ENGL431fosen

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.

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 by Dr. Janette Hughes talks about the import role poetry plays in literacy development and how multi-media uses of poetry in the classroom can further enhance and engage a students learning process. For the sake of how in depth both of these subjects are, I'm only going to discuss what Dr. Hughes says about poetry and literacy development in this article. "Paying attention to the language and rhythms of poetry helps build oral language skills…..Children with well-developed oral language skills are more likely to have higher achievement in reading and writing" (Hughes). Poetry has an elitist stereotype to it, and tends to be something kept out of middle school and high school classrooms for the most part. Some English classes may briefly touch on some of the cannons of poetry, but only focus on a traditional notion of reading the context and finding the one single meaning. As Hughes states, "The dominant model of poetry teaching, particularly for older students, has been to teach poetry through print text and to focus on finding one meaning to be dissected. In contrast, poets emphasize the importance of hearing the poem read aloud, engaging with it, and probing for deeper meaning through discussion with others" (Hughes). I feel that engagement in poetry provides tools applicable to understanding every type of text. The brevity in poetry forces your mind to work in more analytical ways, and a facilitation of this analysis with other students provides a type of engaging learning experience that can be applied to any type of text for any class. This article really fascinated me, and left me with many more questions and ideas I would like to explore regarding poetry in the classroom.

This article by Claire Charles of Monash University suggest that boys are not up to speed in regards to "school based literacy competencies," but females appear to be thriving (72). The author focuses on women attending "elite" schools to explore the reasoning behind their success and how their "practices construct femininities" (72). Charles unveils the transformation women go through to find empowerment and translating that into their "reading and writing practices" (72). English 431 would benefit from this article because many of the students in English 30 are going through stages of self-discovery and by comparing genders this would allow us to sees the differences in this journey as well as the differences in their discourses. I'm interested to see how men and women incorporate gender into their writing. Some questions I had about this article were why/how are girls outperforming boys and what does gender have to do with mastering literacy? I hope English 431 students can learn how to bring feelings of empowerment to both genders in English 30 in order to help the students find their own voice and identity in their writing.

"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?

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.

Becker's article discusses the various models researchers have used to blueprint the cognitive process writers use during revision. The discussion associated with these models came from Becker's inquiry on why novice writers have negative attitudes towards the revision process in comparison to more experienced writers. The goal of this research was to make explicit the most effective and efficient cognitive strategies teachers could use to help novice writers improve their revision process. Most of the models consist of evaluation skills and long-term memory associations. I find this article useful for teaching writing in the sense that it has potential apparatuses that teachers can use to motivate students to revise their work. Because revision is an important and sometimes complex part of the writing process, these models may serve useful or may serve as templates for other models to arise when applied to teaching. The important thing here is finding ways to encourage students to revise their work and examine what processes students use to motivate them to revise rather than have students assume their work is already perfect.

This next article is fairly similar to the last article I posted, but this one is much more assertive and is more of a short, instructive textbook. This article/textbook contains "30 new ideas" for teaching writing, and with each individually constructed idea, your cognition automatically begins to spastically construct new tactics in approaching the students within your designated literary workshop. Some of the ideas include: require written responses to peers' writing, vocabulary building exercises, stepping away from prolixity and utilizing colloquial verbiage, constructing an email dialogue between students, encouragement of descriptive writing (sounds, emotions, sentiments, sensations etc.), establishing a "framing device," introducing multi-genre and multicultural literature to overall strengthen their syntactical horizons. Definitely another beneficial article to the workshop mentors of this English class-the reasons are very obvious. There are even anecdotal passages that share the endeavors of others who have chosen similar literary-assisting/instructing paths. So if you're interested in becoming an English teacher of any kind, add this article to your anthologized conglomerations of instructive, literary resources.

I was reading the first couple pages of your article and i like it. It seems like it will work with teaching ESL learner how to write.

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.

Ardashir Vakil's "Teaching Creative Writing", to me, is an essential read. And I should add that I'm rarely excited by "Academic" writing. What makes Vakil's article different? Well other than his very cool name, he tackles the very real problem of teaching creativity with an opening salvo that had me hooked instantly. Paraphrasing Vakil's words in the first paragraph, you can't teach creativity. What he explores after qualifying his position is in and of itself a story. Vakil hopes to reveal his meaning by giving a kind of case study example of how he learned an important lesson in teaching. His attempt to impart that knowledge begins first though with another example, that of writer Anthony Trollope's attempts to turn his son into a great writer. In what read more like a conversation Vakil continues with an observation he's made of a trend in education, "…there has been a surge of interest in and enthusiasm for courses that offer creative writing, not to speak of books by writers and academics who profess to teach you how to write the perfect story or novel." (157). It's a trend I find myself following and since Vakil wrote this article in 2008 I wonder whether it has grown stronger in the last four years. The first whole paragraph of the second page boils down the troubles teachers face so well I wish I could quote the whole thing but I'll just point it out as an intensely insightful piece of the whole. As the piece continues Vakil describes what he did in his workshops and I must say I was envious of his students. As you follow Vakil's student through her journey to discover her writer's voice it is almost as though you are sitting across from Vakil while he tells the story, a quality of his writer's voice that burned brightly through this very academic material. I don't know that I'll say this many more times but this is a must read for anyone interested in teaching creative writing.

"profess to teach you how to write the perfect story or novel". Do you believe that creative writing is about teaching other to write a perfect story or novel? For me, i don't know. I'm not a writer, so i would assume so.

The article written by ERIC (The Educational Resources Information Center) which I must assume is a part of George Washington Univ. Washington DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development is a broken down "checklist" of sorts. It addresses six different concerns with grading student's writing. One such concern is one I think we all might have asked ourselves at one point in time, "Why do professors need to construct effective writing assignments?"(3). The answer given to the question was interesting in that it pushed hard for effective peer reviews. While some peer review is helpful the article did address the fact that most students are unaware of how to give effective peer review. The basics of the article concerning peer review are that professors need to help students learn by example and explanation. I thought it interesting as well that the article addressed how professors can avoid giving a grade that they will have to defend after the fact, a problem for professors who grade writing without a series of rewriting stages. The solution offered is, that's right, stages of rewrites with the professor holding off giving a grade for as long as possible. One important idea brought up in the article is that "…the writing assignment should include necessary information about audience and purpose, the two pillars of writing."(3) I often wonder how we focus on the first and not the second. As the article states one of the pillars of writing is purpose, yet we seem to habitually focus on the audience and not give student's a purpose for their writing.

This article dealt with an interesting look at the revision process and shortening sentence length. It talks about the restrictions one can place on themselves during the writing process. In this case, Hunley found many of the students writing greatly improved with this one exercise. Some students found the exercise to be helpful, while others said it disrupted the flow of their writing.I thought it was interesting and very relevant to sections of English 030. I have noticed that the kids in the section I am working in have had some problems with run-on sentences and an exercise like this would be really helpful. Any tip we can give people on how to improve the writing process is a good one, even if it doesn't help every single person.

This article covers a multitude of steps that assist in teaching the dynamics of writing to others. There is an extensive list of statements that is followed by a descriptions as well as procedural conduct. The first statement is "establish a positive atmosphere for writing, reading, and learning," and proceeds to illustrate the ambiances of a classroom, as well as possible arrangements of desks etc. The primary idea is to establish a sustainably, beneficial community in which the students are free of apprehension and unnecessary judgment of any kind. The classroom should be "inviting," "respectful," and have positive "routines and expectations." There should also be regimented activities and daily-designated prerogatives that allow the students to expand their literary intentions. This is article is utmost beneficial to every student within this English course that is committed to their weekly internships. The informatively instructive articulations of each scenario that is provided within this article are very versatile, and can generally assist us all in our own unique interned environments. I highly recommend giving it a brief glance, if you're busy or have some obligatory escapade to attend to.

This article addresses every aspect of writers' block as "symptoms" then gives specific cures for each reason for blocking. It goes hand in hand with our reading for this week. While some of the "cures" are rather broad, many are specific enough to really help a person overcome writers' block because they touch on the problems so specifically.

I was reading the article and the symptom see to match some of my writer's block. Especially the symptom for "don't want to spend too much time or don't understand the assignment". This symptom fit me really well. And the cures really help.

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.