ENGL431fosen

This is an RSA animation of a lecture given by Sir Ken Robinson, a proponent of creativity and innovation in education (see http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/who for more information about him). This is an interesting and often humorous look at some general trends in modern public education. Though there is nothing that directly relates to teaching writing, there is much here that may contribute to the topic of failure, and to the importance of learning in social contexts. Robinson concludes that collaboration is the stuff of growth, it is our natural learning environment.

I found this article to be interesting, and overall useful when thinking about the writing process as a whole. Junot Diaz is the pulitzer prize winning author of "The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," and, "Drown." He is one of my favorite writers, and I believe that reading about his routine, how he became a writer, and his thoughts on the craft can only be helpful.

sound interesting...i think i'll check it out.

This website is a tool for people wanting to incorporate blogging into their classroom. The site offers that writing should be a collaborative process, which is exactly what blogging offers. In response to critics, "Blogging is about reading and writing. Literacy is about reading and writing. Blogging is about literacy"

This is a technical discussion on dopamine, rewards, and time by neurologist Robert Sapolsky. His research has shown that the anticipation of reward is more pleasurable than the reward itself and this pleasure increases when the reward is not a guarantee, but a possibility. This kind of discussion may seem overly abstract and distant from the classroom, but understanding how motivation works, even on a neuro-chemical level, can help us to not only design our courses, but develop new approaches to generating enthusiasm and performance in the classroom. It is a good place to start when crafting (or re-designing) a teaching (and/or writing) philosophy. What are the rewards students associate with writing? What is our role in creating, maintaining, and providing access to those rewards? Do the rewards always have to be attainable? How do we frame these ideas for use in academic planning?

This is a handbook for understanding and developing authentic materials suitable for adults published by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL), which ran out of money and funding sources about four years ago. I've already been sold on the value of authentic materials and tasks, but with this handbook, NCSALL takes that extra step I've been looking for, it gives me some guidelines to create tasks for my own potential classroom. The underlying theme of this text seems to be facilitating students' connections with their own literacy.

Tong's post! This article is about the complication of academic writing. It identifies some of the difficulties in understanding an academic paper. Through anthropologist view they point out that academic writing are becoming more and more complex due to many reasons like the contents of the paper, the vocabularies including syntax and discourse. It mentions something that has to do with "technical and/or scientific writing" and the relation to countries that are working to "catch up". And how it would be a hard task in helping them to understand what's really being done. People were being hired to make the text more comprehensible to other readers. Academic writing is like making/ stating an idea in a complex ways by the uses of complex vocabularies. One important thing I found interesting and true for myself is the way student approach academic writing. Students only skim over articles to get a sense of what's being said rather than reading to "make use of the information." Then I thought could it be that students have to write on multiple articles and while in school we takes several classes that are not related to the same thing/topic and therefore our reading and writing are does not focus on the same genres or format.

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 classroom in Japan supplemented their English course with an additional grammar course. I find this interesting because it's another way of looking at what we've been studying, understanding how ESL students and teachers and bridging the grammar gap, either with additional coursework, courses or teaching methods.