ENGL431fosen

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

Andrea Lunsford's Standford study shows that technology is not hurting literacy--it is creating a revolution. "Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again." Today's generation, however, writes every day, often all day long thanks to things like twitter and facebook and texting.

In the paragraph of "The path of multiple tools" the author introduced the idea of "the awesome juggling act" created by Mel Levine. Levine came up with this idea because he believes that the task of writing consist of constantly switching attention between multiple goals and subtasks. "The awesome juggling act" can be described as a boy who is juggling eight balls at the same time. The boy is keeping all the balls in the air at the same time ; to write you must keep all of the parts of writing in your memory while you write.

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 website deals with the idea of conferring with students. The author states that individual conversations with students are important on accessing the students and determining what they need at the time to improve their writing. The author shares a wonderful video that demonstrates how one on one mentoring and conferring can truly build the confidence of a student. The author states that it is critical to support students without taking over their ideas specially if the the student is struggling. I truly enjoyed the video as it truly illustrated the authors suggestions. I found this website interesting because sometimes we must show someone how to be a writer before criticizing their papers and assuming that they are bad writers.

This is an informative YouTube video that looks at the way Dr. Christopher Long uses blogs as writing in his philosophy classes. The video explains how the blog can be used as a way to bring web 2.0 writing into the classroom with a number of benefits. Some of the benefits that Dr. Long discusses refer to "blurring the boundaries between the teacher and the student" and making a "community" within the classroom.

Exploring the Role of Reformulations and a Model Text in EFL Students' Writing Performance Yang, Luxin ; Zhang, Ling The article by Yang and Zhang shares the results from a study of a three-staged writing task by ESL students in a Beijing university. The three stages are composing, comparison (of the reformulation), and revising. The students were asked to study and compose, in English, a narrative of a short picture prompt. The short narratives were then reformulated by a native English speaker, but still maintained the student's original meaning. The students then compared the two to "notice" the differences. The article clearly explains the many types of differences between the two texts; mainly language-related episodes (LRE) and content-related episodes (CRE). The students were also asked to compare their narratives with a model narrative. Though the students tended to focus more on the lexical issues, they were able to more clearly relate their current stage of English language learning with that of a native English speaker. This helped them to "notice the gap". I would recommend this to anyone focusing their attention on ESL learners.

This article discusses "how emotions affect the composing process" in academic writing. The author argues that writing assignments that demand "critical thinking and identity shifts" cause anxiety for students, hence why they cannot fully engage in "critical analytic writing" under these conditions. The author suggests instructors need to better understand these conditions in order to help students succeed in academic writing. ENGL 431 would find this article useful because the students we are observing are at stage in life in which identity and self-discovery is central. Therefore, tutors, mentors, and instructors may be able to use these factors to draw connections between "discourse and emotion." Also, if tutors, mentors, and instructors found a way to make themselves more relate-able the students would feel more comfortable in the classroom setting. In turn, by making academic writing, in some way about the students they would feel more comfortable about academic writing assignments.

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.

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.

Thinking of invention in chapter two of our text lead me to think about the ways in which we write to express self. This article discusses how the world of texting, instant messaging, blogging and other such types of writing help to open our minds to our inner thoughts. We are free from the rules and regulations of a stereotypical classroom and are also allowed to share and respond to others writing. The internet and cell phones have opened up a huge new space for writing. Some think it's hindering and destroying language, while others believe its radically changing it for the better. I want to start my journey here and reach my own personal conclusion through further research and discussions.

If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order -- facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table -- the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests. I want to find information on listening to music in the classroom, specifically the English 30 classes. I find the constant playing of Pandora to be distracting and I want to know if it's detrimental to the English 30 students learning, etc. So far I've found issues with listening to music and memorization, but not necessarily as it relates to writing workshops like the one I'm interning in now.

Let's try to stretch beyond CNN reports, which most often are quick and superficial.

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Here is the correct links http://www.jstor.org.mantis.csuchico.edu/stable/356190 I found this article to be something that's useful for me and hopefully everyone as we starts searching for something to write about. This article illustrates some ways in which two broad topics can be narrowed down so that it's not too narrow. It points out some of the advantages an disadvantages of narrowing down topics. What I capture in this article is that once we started to narrow things down, it limits the kinds of resources that could be used, therefore making us more focus in finding the iformation we needed.

Aimee C. Mapes writes about her experience as a teacher in Freshman Connection of FC, on the social and cultural context among at-risk, first-year university students. Issues of identity are central to understanding the discourse because the context instances identity. I found parallels in the experiences of Keneika and my own experiences as a minority, although she was a girl. The study examined the role of gender as the site of pedagogic content. Academically underprepared students in the federal TRIO program include first generation, having low income, racial minority status, or learning disabled. The author/instructor also felt a commonality with the student she observed. One thing that emerged from the FC progam was that conflict emerged and it was related to identity. The most interesting thing to me was the fact that because of the focus on "at-risk" groups, much of the attention was devoted to males. This dynamic was a response to the male voice that dominated discussions and seemed to be heard whenever there were behavoiral problems--males were associated with problems and males were overrepresented as a result. The programmatic behavoir necessarily overlooked the status or identity of females in the FC. Because the females were not vocal, their nonparticipation, as a function of gender, diminished focus on them. Keneika responded to her position through the assignments. She thought of herself in very positive terms and absolutely different from the males whom she considered inferior. Everything that represented male to her, she constructed the opposite trait or quality for herself. Assignments offer students a way to polarize against social positioning.

Interesting! Aimee Mapes did her MA here at Chico State. Will have to read the article!

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.

Although this article deals more with the creative writing process, I thought there were some really good tips for overcoming writer's block. It goes over a few instances of when students got stuck with writing and offers suggestions on how to change it. It explains why students experience writer's block with creative writing, which I find to be reasons true of academic writing. It would be useful for our class to review the tips it gives and use them when helping students who are currently stuck in their writing processes.

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 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.