ENGL431fosen

After much searching, I was able to find a book that was written by an educator from England about her varying experiences with excellent writers that had a difficult time adapting their writing style to the expectations the West. Helen Fox, author of "Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing, analyzes the effects of culture and the problems this cultural influence causes when students try to adapt their writing styles and personas to that of Western academia. Problems include; focusing on a group instead of emphasis on self, a mindset geared toward a focus on the past instead of a focus on the future and a circular approach to writing instead of a linear approach. Fox investigates these issues and other cultural effects on the writing process.

This article is written by Cheryl Hogue Smith, a professor of English at CSU Bakersfield, about teaching writing to students considered "basic writers." Smith discusses the difficulty of getting basic writing students who are "woefully underprepared for college-level reading and writing tasks" to learn to be better writers. The solution, she claims, is to teach writers to be critical thinkers and "less fearful performers of academic tasks." She talks about how students come to her class from all different backgrounds with all sorts of different perspectives and ideas. A lot of her students have no confidence to write in the college level and so have no interest in it as well. The article attempts to solve this problem. Smith's idea is to teach the students to better value their thinking so that they have more of an interest in their writing and eventually, more confidence.

This article goes into great detail about how the physical classroom should be designed. O'Hare makes two big distinctions between lectures and discussion-based learning, and how lectures do not encourage a community of active learning because students are not facing each other. However, when students are facing each other, it is much easier for a discussion to happen between the students. To make this possible, O'Hare discusses seating arrangements, lighting, blackboards/chalkboards, projectors, and desks that can properly satisfy student needs.

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.

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

The author of this article uses the critical perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language and Lev Vygotsky's theory of language learning to examine the polyphonic texture of writing workshops, the dialogic classroom, the teacher's role as writer and authority figure, and the student's search for voice and role. So, she decides to participate in and observe (two students in particular) an introductory composition class in order to explain the polyphonic texture of workshops. In the end, she concludes stating that "we must resist reductive descriptions of our students' development as writers. (…) each writing workshop will compose a different "polyphony" of disparate elements which each student will appropriate and reshape in different configurations" (171). Unfortunately, you will have to log in as a member to view this article. It can also be found in Chico State's e-library.

The author of this article explores the writer identity of a college ESL student in order to understand how embedded ideologies and power relations shape understanding of writer identity. The research method is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The author presents the definitions of three important terms before proceeding to the analysis (identity, traditional formal discourse, and expressivism), where they are frequently used, to help the reader to understand them better. In the end, she comes up with concrete and practical implications for teaching. She recommends strategies for working with writers that are designed to encourage rather than silence the multicultural voices in our communities. Also, she suggests varying the types of assignments instructors give, using a process approach and discussing the sociopolitical implications of language use with students in order to overcome language policies that can work against ESL students. Unfortunately, you will have to log in as a member to view this article. It can also be found in Chico State's e-library.

According to the article, the critical difference between high school and college is that "high school education is designed to be standardized and quantifiable," while "college education is designed to be theoretical" (Fanetti 78). However, the authors do not lay the blame with either the high school or college writing instructors. Instead, the blame lies with standardized testing in high school curriculum. To meet standards, high school instructors must sacrifice certain types of writing for 'test writing', even though standardized test writing virtually disappears after high school. Thus, the skills needed for standardized test writing must be untaught in college. This seems wasteful for high school and college instructors. The article compares high school to a factory, in which the student is the product and standardized testing is quality control. Through the process, students become "mass-produced and measured everywhere by the same instrument" (Fanetti 80). To close the gap between high school and college, the authors' suggest that the purpose of high school should be redesigned completely. High school curriculum should view all students as college bound, whether they truly are or not. This will great better writing skills for all students and prevent extra work for secondary and post-secondary instructors. Also, we need to get rid of standardized testing completely since it does more damage than good, especially in the writing skills of students.

The title of the article, Understanding the College First-year Experience, basically explains the focus of the article. Kirk Kidwell summarizes the typical first year development of a freshman student as a time of purgatory. Successful students are able to go through four phases; dualism, multiplicity, relativism, and commitment to relativism. Through the phases, students lean to change from a passive style of learning to an active style of learning, as well as learn the "game: of college academia. In the game of college writing, Kidwell believes if students pass through the "academic hazing" or purgatory of the first year, they will learn the following two lessons. First, "College is not high school; one cannot just coast through" (Kidwell 253). Second, "The successful college student takes responsibility for his or her education" (Kidwell 254). These lessons are a good idea, but I feel they are too simple. Of course college is not high school. Stating such an obvious observation seems condescending towards freshmen students, regardless if they do or do not realize the fact. Also, the article summarizes the first year well, but it leaves out the more intricate parts of changing the issues freshmen students face. The missing issues include; how can teachers make the freshmen year less of a purgatory, is it possible to prepare high school students better through a change of curriculum, how do we help students to stay in college instead of dropping out, and how can we create awareness of college "is not high school"? These are crucial points that are completely missing from the article, thus the article is better for a basic understanding of what freshmen endure their first year of college.

After getting past the awesomeness of the fact that the author's name is Magnifico, this article concerns itself with issues of audience in writing. Much of the article is a literature review summing up the current research in the area and how it relates to her future research. Some of the areas examined are the cognitive and socio-cultural analyses of the effect of audience on writing. She finds that the audience can be a source of motivation and that writing with the audience in mind can inspire new comers to ask themselves the same sorts of questions as expert writers, such as what is it that they want to say, to whom are they saying it, and how are they going to convey this message.

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, Oura discusses authentic materials and task-based lessons in ESL instruction. The more I read about motivation in the classroom and successful skill learning, the more I read about authenticity and  task-based lessons (as well as a couple of other things not explicitly covered in this article). Though I've many authors talk about these two topics, this article stands out for it's clear and concise explanations and included examples. Interestingly, the examples aren't authentic tasks for any class I foresee teaching, but I can see their value in other courses.

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 goal of the article was to broaden the current understanding of social contexts in education. It focused on student-teacher relationship from the perspectives of attachment, motivation, and sociocultural effects.

I have already posted a Extra Credits video but I have to be completely honest: I feel the show is a goldmine for the potential topic that I'm looking at. While my other video discussed the basic concept of Gamification, this video explores the application of gamification to education specifically. Honestly, it may be a better idea for me to just lump all of Extra Credits together and simply refer to each video as its topic comes up. This is especially important because Extra Credits also has the following topics: Tutorials (http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/tutorials-101): This would tie in well with the "Rigid Rules" article from our text. Education does not necessarily have a clear "tutorial phase" especially for certain topics. Tangential Learning (http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/tangential-learning): This is a very important topic because it essentially explains the wikipedia effect. Learning about one topic can lead to an interest in another and someone who started on prominent war battles could eventually end up on the page for horse breeding. Enriching lives (http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/enriching-lives): Which does not focus on either topic specifically but focuses on the way

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.

Compared to my other sources, which thus far have had a solely focused on Gamification and all ties to education were stated by myself, this article takes a greater initiative in connecting Gamifaction and education, by discussing potential uses for Gamification in a classroom setting. It also refers to a psychology study conducted on implementing Gamification at the University level.

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.

When reading student work, I often come across misspellings like "u", "cuz" or the annoying lower case i. It's crossed my mind a few times that these mistakes are because of an increasingly technology dependent world. This article discusses the links between the digital age of writing and the academic world of writing. Can one exist with the other? The author suggests that students use things like texting as another form of writing they must learn how to do, just like creative writing or science writing.

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.