Most Important Take-aways from Blogs

Take-aways

• The self introduction and literacy narrative at the beginning of the course were important to me because they got me writing expressively and reflecting on who I am as well as what reading and writing means to me.

• The active reading in the classroom blog was beneficial to me because it helped me take a more in-depth look and pre-reading, during-reading and post reading heuristics. I think these skills are so important for integrated reading and writing instructors to teach because they are transferable for our students. I took away skills I can use from this reading. I now know the importance of reading a little faster through portions of the text that I feel are not as important and slowing down to take a deeper reading of sections that need more attention. Through discussion with one of my peers I discovered a way to read a little faster when I have to by using my index finger as a guide as I read. I will also be able to teach these two strategies I learned to my future students so they can see if they work for them.

• Alexander & Fox’s historical perspective helped guide me in the literature of the past and see how the field of composition has transformed over the years. It was good to see what the important theories have been and make inferences about what the future may hold in our field.

• I think the readings and blogs from week 3 provided me with some of the most important take-aways in the courses. They showed me the needs of underprepared students and reconfirmed for me that as composition teachers we will have a very diverse student population in our classrooms that come with different problems/needs. I learned that there is a need for remediation because if not our students will not have a chance in academia. Composition instructors Goen-Salter and Gillote-Tropp offer a great example and solution to the problem with a ground breaking iterated reading and writing course.

△   I like the fact that the student and teachers are able to stay together for the entire school year and that if the student passes the integrated program they have already completed the college level writing requirement.

△   Students are introduced to many different types of reading materials and this will help them read for different disciplines.

△  The program also gives those students who do not pass the integrated program another chance to take the college level writing course.

△  I also like how they have given the course unit credit so students will not feel like they are taking the class for nothing.

△  The introduction of K W L +  (This was a huge take-away for me because I used it with my tutees at the Learning Assistance Center and found it to be a practical activity to foster my students in an integrated reading and writing course).

• The McCormick readings helped me take a close look at the cognitive, expressivist and socio-cultural approaches to teaching reading. Thought this I understand that these models cannot stand alone in a composition class and must be integrated to best serve our student.

• I think community building in the classroom is so important for our diverse student populations and I plan to implement it in my classes. What I took away from the Nicholas Sacra Nevaire article was that by cultivating community in the classroom teachers give their students a safe place to experiment and learn from their mistakes. A community classroom also fosters interest and intrinsic motivation in the students. Sacra Nevaire also reintroduces what I think is a very important idea of offering block classes for students so they can continue to work with the same discourse community and make a closer connection with the same teacher. This also enables the teacher to focus on salient errors the students are making and help students develop as writers.

• My Bridging the Gap blog helped me begin to envision what my integrated reading and writing course would focus on and look like.

• Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a reading and writing course by David Bartholomae and Anthony Pettosky

Ø  Shows importance of annotation

Ø  Immersing students in an academic discourse community

Ø  The thought of a kind of composition laboratory where students share and build on each others knowledge

Ø  Really liked the group peer editing in class activity and could see myself implementing it in my classes.

• The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and learning with diverse student writers by Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Q Groden and Vivian Zamel.

Ø    Shows the difficult students have in entering an academic discourse community as well as that they all have language competence that they bring with them to the class.

Ø  Learning academic reading and writing is similar to acquiring a new language.

Ø  As instructors we have to begin to address that fact that we have a very diverse student population with very different needs.

 

 » Fellow Student’s Blogs:

I feel like the students we will eventually teach our class was composed of a very diverse student population. I gain a myriad of insights from peers bloging from different disciplines such as literature, composition and teaching English to speakers of other languages. I particularly like the practical examples from fellow student mentors who are already teaching and experimenting with integrated reading and writing in their classrooms. We started to comment on our peers blogs in the middle of the course. I feel I would have gotten more out of my fellow students blogs if we had to do less writing of our own blogs and a little more commenting on other peoples blogs.  

 

Memo to the English Department

10 December 2012

Dear English Department Dean:

As an associate professor in the English department here at Pasadena City College, I am writing to appeal for integrated reading and writing courses in our division. There is this idea that reading and writing are separate skills and that our students should have learned reading in their K-12 education, but this is not representative of the diverse student population in our classrooms. In any one given composition class that I teach I have native speakers of English, non-native speakers and generation 1.5 students.  Many of these students have never been taught necessary academic level reading skills.  

I believe reading and writing should be integrated in our composition classes because the two skills foster one another. Before students can write academic level essays they must be taught how to read actively.  There are three elements to active reading and they are making inferences, anticipating what one is going to read and the art of selecting (van Woerkam 2012). These three aspects of approaching reading facilitate students in getting the most out of the texts they read. I argue that students should be taught active reading in their writing classes so they can then use the skills they have learned (that are fresh in their minds) on writing assignments in the same class. Students will then be able to transfer these skills into other courses where they write papers. I also strongly believe that students should be using heuristics such as annotating as they read texts.  When students write in the margins of the text they are reading we see reading and writing working together.  Reading good texts in a composition class also helps students generate ideas for their writing. In my experience when I am teaching independent writing classes my students’ papers lack originality and solid evidence to support their arguments. When reading is integrated in a composition course well written articles, essays and books can serve as templates for students to produce better writing.    

Students need to be taught that reading is a part of the writing process. According to Kutz, Groden and Zamel (1993), “…it is not through learning facts but through thinking, working with others, and having the opportunity and the need to perform certain intellectual operations and see things in new perspectives that people come to value their own knowledge and acquire new ways of thinking.” I propose to teach a course that is a kind of composition laboratory where students develop both reading and writing skills along with their peers. Having students read and discuss what they have learned amongst their fellow classmates will help them acknowledge different opinions and facilitate them in their writing. Please consider my proposal for integrated reading and writing courses in our department. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Respectfully

 

Michael C. Andrews

Associate Professor, English

   

Unit Brainstorming

The working title for the course Jessica Brugler and I are working on is Becoming a Member of the Academic Discourse Community.  The course would be for both native and non-native beginning writers.  Our course is based on Bartholomae & Petrosky’s idea of placing students within a discourse community so they can learn the language of academic reading and writing.  We also incorporate elements of Kutz, Groden and Zamel’s theory that every student has something to bring and that learning composition is very much like learning a new language. 

 

We are planning to develop unit two of this course and our topic focuses on Acknowledging student’s Linguistic Competence; Every student has a language to bring; Building on one’s linguistic knowledge; Bringing one’s language & adapting it to the language of academic discourse.  This unit will build upon pre-reading, annotation and pre-writing heuristics that were taught in unit one.  The previous unit will have begun to introduce our students to academic discourse and have given them some tools they can use to further develop their writing process.

 

This second unit will help them assimilate even further into the new academic language they are learning and facilitate them in developing arguments and claims.  In unit one our students have been doing expressivist writing and will continue in unit two only they will start to incorporate taking a stance in their writing.  We begin unit two with a writing to read activity where the students write an anonymous letter to a friend.  This assignment will give the students an opportunity to express their identities in their writing as well as see the diversity of their fellow classmates.  Our goal is to show students that there are benefits to both being a native English speaker as well as a non-native. And to debunk the myth that native speakers find learning this new language of writing easier than non-native speakers due to English being their mother tongue.  The students first homework assignment will be to write a personal narrative about their experience as beginning writers. We then wish to give our students a taste of academic success by having them read short stories from How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life by Tom Miller.  It is an interesting book of 55 short stories of second language learners having success at learning English.  We would probably give our students a choice of several stories from the book and have them read two.  The stories are about three to five pages long.  It stated in The Discovery of Competence that national statistics indicate that almost half of every entering group of first year students at public institutions of higher education have dropped out by the end of the first year.  Our motivation here is to give our students confidence that they can be successful.  We would then assign a paper similar to the one in Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts (p. 32) only have the paper topic be recalling a time when they experienced success.  We would formally teach thesis statements and give activities facilitating students in taking a stance.  We like the idea of having students volunteer their papers to have them critiqued by the class and foster their revision. This is something we would have modeled previously in unit one. 

 

The end of unit paper assignment would be as follows:

Argument Essay                                                                                                                                                                                                       

●       Formal (thesis statement, reference class readings, 1 outside resource)                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

●       Informal (expressivist, personal experience)                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

●       Prompt: Has your current knowledge of English facilitated or debilitated your transition into academia?

 

 

 Jessica and I will bring an example of the grid for our unit to class.  The subsequent unit of our course would continue to immerse our students in an academic discourse community helping them build on and incorporate their linguistic competence into the new language of academic reading and writing that they are learning.  The papers assignments would progressively become more formal.

Thoughts on The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers by Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Q Groden and Vivian Zamel

Suzy Q Groden begins the book with a short story of how she recued two birds that were stuck in a catwalk between two buildings at the university where she teaches.  It was a powerful metaphor of the struggle new writing students go through finding their place amongst an academic discourse community and how composition teachers have to guide them in learning what the authors refer to as a new language. Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Groden and Vivian Zamel explain how all teachers must contribute to helping their students, but a majority of the responsibility falls on composition teachers. With their book the authors have taken an action research approach with the aim to help students recognize that they bring a certain amount of competence from their outside lives into their new discourse community.  The three teachers explain that teaching is an ongoing learning process and that composition teachers need to adapt to their changing classrooms as well as question traditional curriculum that does not address diverse student’s needs. 

Kutz, Groden and Zamel find that theories of cognitive and intellectual development are not as useful for them because they are faced with students with many different backgrounds that will not fit neatly into such molds. The authors hope they can create an environment where the students can realize their potential and develop as writers. Like Bartholomae and Petrosky’s they argue that students need to be immersed in an academic community to then become a part of it.  I also see similarities in their theory that the academic discourse community speaks an academic language that new writers must acquire.  The authors even compare the process to that of 1^st language acquisition.  They look at students writing in new ways thinking of the possibilities of their writers rather than focusing on errors.

I feel like I can really relate to what the authors are proposing and I think it complements Bartholomae and Petrosky’s model.  I see both cognitive and socio-cultral elements in this teaching theory.  I like how it addresses ESL and other diverse members of the student population.  I truly believe in immersing students in the academic discourse community so they can be a part of it and I want to build my unit plan with this in mind.  I also agree with the authors that academia has its own language that needs to be acquired by the novice writer.  The only thing I found missing in this book so far was the practical way to accomplish these goals.  I would have liked to see more of a unit plan showing future composition teachers how to use this model.  Perhaps I will find that by reading the remaining chapters.  The past two weeks reads inspire me that we can possibly create composition unit plans that will address the needs of the current diverse student population and help them acquire the language of academia         

Comments on Empowering Revision by Nicholas Coles

Coles begins his argument explaining that novice writers do not like to revise their work like experienced writers do.  He describes how the act of revising for the inexperienced writer is just fixing surface errors and making different word choices where as the more seasoned writer is willing to let go of their first draft and make changes to the meaning of the paper.  Coles suggests giving students subjects they have a stake in and will want to write about.  The author talks about how experienced writers revise their work to generate knowledge and to have something to say about a subject. Coles goal is to get the student to shift from not only writing about general things, but also being more particular. The author then talks about two methods (feedback from peers and teacher comments) that help his students achieve this goal. 

I think Coles approach fits into Bartholomae and Petrosky’s course because it immerses the students into an academic discussion with their peers.  The peer feedback method made me think of students having the chance to test out their writing on the audience they are writing to.  It is like getting a taste of your audience’s reaction to aid your revision. I would like to include this type of activity into my unit plan. My only reservation is that not all of the students would have the opportunity to have their paper up for discussion, but I still think the students would learn from this activity because they get a sense of the audience they are writing to and it prevents them from the thought that the teacher is the one and only audience of my paper. After this exercise I think would be a good time for the instructor to initiate a little discussion about audience. I think the teacher comments are also beneficial to students revising their papers because it encourages them to actively read their own papers.  They are analyzing them to find what is significant (something they should be doing in all their readings) and making sure they are conveying that which is significant in the writing.  Through my feedback as an instructor I would want to foster my students in expressing what they want their readers to understand from reading their papers.           

Comments on Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course by David Bartholomae & Anthony Petrosky

I began reading this book very casually since Mark said it was a lot of reading and asked if people were having difficulties with it.  I guess my strategy was if I approached the reading as reading for pleasure I may retain more.  It was not until about the eighteenth page that Bartholomae and Petrosky reminded me that this was a foolish idea so I took out my highlighter.  I like how Bartholomae and Petrosky want to show their students that they can read for pleasure.  Some of my best professors were ones that got me excited about reading outside of the classroom.  The authors talked about if a reader could remember everything they read from a text it would be madness and that the writer has the opportunity to be creative in their composition.  I think if these thoughts are conveyed to student readers and writers it would take a lot of the burden off them in regards to reading and writing.  I like the idea of making the course like a graduate seminar and immersing low level students in an academic discourse community because it may help facilitate them rising to that level.  I believe we read in this course about creating materials that are just slightly above our student’s abilities so they can learn. I believe this course does that with this type of setup.  The collaborative learning environment of this course is also appealing to me as teacher because I believe we can learn from our peers as well as inform them about things they may not fully understand.  I think the bound book of student writing is a really cool idea as well, but I do not know if that would be possible in a regular sixteen week remedial or freshmen writing course.  One of my questions would be with the current state of education and funding being cut, would this fifteen student two teacher course be freezable today?  One of my favorite activities from this course was the one where students write a journal entry selecting a quote from each chapter that seems to be the authors main point of the chapter and then they have to explain how and why the quotes they have selected relate to the authors overall message. This enables the student to analyze a text and discover what they think is significant about what the author is saying.  That seems to be one of the core objectives of this course.  I think this is something I would like to add to my unit.  I will have to ask my partner what she thinks.        

Bridging the Gap

I would like my final unit plan to focus on the needs of ESL students in their successful transition into academic writing.  The theme of the course would evolve around this particular student population and what skills they require to be successful in academia.  International students come to America with many skills they have acquired in their home countries.  Many of them have used the grammar translation method to learn English so they bring a great knowledge of how the language works, but have little training in the structure of an essay and writing thesis statements.  Even with a good foundation in English grammar ESL learners still have difficulty applying it to the academic writing that is required in our schools.  I believe this student population does not just magically become ready for freshmen composition.  I think these students need to become familiar with the academic writing process both in regards to grammar and style. 

This would be a beginning-of-the-semester unit catered for ESL writers making the transition into academic writing.  I would want this course to introduce ESL students to an academic discourse community and give them a sense of belonging as well as confidence that they can become academic writers.  The orientation of the course would be a mix of expressivist and critical academic discourse.  The goal of the course being to foster ESL students in expressing themselves with their writing and also enabling them to write for an academic audience. 

I would probably want to start the unit with pre-writing heuristics and an autobiography writing assignment leading to a short presentation of the students writing.  I believe this would help build community because many international students want to express who they are and a little bit about their culture.  The readings for this unit would not only focus on the difficulties that ESL students have making the transition into academic writing, but also articles and readings about all novice writers.  I would want the ESL students to feel a part of the academic writing community and see that all new writers have difficulties.  Again my goal would be to give these new writers a sense of confidence and nudge them towards becoming successful academic writers.  These are just a few of my ideas.  I am excited about creating a unit to enable international students to bridge the gap in their transition into academic writing because I truly believe this is a need for ESL students.