Robert Bly, James Hall, Helen Luke, Victor Turner, and Marion Woodman."A watershed book ... an interdisciplinary array of essays highlights both the need for, and importance of, rights of passage to mark important transitions in our lives". Victor Turner's essay, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage" gives readers a better understanding of human's inner growth during the various stages of life. As an English 431 student studying English 30 students I notice this group demonstrating feelings of anxiety as if something was lost in translation or transition from high school to college. The transition from high school senior to college freshman appears to be difficult for the students in my internship. I want to know more about their "rites of passage" and why these students are struggling their first year. How does understanding this transition help us better prepare them for success in academic writing?

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.

This article discusses the different types and the effectiveness of Credit Based Transition Programs or CBTPs. CBTPs are programs that allow high school students to take college level courses and earn college credit. Some of the programs even help the students apply and transition into college life. CBTPs are very widespread and common because in the "2002-2003 school year, 71% of public high schools reported students took courses for dual credit". The debate now, which the article focuses on, is whether or not to make CBTPs more accessible to middle and low achieving high schools. Since these programs have proved to be very beneficial and highly used, policy makers are currently discussing how to implement them in the majority of public high schools. Implementing CBTPs programs in middle and low achieving high schools would give more students the opportunity to go to and succeed in college.

This article by Caleb Corkery analyzes the use of literacy narratives as a technique to help transition students who aren't from our culture. Corkery argues, and I agree, that storytelling gives students a chance to change their identities. He cites an example given by Betsy Rymes, "Rymes claims that former high school dropouts can re-script themselves through narratives that eliminate their past identities" (51.) Also through literacy narratives, students can gain insight into their own cultural identities and through this awareness understand how one is "culturally scripted" or how their culture affects how they see writing and the writing community which they are attempting to join. One of the hindrances that Corkery mentions in his article is the difficult transition for writers who come from an oral tradition. A different consciousness accompanies oral thought. Citing two researchers who study the Athabaskan culture in Alaska, Corkery writes, "Because learning to read and write in the essayist manner is in fact learning new patterns of discourse, literacy for an Athabaskan is experienced as a change in ethnicity as well as a change in reality set" (61). While we might not have the opportunity to teach writing to an Athabaskan, we do have students that come from a oral culture. The African American community has a very deep oral tradition. While it may not be as extensive as the native tribe in Alaska, it still deals with a certain amount of ethnicity change.

This study focuses on colleges with first year experience programs and whether or not having these programs be main faculty led is beneficial. It explores the idea that have upper classmen take part in the first year experience by interacting with freshmen would make the transition process easier because the first year students would connect more with peers than teachers. In the introduction it says that 'more than 68% of 2005 high school graduates entered some form of post-secondary education within 4 months of graduation' but more than 40% of these students fail to complete college and that most students will drop out within the first 6 weeks.

I watched this video in ENGL 030E workshop, and I am very interested in this video and the way the tutor use this video. The tutor show the video twice to students and assign them 8 minute quick write about what they have known from the video; after the quick write, the tutor let them discussion what they have gotten from the video in small group and share in the big group. In the big group discussion, some students mentioned that they "saw" words in the video. After discussion, the tutor show the video third time and asked students to write down all the words they have "seen" in this video. At the third, I figured out that the video shows different definitions of same words, like play, blow, run, etc., and the transitions between the words are done well. Through the process of thinking and discussing, the students noticed the words and the fluent transition. At the end of the discussion, the tutor collected the students' writings. The questions I raise from this video are that: 1. How to guide students to have such thinking rather than limited eyes. There will be more than two viewpoints to the same phenomenon, just like the different but interrelated definitions of the same word. At the beginning of the writing, the thought about the writing should be not limited in a specific topic or certain aspect, and writer can explore more ideas than they can. 2. How to start and use the invention strategies to avoid mechanical writing. Writing can be anything, not only the structure but also the idea. How to organize the essay, the structure, should be considered when the writing is certain; when having no idea of what to write, the free thinking and think deeper would be much more useful. It could be anything to inspire thoughts and ideas, like vocabulary, normal experience and so on. The video, the way the tutor delivers and the reading (Chapter 2 in Clark's book) make me think about how to really use the invention strategies.

This article discusses a program used by Kent State University to help high school students transition to college through an initiative that introduces the students to collegiate level academic libraries while they are still in high school. This program was started in an attempt to help college freshman succeed and to increase the retention rate at the university. In the program, high school seniors take field trips to the Kent State Library and are introduced to higher levels of research and the workings of a collegiate library. There are also online resources that are available to those outside of the immediate Kent State University area. The initial results of this program have been very positive and students have been succeeding at a higher rate. The librarians believe that college freshmen can be overwhelmed with everything a college library has to offer them and may be hesitant to ask questions, so they simply give up instead. But if they are introduced to the system when they are still in high school and excited about everything college has to offer, they are more likely to succeed when they finally reach the college level.

This article is looking at the differences in Non-Native speaker (NNS) and Native speaker (NS) in their writing discourse. The main focus is on the usage of tense, aspect, and active/passive voice in their writing. The subjects include NS, and NNS Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Arabic. They were given a class periods to answer one out of three questions. The result is very interesting for it shows the difference between the different groups of NNS and the overall differences of NNS and NS. At the conclusion of the finding, it says that NNS are less likely to use passive voice in their writing. I reflected it back to professor Wyrick's question about passive tense in Hmong. I notice that the reason we never pay attention to passive voice because we rarely use it in everyday communication that when I translated to my parents they said it's possible but it's hard to make sense out of it. I also tried to translate some transition words and found it to be very disturbing to the flow of the sentence.

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 is geared more towards translation but I've found that many of the same principles of translation can be applied when trying to write academically. We are doing nothing more than trying to translate our thoughts and complex ideas and put them into the language of academic writing - usually a foreign language to us. Because I am writing on cultural barriers to academic writing, I thought it would be useful to see how other minds work. In this way we might be more empathetic to our students and it might aid our diagnostics as well. The author, Dirk Siepmann, compares the academic writing of English, French and German. "For a long time the idea has been around that the 'spirit' of a language exerts a formative influence on its speakers and writers" (Siepmann 1). This influence is something that educators need to be aware of when teaching writing. How can you help transition students into a different academic writing culture without making them give up their own? Siepmann also discusses what he refers to as "Intellectual Styles." He calls these the "Saxon", the "Teutonic", the "Gallic" and the "Nipponic". He has derived these terms based on writers' ability to organize thought, target audience, relationship of writer to audience and other criteria. The author also talks about the differences in learning systems and what is expected in those learning systems.

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 article addressed the all to common problem of second language students being placed in mainstream English classes well before they have developed second language proficiency. These students are then expected to compete with their fellow peers who have developed proficiency since childhood. This article confronts the issues students face transitioning from ESL classroom environment to the mainstream environment. According Harklau the importance peer interaction and socialization should be used as tools to increase second language proficiency. Peer interaction and peer editing can help students develop a level of comfort and proficiency in their second language that is often missing in mainstream classrooms.

High school teachers and college professors pen a collaborative musing on whether high school sufficiently preps students for college