WritingWeek 5 NJ Kang

Development of a Synchronous Collaborative Writing Revision Instrument for Teaching English

• RQ: To see effect of a developed online synchronous an-notation system which can provide annotation marking and knowledge sharing, on applying to error correction and error feedback for collaborative writing revision in English writing instruction.

• Finding: Research findings showed that students’ major difficulty in error correction lies in their failure to detect errors. Also, researchers proposed that error analysis can be reinvented in the form of computer-aided error analy-sis, a new type of computer corpus annotation.

Methods

• Collaborative corrective feedback and error correction with asynchronous annotation systems have been de-veloped by researchers. It is suggested that collabora-tive teams can be enhanced by applying collaboration in a synchronous environment. • However, few synchronous annotation systems are de-

veloped for corrective

Method

• This study developed a web-based online synchronous collaborative writing revision instrument for collaborative writing revision.

• With this system, users can collaboratively make corrective feed-back and error corrections on digitized documents in a synchronous environment.

• It is implemented on the general web browser such as Microsoft In-ternet Explorer, with online annotations in the same way as the tra-ditional paper-based correction approach.

• Another innovative functionality developed in this system is that the user can freely switch between the annotation mode and the review mode to neatly review the “right” article after correction without showing the correction marks to reduce the problem of cognitive overload.

Findings

• Researches showed that students’ major difficulty in er-ror correction lies in their failure to detect errors. • Researchers proposed that error analysis can be rein-

vented in the form of computer-aided error analysis, a new type of computer corpus annotation. • Annotations on digital documents can be easily shared

among groups of people, making them valuable for a wide variety of tasks, including providing feedback.

Literature review

• Collaborative writing, one of the methodological innovations for language teaching, is “the social act of creating a single, coordinate document with two or more participants”.

• In collaborative writing, students work together to achieve shared learning goals [Nunan, 1993], and language acquisition is facilitated by students inter-acting in the target language [Larsen-Freeman, 2000].

• Collaborative writing also accommodates the principles of social construc-tivism as proposed by [Vygotsky, 1978]. According to Vygostsky’s zone of proximal development, individual learning is mediated through either adult guidance or collaboration with a more capable peer.

• Collaborative writing is consistent with communicative language learning and assumption of second language acquisition made by [. Krashen, 1985], which emphasize that while learning a second language, learners need to ac-tively interact with the external environment, and such a learning environment is worth investigating.

Comprehensible Input Hypothesis

1. Access to comprehensible input is characteristics of all cases of successful language acquisition, in both first and second language acquisition

2. Greater quantities of comprehensible input seem to result in better L2 acquisition

3. Lack of access to comprehensible input results in little or no acquisition.

• As [Nagelhout, 1999] advocated, one of the most important benefits of col-laborative writing is that it makes students aware that writing is a recursive process, allowing them to focus on each phase of the writing process.

• The process of writing builds on the action-reaction responses. Through this evolving communicative process, unskilled writers are pushed to achieve higher levels of writing as they learn from others, and skilled writ-ers have the opportunity to exchange ideas and think critically about their writing before a teacher evaluates it.

• In the situation of collaborative technical writing, “…students demonstrate a tendency toward scaffolding” [Semones, 2000]. That is, each member of the group contributes a particular skill in his or her area of expertise to help complete a task. In this way, students simplify the task and keep one another motivated and in constant pursuit of a goal.

• A synchronous environment is a real-time communication en-vironment, wherein team members can meet anywhere at the same time. In the age of information, chat and teleconferencing are con-sidered as “real-time” synchronous environments.• Corrective feedback is a technique to help learners correct errors by

providing them with some kind of prompting. As defined by [Ellis, 2007], corrective feedback takes the form of responses to text or utterances containing an error. • Annotations are the notes a reader makes to himself/herself, such as

students make when reading texts or researchers create when noting references they plan to search [Wolfe, 2002]. • Annotations are a natural way to record comments and ideas in spe-

cific contexts within a document.

Time-honoured circle writing activity. • One student writes a line, then passes it on to another who writes the next line and so on. I have to admit that I

am not actually very keen on this activity. It can have some amusing outcomes, but I wonder what exactly the students are learning, as the process rarely produces a coherent or cohesive outcome.

Genre Circle Writing, • This works beautifully with more advanced learners who have been learning about the features of different gen-

res. Start by brainstorming different types of narrative genres, such as news article, romance, conversation, fairytale, sci-fi. Ask each student to choose a genre they would like to write in and ask them to think about the features of their genre, e.g. typical vocabulary and fixed expressions, register, word and sentence length.

• Put the students into groups of 5-6, then ask each of the to write the first paragraph of a narrative in their genre. After an agreed time limit they pass the papers clockwise, read the new story and write the next paragraph, but in their own genre, rather than following the original genre. Continue until the story reaches its originator, who writes the concluding paragraph. Some of the stories can then be read aloud and the students listening have to say what genre they think each paragraph is. These texts won’t be any more coherent than the usual circle writ-ing texts, but they are really good for raising awareness of genre.

Jigsaw writing• This works well with picture stories or cartoon strips. Put students into small groups and give each group one or

two pictures from the sequence. They have to write a paragraph describing what is happening or happened in their picture(s), and should have a copy each. [Incidentally, make sure everyone is using the same tense. ]Then regroup the students into larger groups so that there is someone in each group who has written about each of the pictures, and ask them to decide on the correct order of the pictures and make any changes necessary to turn their paragraphs into a coherent whole. Students can then read and compare the different versions.

• If students are quite used to working together, and don’t need quite so much structure, adding an element of competition can provide some fun and motivation. This activity also comes from Learner-based Teaching. Ask the class to choose a current event or issue. Then put them into small groups (3-4) and ask them to write a short article about it together. They should try to make the article as informative as possible. Once the groups have finished the articles are passed around. Each group should look for pieces of information or facts which their group did not remember. Students can then vote for the most informative (and best written) text

Elementary Teachers’ Views on the Creative Writing Process: An Evalua-tion• RQ: The aim of this study is to identify 4th and 5th grade teachers’

views on, knowledge of, and experiences with the creative writing process with answers to the following research questions sought: • 1. What do teachers know about the creative writing process in

general? • 2. How often do teachers use creative writing practices in their

classes? • 3. What do teachers know about the advantages or disadvantages

of creative writing? • 4. What do teachers know about creative writing techniques? • 5. Do teachers participate in in-service training courses related to

creative writing?

Subjects

• 69 teachers (female=42, male=27) from eighteen schools with medium socioeconomic level in different parts of Izmir, Turkey.

•MethodsA semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers was used to identify the sample teachers’ knowledge about, expe-riences with, and views on the creative writing process. A total of 7 easy to understand, open-ended questions focusing on the creative writing process were developed. A survey including open-ended questions and closed-end ques-tions used to gauge participants’ characteristics.

Literature Review

• Creative writing activities reach children’s inner worlds, make them express their feelings and opinions anytime, anywhere, and to anyone freely, without any pressure or fear of being judged and criticized.• Creative writing includes being extraordinary without at-

tacking commonly accepted values, offering different ideas by using one’s imagination, being unique, writing for pleasure, and thinking beyond clichés (Küçük, 2007, p. 11).

“Creative writing is

• considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fic-tion, that goes outside the bounds of normal profes-sional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of lit-erature. Works which fall into this category include nov-els, epics, short stories, and poems. Writing for the screen and stage, screenwriting and playwriting respec-tively, typically have their own programs of study, but fit under the creative writing category as well.• http://kidstardustliteraryblog.com/2013/04/09/28-creativ

e-writing-exercises-and-prompts/

• 1) Literary Telephone: Have each student write a brief descriptive paragraph, then pass it to the person on their left.  Have that person translate the paragraph into boring, nondescriptive language, and fold the sheet down to cover the original paragraph.  Pass to left; have the per-son fill in the descriptions.  Wash, rinse, repeat, etc until it’s gone around the entire circle and is back to the original author.  Have them read the first paragraph and the last one, and see how things have changed.

• 2) Mixing Up Metaphors: As a class, put every overused metaphor or simile you can think of on the board (quick as a fox, strong as an ox, cold as ice, swift as a river, etc).  Then, erase the last word and replace it with something unexpected (quick as an ER waiting room,  strong as a diamond, cold as a doctor’s hands, etc).  It’s a fun exercise and teaches students to avoid cliches.

• 3) Raising Voices: Write down a character’s name, age, and occupation; give a character to each student.  Have them write a first-person monologue in the voice of that person.  (Example: Lisa Topaz, 46, Green Peace Organizer; what does this character sound like?  What about Susie Johnson, 4, preschooler, or Jonathan Miller, 63, preacher?)

• 4) Bait and Switch: Write a flash fiction piece about an argument between a mother and a daughter.  Almost every time, students will write about it from the viewpoint of the daughter.  Then, have them re-write it from the viewpoint of the mother.

• 5) Life is Not Like a Box of Chocolates: Replace “chocolates” with something they do think life is like, and write about why.

• 6) Red Bicycles, Blue Seas: Pick a color and write about a memory associated with that color.• 7) Triptych: Choose three physical objects you own, and write a flash piece about why each

one is important to you.  Don’t try to connect the flash pieces to one another.

Write what the man would say in this picture.

• 8) Found Poetry: Have students bring their cameras to school and spend a class period walking around the campus (or sur-rounding town, if possible), taking pictures of signs, labels, notes, etc that they come across.  Compile the words and phrases into a list, and have them construct poems using nothing but those words and phrases.  For an extra challenge, give them a topic their poem has to be about (love, the environment, passing of time, loss, etc).  Also optional: Creating a collage from the pictures they took that tells the poem.

• 9) Four-Sense Food Sonnets: Blindfold each student and hand them a plastic sandwich baggie with food in it.  (I used kiwi slices, peanuts, chocolate-covered raisin, pickles, and stuff like that– be sure to check for food allergies and restrictions first.)  For five minutes, they should taste, smell, feel, listen to their food items without knowing what they look like.  After five min-utes, they can take off the blindfolds and write sonnets about their foods, being as descriptive as possible but without includ-ing a physical description.

• 10) No-Send Letters: Write a letter (or letters) to someone (or someones) that you know you’ll never send.• 11) In Transit: Write about a time you (or a character) were walking, flying, running, or biking somewhere, why it was im-

portant, and what you (or the character) were feeling as you moved.• 12) This I Believe: Write an essay, fiction piece, or poem based on the NPR series.• 13) Fill in the Blanks: “I think the world needs more of _____________” or “I think the world needs less of

__________________”.  You can take the serious route (more love, patience, compassion), the absurd (more air fresheners, hamsters, pencil sharpeners), devil’s advocate (serial killers, discrimination, etc), or anything else.  Use your answer as the first line of an essay, fiction piece, or poem.

• 14) Dr. Farsnworth, A Chiropodist….: Print off copies of the poem “Dr. Farnsworth, A Chiropodist, Who Lived in Ohio, Where He Wrote Only the First Lines of Poems” by Tom Andrews (available in his collection Random Symmetries, or online, al-though I don’t think I can provide the link here for legal reasons).  Take one of the first lines, and continue it into a story or poem; if you get bored with that one, choose another.

• 15) Something Beautiful, Something Ugly: This one takes about three class periods.  For the first one, freewrite on what you think makes something beautiful and what you think makes something ugly (half the class period for each).  For the sec-ond one, let loose in the school or go outside, and turn on your “macro” lenses to look at as many tiny details as possible, taking extensive notes as you do so.  For the third, focus on the objects you took notes on and write two creative responses, one on something beautiful and one on something ugly that you found.

• 16) Write About Names: Where yours came from, or where you wish it came from.  Who you’re named after.  Who your fa-ther, mother, neighbor is named after.  Odd names.  Nicknames.  Street names.  Family names.  What you wished you were named.  Why they’re important, why they’re not important.  Write about names.

• 17) Have them write a creative response to this:

The findings

1. What do teachers know about the creative writing process in general? • Teachers had general knowledge of creative writing. Fourteen teachers described the creative writing process as “completing stories which are not finished.” Considering the number of such teachers, it shows that reasonable amount of teachers perceive creative writing as merely completing stories

2. How often do teachers use creative writing practices in their classes? • they include creative writing techniques in their classes, these teachers avoided stating

clear descriptions as to which techniques they used.

3. What do teachers know about the advantages or disadvantages of creative writing? • the teachers listed almost all the advantages of the creative writing process. In particu-

lar, they emphasized that creative writing “develops the imagination, helps uncover abil-ities, increases selfconfidence, develops writing ability, encourages one to think and move beyond clichés etc.”

4. What do teachers know about creative writing techniques? • With respect to the fourth research question of the study, the teachers had the most

amount of knowledge about the following two techniques that may be used during cre-ative writing: “completing a story that is not finished” and “composition, story, game, novel writing.”

5. Do teachers participate in in-service training courses related to creative writing? • According to the fifth research question of the study, it was found that the number of

teachers participating in creative writing practices is quite low. Based on the findings, al-though most of teachers had not previously attended creative writing practices, they stated that they would like to. In general, it can be argued that the teachers possess a preliminary knowledge of creative writing techniques.

Making the familiar strange and the strange famil-iar: a project for teaching critical reading and writ-ing • RQ • teaching critical literacy in the context of Singapore. It begins with a concep-

tualization of critical literacy as a stance oriented to questioning and chal-lenging the often taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions found in ‘ev-eryday’ texts.

• It then discusses how this stance can be cultivated in students through a crit-ical reading and writing project aimed at encouraging students to question the underlying motivations of seemingly unremarkable texts (‘making the familiar strange’) and produce alternative texts that challenge and destabi-lize the normative structures of society (‘making the strange familiar’).

• The article concludes with a brief discussion of the issues and challenges faced by teachers in developing a critical disposition in students that will help them negotiate the information-saturated and text-mediated world of the twenty-first century.

Subjects

• a group of high-ability Year 10 students in Singapore • mainly boys, came from a mix of socioeconomic back-

grounds. • The aim of the project was to gauge the participants’

receptivity and responsiveness to a reading and writing program designed to raise their critical awareness of ideological meanings embedded in ‘everyday texts’ (Vasquez 2007).

Methods

• The two-week intensive program was conceived as a three-stage design that • (1) exposes students to the ideological meanings and

assumptions in everyday texts, • (2) encourages students to intervene in these texts and • (3) to reflect on their (changed) worldviews.

Literature Review

• Freire and Macedo (1987) proposed that worlds and words are so-cially and historically situated. As such, to be able to challenge and change their worlds, individuals need to start reading the discourses of their worlds in order to identify and recognize the issues oppress-ing them. Being ‘literate’ is, therefore, not only about possessing the skills to read the word but to read the world.• This view of being ‘critical’ departs somewhat from the liberal-hu-

manist philosophical tradition that values logical thinking skills like distinguishing between fact and opinion, detecting logical fallacies and evaluating the validity of claims. • This tradition of criticality is rooted in a rationalist view of the world

which believes that knowledge of the world can be attained through careful deduction and systematic reasoning.

The critical competence

• that forms the subject of this article stems from a much more recent development in critical social theory and critical pedagogy which sees texts and talk as socially situated practices that are invariably intertwined with issues of power, privilege and dominance (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk 1998). • Thus, while one sees critical reading as a process of searching for a ‘correct’ and verifiable knowledge in a text, the other sees crit-ical reading as looking for alternative but plausible interpreta-tions of a text. One is aimed at cultivating a ‘learned’ mind, the other is dedicated to raising one’s consciousness of social in-equalities and injustices. One sees knowledge as universal and un-problematic, the other sees knowledge as socially and culturally situ-ated, and hence contestable (Cervetti, Damico, and Pardeles 2001).

• This coalesces with the view that being critical entails an ‘epis-temological Othering’ or ‘dissociation’ from the explanatory texts and discourses we are familiar with, a process of ‘making the familiar strange’ (Luke 2004, 2627).• Indeed, critical reading can be seen as a process of ‘making the

familiar strange’ by probing into the underlying motivations of seemingly unremarkable and innocuous texts and deconstruct-ing the linguistic structures that support this impression.• One way of demonstrating critical reading competence, there-

fore, is to create alternative texts, to recast a text in a different light to show up its otherwise opaque assumptions and ideolo-gies about the world.

Stage 1:Exposure: making the famil-iar strange• advertisements/publicity materials drawn from YouTube and other Web sources were chosen due

to their intrinsic interest value to adolescents. • The aim was to get the participants to think more analytically about the semiotic resources that

advertisers exploit to purvey their goods and services and the language and imagery through which stereotyping is encoded and perpetuated.

• Focusing on the linguistic and semiotic means through which meaning is created also meant re-maining faithful to the basic aim of this being a reading program.

• To stimulate students’ thinking, a list of questions aimed at focusing their critical attention on cer-tain aspects of the text production and consumption process was provided:

• (1) Who is the target reader of the text? Is it written for mainly male or female readers, youths or more mature readers, middle- or high-income people, Singaporeans or a more international audi-ence, etc.? How can you tell?

• (2) Whose perspective is the text written from? A friend, expert or official authority, a Singa-porean/Asian or ‘Other’ perspective, etc.? Whose voice/perspective is represented in the text and whose is not? How do you know?

• (3) What do you think the text is trying to make target readers think or believe? Whose interests are being served by the text, and whose are not? Who benefits from such texts and who does not?

Advertisement

• http://cargocollective.com/search/swatch • sumo wrestlers in pink tutus dancing • a convention-defying, rule-bending attitude

Publicity poster produced by the Singapore Health Pro-motion Board aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of AIDS among women in Singapore

• The poster features an image of a half-naked man being cradled by a young woman in a rapturous embrace with the text: ‘She allowed him to do nothing for himself. Her strong arms cradled him, as he laid back in panicked excitement, helpless in rapture’.

• ‘There’s no such thing as a weaker sex. Take charge and protect yourself from HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infection (STIs) by abstaining from casual sex, being faithful to one partner and practicing correct and consistent use of condom’.

• challenge stereotypes by reversing the traditional roles of males and fe-males, by depicting a female on top of a male in a visual image reminis-cent of the cover pages of romance fiction.

• The text at the top reinforces the dominance and agency of the female (‘Her strong arms cradled him’) in contrast to the submissive and helpless male (‘he laid back in panicked excitement, helpless in rapture’).

• While many of these texts tend to appeal by injecting an element of humor or surprise, participants were en-couraged to explain how and why the ads succeed in capturing audience interest, thereby uncovering the in-herent stereotypes/assumptions about people and cul-tures that are drawn upon and perpetuated through such texts.

Stage 2Intervention: making the strange familiar• r At the ‘Intervention’ stage, participants were encouraged to rewrite some of the

texts they deconstructed in order to lay bare their inherent stereotypes and assump-tions. Guiding questions included:

• (1) How would you change the language and imagery of an advertisement if it tar-geted at different consumers like businessmen, housewives, students, affluent senior citizens, teenaged girls, etc.?

• (2) How would you change the focus and content of a text if it written from a differ-ent perspective? For instance, what would a zoo brochure be like if it is written by the animals, or a History textbook on World War 2 if it is written by prisoners of-war?

• (3) How would you change the focus and language of a text if it is transmitted via a different mode? For instance, how would you rewrite a newspaper report into a script for a news broadcast? How would you change the headline of a news report if it ap-pears in an online ‘tabloid’ rather than a mainstream print edition? Why?

• (4) Why do writers select and draw on different genres to achieve what effects? For instance, why do some ads appear as a news report and vice versa? What happens if you rewrite a news report as a fairy tale or vice versa?

A particularly successful text

• The 86 year-old grandmother of Little Red Riding Hood, star of recent horror flicks like ‘Child’s Play’, ‘Scream 5’ and ‘The Beast’, was savagely killed by a wolf early yes-terday morning in her hut where she lived alone. The pretty star herself had a narrow escape when a passing woodcutter heard her screams and came in time to chase away the killer-wolf.

Stage 3Reflection

• In the final ‘Reflection’ stage, the participants were asked to record in journals, which they kept for the duration of the course, their thoughts, ideas, reflections and questions that arose from the various tasks during the ‘Exposure’ and ‘Intervention’ stages. To guide them in their reflections, the following questions were offered:

• (1) What have you learnt about the role that words and images play in shaping or framing our expectations and interpretations of the meaning in texts?

• (2) To what extent has the way you look at ‘everyday texts’ changed as a result of this program?

• (3) To what extent do you now understand the comment that ‘no text is neutral’? Can this be applied even to the textbooks you use in school? Why or why not?

a schema

• describes an organized pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of infor-mation and the relationships among them.[1]

• It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework repre-senting some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new informa-tion.[2]

• Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit.

• Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory infor-mation. Schemata can help in understanding the world and the rapidly changing environ-ment.[3] People can organize new perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not require complex thought when using schema, since automatic thought is all that is re-quired.[3]

• People use schemata to organize current knowledge and provide a framework for future understanding. Examples of schemata include academic rubrics, social schemas, stereotypes, social roles, scripts, worldviews, and archetypes. In Piaget's theory of devel-opment, children construct a series of schemata to understand the world.

Homework

• Read and summarize the articles. Need more detail de-scription about the main literature and methods used. • Application of the learned methods and theories in

one’s own context.