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Luberda's essay is a preliminary overview of his experiment in applying cognitive science to writing. Luberda suggests that the most applicable elements of cognitive science for teaching writing and composition come from linguistics. He also suggests that in teaching writing and literature, students may be accustomed to learning terms, dates, facts, and test-taking, while others receive a vague understanding of literature. In light of the teaching structures he used, the writing and analytical skills the students acquired were independent of the literature in their course. In using the cognitive approach, Luberda structured writing and literature courses within the context of differentiating relations between language change and writing acquisition. In reading the positive results of Luberda's experiment, I noticed a few implications for teaching writing. One advantage of applying linguisitics and the cognitive approach is that students learn why they write the way they do and raises awareness to the writing structures they use. The other advantage is the ability for students to "say what I mean" and incorporate accuracy in their writing when communicating meaning. This would mean that even when students are intentionally manipulating writing structures within various genres, they are learning to communicate "what I mean" without being submissive to directness. There was one negative result of the experiment where a student stated "I don't believe this course has helped me improve my writing skills. In high school I was taught how to write analyze books and then write papers about them using solid grammar, intense vocab, thesis statement and a well thought out conclusion. I do not believe I learned how to improve my papers. I am still on the same level of writing as I was in high school." I find this to be interesting in relation to teaching writing because it suggests that cognitively, we strive to use writing structures differently or advance our writing by chan

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 quite a small article, but it presents a certain interest as it connects writing with other social practices. I guess this assumption is crucial for teaching because it presupposes writing in the classroom with real-life purposes. The article also mentions interculturality and constant interaction of two languages, which is important when teaching writing to ESL students. The author is concerned about the specifics of effective transfer of literacy skills in bilinguals and heritage speakers. According to Martinez, as a result of traditional teaching, bilingual students tend to write with "conformity to rhetorical traditions in the dominant language" ("backwards literacy"), which creates certain problems with style, thoughts expression, choice of words and sentence patterns (i.e., mechanical transfer of the dominant language features into L2 writing). Therefore, it is necessary to develop "forward literacy", which accepts a non-standard way of writing ("writers carve out their own transcultural paths of expression"). In other words, writing of a bilingual or heritage learner implies constant shifts (transfers) between languages and cultures, and using the multiple resources of both languages in order to create an original pattern. The instructor's task is: (1) to identify multiple literacies (i.e. writing practices) that students possess and / or should possess in their heritage language and their dominant language; (2) to teach the students how to shift without mixing two languages. E.g. in early works of Spanish heritage learners, English norms penetrate Spanish writing: estoy the acuerdo instead of estoy de acuerdo. The shift should concern rhetorical strategies, which reflect cultural and aesthetical values of the two languages worlds, but not grammar or writing vocabulary; (3) teaching writing in the context of multiple social practices and contents While teaching writing, it is important to distinguish between positive transfer of skills already acqu

Wow, i like your article. It state purposely on how to help ESL student to write English better.

Although this article discusses getting past writer's block for creative fiction writing, I still think that some of Smolens ideas are worth mentioning. His major focus is time. Smolen suggests that writers should give themselves a minimum amount of time to write in a session--just to get ideas flowing. In addition, he suggests that writers ask themselves questions about their environment. Where do they write and what makes their writing focused or distracted because of where they write? What sorts of noise occurs that promotes or reduces the flow of ideas when composing? After each timed writing session, Smolen states that writers to leave their paper and go walk around or visit a new environment for a minimum amount of time. This will help bring in new "fresh" ideas that may help the writing process during the next session. I think Smolen's suggestions of balancing your time between writing and taking constructive breaks can be useful for moving past writer's block, especially giving yourself timed writing sessions and breaks. this gives an external structure on how to compose that may be beneficial to those who feel that they should sit all day, staring at a blank computer screen, hoping to get past their writer's block if they sit there long enough.

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 deals with creating writing opportunities for ESL/EFL students so that they can feel confident in their writing abilities. The author talks about developing meaningful writing task. Writing about cultural,social and emotional experiences are critical on building confidence in the students writing. When ESL students see that their life is related to meaningful issues of the world that can be portrayed in writing, they become more engaged;Their confidence in writing begins to build.

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.

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 (

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.

Kimberly De Vries writes about the differences in writing between Chinese students and American students and the expectations of Western academic institutions. She compares Western writing to "mathematical plainness" and argues that there is a cultural bias that exists. De Vries writes, "My experience with American writing practice has led me to conclude that in America, clarity depends not so much on using a particular form, but rather using the form expected by the reader. Thus clarity is entirely dependent on cultural expectations..." (1). This article was interesting to me because I have several Asian students in my workshop. I'm trying to understand the motives behind some of the errors they make while writing. It's difficult because much of the research deals with wether they're using their L1 to help organize their thoughts and simply translating them into L2 (which usually results in a complete lack of clarity. In fact, at times I didn't know what whole sentences meant) or writing by using L2 only. De Vries also relies on research by Robert Kaplan who has documented the effects of culture on writing practices. De Vries writes, "Kaplan contended that writing teachers needed to understand that culture produces different styles of argument, rather than flawed thinking. If we are not looking for it, we may miss an unfamiliar pattern of argument just as we may miss an unfamiliar sound in a foreign language" (3). De Vries believes that American scholars value a certain "style" of academic writing -- a style that represents only a small part of all the writing that goes on in the world today. "As this work goes on, we now begin to see that many characteristics of 'good' writing that were once perceived as universally true, are actually very much influenced by culture" (6).

In this article, there are 30 different ways in which this website tries to get students into their writing. Some of the ideas are probable and others not so much, but the main focus of the article seems to be relating the writing the students are doing back to the students themselves. We see in the article one idea that is really great. Number eight states to have student write on their own writing. How interesting would it be to read your own writing? Maybe not always as interesting as you would have thought? Well... how can you change that? How can you write something that you would not mind reading? These are the challenges students face, but by reading their own writing and reflecting on it, we could see a possible change in the writing being produced. Another example and method that the article shows is to have a writing buddy. Yes, I know this sounds kind of immature for college students, but in reality, I believe it would be nice to have someone that always read my works and I read theirs. You can make a friend, and you can also get a better idea of how important your writing really is.

This website/article lists, in detail, many, many (30) different ways one can teach writing. It lists exercises and methods and ideas. I don't have to explain that much of it, because it relates directly to a lot of the stuff we're learning and discussing in class.

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

Nature writing This particular article deals with a post-composition era that still resides in the university. Writing is depicted as a means of a disconnection between different experiences that students often times find themselves bewildered. This goes along with the argument against writing from the stimulation of reading: writing, for example, a response to a piece of reading in an anthology might be interesting, but it does not provide the original experience for the writer. By the time something is put into words, it makes a specific connection, or a specific rhetorical stance towards that thing. Reading, then, becomes a re-interpretation of a text, not the original experience wherewith the text is from. What this paper argues, then, is to take students through the original experience of actually confronting the scene of nature itself: what is there, what is constituted, and what can be written. Traditional texts in nature writing include the following: Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Joseph Krutch's The Desert Year. The course would include times dedicated to the reading of what is emphasised on style of writing, technique of writing and different elements of style. By then, not only would the students learn the value made by the originality of experience, they also learn the value that writers put into writing. It is not an exaggerating thing to say that such is the writing experienced by a writer. Peer critique is one of the crucial aspects of the course where students will give feedbacks on "perception, emotion, evaluation that includes both efferent and aesthetic considerations". At the end of the course, the value(s) in perception will be a lifelong skill, which in time develops into a tradition.

I first encountered this article when taking 470 course, and this week I have looked it through thoroughly, as it seems to me that it contains some significant information concerning the nature of bilingual writing. Losey affirms that written codeswitching is significant for bilingual students as it provides opportunity for them to fully express themselves. According to the author, the writing identity of a bilingual is constructed by the constant correlation of the two language worlds; therefore, it is not only natural but also necessary for him / her to codeswitch in order to express his / her individuality. This idea correlates with the article "Heritage Language Literacy: Theory and Practice" by Chevalier, where the author considers that bilinguals do not possess the whole range of written registers because they codeswitch in the situation when monolinguals change their writing style. However, Losey does not see codeswitching as disadvantage like Chevalier does. His point of view is closer to another article "Writing back and forth: the interplay of form and situation in heritage learners' composition" that I reviewed during the previous week. The author of that article explains that the productive writing in bilingual schools implies shifts between two cultures and languages in order to create a new non-standard way of expressing one's thoughts. Losey goes even further. He does not only considers codeswitching possible in the classroom settings ("an unsurpassed opportunity for bilinguals", "a successful strategy for enhancing communication, promoting natural literacy acquisition in both languages, valuing students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds", though "its use in the classroom runs counter to linguistic and cultural norms and must be guided by an informed and sensitive instructor"), but, after analyzing writing patterns of the 47 personal letters exchanged between young individuals, he also determines the form and functions of the written codeswitching

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.

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.