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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.

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.

Patrick Hartwell discusses the value of teaching formal grammar by reviewing its history as a fundamental building block to the development of good writing. By determining a set of definitions for grammar Hartwell shows that the process of absorbing correct grammar usage occurs within native speakers naturally by exposure to the language; even young children are able to use complex grammatical structures with skill. Yet when sorted through the scientific lens and broken down into categories and labels the study of grammar cannot explain how learning the component rules of language will prove valuable to overall writing ability. Instead Hartwell suggests and I agree that "one learns to control the language of print by manipulating language in meaningful contexts, not by learning about language in isolation, as by the study of formal grammar" (125). Language, Hartwell says is "verbal clay, to be molded and probed, shaped and reshaped, and, above all, enjoyed" (125). So language is play dough; it is supposed to be fun; it should not be something you do because you have to, but because you want to; you do it because you like to do it; it is about process not product. What can tutors/teachers do that can encourage students to view writing not as a means to an end, but as a valuable tool of expression, a concrete manifestation of focused energy that is representative of an individual's attempt to express? This need to express is at work on us all of the time; our survival depends on it. That is not an exaggeration; a closed mouth does not get fed. By funneling our thoughts into words, even if the result is an approximation of the truth of our energetic pursuits, there is still a result. Words do work on people because people feel. Maybe some of the frustration that freshman feel is a result of the heaviness of the rulebook; certain grammar rules affect student grades, certain constraints are imposed by the teachers rubric and the teacher as well a

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.

A few semesters ago during finals week I found my husband slumped over his laptop. He was stressed out because he needed to write a final paper for his Philosophy class. He had known about the paper all semester long and had avoided working on it until the last minute. When I found him, he was deep in calculations. My husband is a Math major, you see. His calculations told him that he could get a B+ in the class, based on his prior work, if he did not write the paper. And he was okay with that. In the end, he got his B+ and never wrote the paper. This is just the way he has navigated his entire college career, and it is the exact emphasis of the study in this article. The fact is that, "at some colleges, it is possible to earn a four-year undergraduate degree...without ever doing much writing."

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.

This blog post by a teacher may not be the most credible source, but it defiantly seems to give some very good information about teaching and how to use different methods for discussion. In this blog article we see three different ways of how to lead class discussion,, all dealing with small group activity. The teacher describes rotating, jigsawing, and snowballing threads that all help with student group work. I thought the ideas in this blog were very interesting because they show how there is not just one way to teach to a large classroom. Having the students learn for themselves and with each other is crucial. But, the problem I have with the article is this: What if not all of the students wish to learn in groups? I feel that there could be a very fine line between group work and working by ones self. Where does this prove problematic?

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.

This is an interesting review/exploration by Jill Parrot of Eastern Kentucky University of David Foster's book "Writing with Authority". Parrot explains that Foster's book compares and contrasts the German university writing systems with American ones to examine the effects of each on a college student's confidence and self-efficacy in writing. Foster's thesis begins, "Undergraduates should learn how to write as knowledge-makers, developing the capacities for self-direction, long-term goal setting, and cumulative, recursive task development and writing," thus setting up the focus of the study. He argues that while there are pros and cons to each country's academic practices, the German system's focus on gradual development and self-direction with frequent interaction and discussion in the early stages helps to create a more long-term oriented view of the writing process and to establish the students as authorities on a topic that they may spend a great deal of time with. Without having access to the book itself, this article serves as a very thorough analysis of the text and I found this to be very informative.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.