...Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life, 2/e II. Using What You’ve Learned to Share Information The McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life, Second Edition 4. Writing to Share Experience © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2011 13 Reading, Inquiry, and Research ■ PART 2 | Using What You Have Learned to Share Information 57 TANYA BARRIENTOS Se Habla Español MEMOIR he man on the other end of the phone line is 1 Tanya Maria telling me the classes I’ve called about are firstBarrientos has rate: native speakers in charge, no more than six stuwritten for the dents per group. Philadelphia “Conbersaychunal,” he says, allowing the fat vow- 2 Inquirer for more than els of his accented English to collide with the sawedtwenty years. off consonants. I tell him that will be fi ne, that I’m familiar with 3 Barrientos was born in Guatethe conversational setup, and yes, I’ve studied a bit mala and raised of Spanish in the past. He asks for my name and I in El Paso, Texas. Her first novel, Frontera Street, was supply it, rolling the double r in Barrientos like a pro. published in 2002, and her second, That’s when I hear the silent snag, the momentary Family Resemblance, was pubhesitation I’ve come to expect at this part of the exlished in 2003. Her column “Unchange. Should I go into it again? Should I explain, conventional Wisdom” runs every the way I have to half a dozen others, that I am Guaweek in the Inquirer. This essay originally appeared...
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...Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to get this huge growth spurt in my writing in one day and just magically turn into an award-winning writer overnight, but huge growth spurts in writing never happen overnight so that thought is probably unrealistic. Growing as a writer happens over time and through many trial-and-error pieces of work. No good writer has started out at their best, but instead, they grow into it because they learn new things in the course of their writing career. Over the course of this semester, I have grown more as a writer than I did in the first three years of high school combined, so yes, I did have a growth spurt as a writer, but it didn’t happen all at once and I am not finished growing. This semester, I have had to write...
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...Academic Literacy in the Classroom Vincent Bordi Grand Canyon University: SED 535 February 6, 2013 Abstract Presented in this paper is a class and student profile concerning literacy traits as observed in a 9th grade health class at Lathrop High School. From classroom observations and personal research the class as a whole was analyzed on how they were able to read and write while also observing the strategies the teacher used to promote these literacy skills. To better understand literacy skills used by the teacher in the classroom there was a meeting between him and I where we discussed different strategies that he incorporates into his lessons. Attached are the observation summaries along with a Venn diagram that is based off one student that was individually observed. Introduction What do you need to know to become an educator for adolescents? It is obviously a requirement to master the content being taught and having the ability to manage a classroom; however educators are sometimes oblivious to one trait and that is teaching literacy. Most information in the secondary classroom is extracted from text and a common misconception is that it is not the responsibility of content instructors to teach literacy. It is often thought teaching how to read and write is up to English teachers while a content educator only needs to focus on their content. Observed Classroom as Whole From the little time spent observing the classroom a lot of information was...
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...English 114 29 September 2014 Literacy Narrative I walked into my 10th grade English class on the first day of school and was greeted by my peppy, upbeat teacher, Mr. Mathew Kahn. I knew it was going to be a fun semester just from that first day of class. Mrs. Kahn gave us a lot of freedom to write what we wanted, when we wanted to. He had an amazing ability to communicate with students. It might have been because of his young age, so he knew how to satisfy teenagers like us. This teacher taught the material from his heart. He was making sure that everybody had understood the lesson before they leave. This helped me mold my papers into perfection with the help of Mrs. Kahn’s exceptional editing skills. He taught me how to write a paper that only I could come up with. He encouraged me to do this by using different writing techniques. A teacher that doesn’t take himself too seriously always will be a big hit with teenagers, although he’s not afraid to impose his authority if he has to. He would open every lesson in a disciplined manner by quickly silencing the class and getting on with the work while still having his bright positive attitude. This was a rarity at my school because my peers would typically waste the first twenty minutes of class. Mr. Kahn showed his students that he actually cared if we learned from his lessons or not. He made sure to get to know us on a personal level as well. We all had a relationship with him and knew if we ever needed anything...
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...This article was downloaded by: [University of Texas El Paso] On: 09 August 2011, At: 13:50 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Bilingual Research Journal Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ubrj20 Language Learning in the American Southwestern Borderlands: Navajo Speakers and Their Transition to Academic English Literacy Gloria Dyc a a University of New Mexico-Gallup Available online: 22 Nov 2010 To cite this article: Gloria Dyc (2002): Language Learning in the American Southwestern Borderlands: Navajo Speakers and Their Transition to Academic English Literacy, Bilingual Research Journal, 26:3, 611-630 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2002.10162581 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently...
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...students’ comprehension of narrative text through the use of the Question Answer Relationships (QAR) comprehension strategy. The focus was primarily on assessing students’ improvement in Reading Comprehension after learning a comprehension strategy and also to determine students’ willingness to apply the/a newly learnt strategy for comprehension tasks in a grade five classroom. As a result, the researcher will include the aforementioned strategy for all comprehension lessons that will be taught during the six week period which has been allotted. The researcher will keep track of all events during this period by way of journal entries for the purpose of reflection, record keeping and referral for follow-up lessons. An end of term exam will be designed accordingly and administered to students. Looking at the results of the post-test, even the weakest students showed a remarkable improvement in reading comprehension. Throughout the investigation students seem to be enjoying the activities and fully participating in all tasks. In conclusion the use of Question Answer Relationship comprehension strategy is a reliable asset for improving students’ reading comprehension of narrative text. Schools and teachers specifically should seek to include such a strategy in their reading comprehension lessons to assist students’ understanding of narrative texts. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the many persons who rallied around me during this time of hard work. To my wonderful husband Terrence...
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...Published on Graphic Novel Reporter (http://graphicnovelreporter.com) Why Comics Make Reading Fun “Wak!” “Crunch!” and “Glom!” taught Vicky Smith how to read. “For end-of-the-day snuggling with my mother,” she relates, “Uncle Scrooge comics were our stories of choice. When I was about four, she started me out reading the sound effects to give me practice in phonetics as well as an opportunity to participate. One magical night, I apparently turned to her and said, ‘Now, I will read Huey, Louie, and Dewey, and you read Uncle Scrooge and Donald.’ And from that moment on, I was a reader, and she proselytized the Gospel of Uncle Scrooge to all of her friends!” As for Vicky, it was a fine literary beginning for the future Children’s Editor of Kirkus Reviews. Comics Teaching Words Other adult word professionals boast similar “origin stories” for reading. “You’d be surprised,” Diamond Comics’ John Shableski told GNR last August in his Op Ed on Kids, Graphic Novels and Publishing, “at how many mainstream authors fell in love with reading books because of comics. I see them at comics conferences, where they recall...their favorite comic characters with warmth, passion, and enthusiasm.” Cartoonist Phil Yeh, dyslexic himself, says, "Ray Bradbury and many others have told me that they themselves fell in love with comics, especially comic strips, when they were young and then found themselves checking out other books in the library, becoming life-long readers." Some of these young...
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... and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer. My first encounters with how computers change the way we think came soon after I joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970s, at the end of the era of the slide rule and the beginning of the era of the personal computer. At a lunch for new faculty members, several senior professors in engineering complained that the transition from slide rules to calculators had affected their students' ability to deal with issues of scale. When students used slide rules, they had to insert decimal points themselves. The professors insisted that that required students to maintain a mental sense of scale, whereas those who relied on calculators made frequent errors in orders of magnitude. Additionally, the students with calculators had lost their ability to do "back of the envelope" calculations, and with that, an intuitive feel for the material. That same semester, I taught a course in the history of psychology. There, I experienced the impact of computational objects on students' ideas about their emotional lives. My class had read Freud's essay on slips of the tongue, with its famous first example: The chairman of a parliamentary session opens a meeting by declaring it closed. The students discussed how Freud interpreted such errors as revealing...
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...I will be reviewing Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, in which Hunt focuses on the conceptualization of human rights and the paradox of self-evidence. Hunt introduces her perspective regarding novels as the fuel for a change in political ideas, “The austere Swiss natural law philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui insisted that liberty could only be proved by each man’s inner feelings: ‘Such proofs of feeling are above all objection and produce the most deep-seated conviction.’ Human rights are not just a doctrine formulated in documents; they rest on a disposition toward other people, a set of convictions about what people are like and how they know right and wrong in the secular world” (Hunt 27). Especially in the eighteenth century, novels were a way to escape from the everyday and dive into a character. It is only natural, then, that the reader begins to project themselves onto the...
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...The Real Ebonics Debate What Should Teachers Do? By Lisa Delpit The "Ebonics Debate" has created much more heat than light for most of the country. For teachers trying to determine what implications there might be for classroom practice, enlightenment has been a completely non-existent commodity. I have been asked often enough recently, "What do you think about Ebonics? Are you for it or against it?" My answer must be neither. I can be neither for Ebonics or against Ebonics any more than I can be for or against air. It exists. It is the language spoken by many of our African-American children. It is the language they heard as their mothers nursed them and changed their diapers and played peek-a-boo with them. It is the language through which they first encountered love, nurturance and joy. On the other hand, most teachers of those African-American children who have been least well-served by educational systems believe that their students' life chances will be further hampered if they do not learn Standard English. In the stratified society in which we live, they are absolutely correct. While having access to the politically mandated language form will not, by any means, guarantee economic success (witness the growing numbers of unemployed African Americans holding doctorates), not having access will almost certainly guarantee failure. So what must teachers do? Should they spend their time relentlessly "correcting" their Ebonics-speaking children's language so that it might...
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...sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily, they are often unaware of the sophisticated rhetorical analysis they employ while browsing others’ profiles (or as they decide what to add to or delete from their own page). Engaging students in a rhetorical analysis of Facebook can take advantage of this high-interest...
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...------------------------------------------------- I strive to teach my high school students the value of criticism, especially when it comes to improving their writing. To do so, I model how criticism continues to help me become a better writer. Earlier this year, for example, I shared a draft of one of my education feature articles, which included detailed feedback from an editor at a prominent media company. I asked my classes for advice on how to address several edits, dealing with sources, transitions, terminology, and structure. A few days later, I directed my budding writers to the much-improved final draft. This easy but worthwhile activity helped more of my students feel comfortable receiving criticism, and not view it as an affront. As a result, they improved their writing by taking the time and care to consider and respond to reader insight. I want my students to feel secure in the knowledge that nobody is beyond criticism (even their teacher), and that the bigger challenge is developing the good sense to acknowledge and successfully respond to feedback. Along those lines, I also offer the suggestions below about teaching writing: 1. Writers are the Best Writing Teachers To teach effective writing, we must be effective writers ourselves. We can't teach what we don't know, and when it comes to writing, it's important to continue honing our craft. If you haven't engaged in much formal writing since college, you will remain a less effective writing teacher. No matter what subject you teach, try...
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...http://www.historytoday.com/jerome-de-groot/signposts-historical-fiction These were some of the questions raised at a recent conference at the Institute of Historical Research at which History Today Editor, Paul Lay, hosted a discussion between Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, and the Tudor historian David Loades. Historians often describe themselves as detectives, seeking out a kind of truth among the conflicting evidence of the past. There is, furthermore, a large and growing subgenre of historical crime fiction. From C.J. Sansom to Philip Pullman, from Orhan Pamuk to Walter Mosley, from Ellis Peters to Boris Akunin, novelists have been keen to use the past as a backdrop for their stories of detection and mystery. The most famous historical detective might be Brother William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s peerless The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980). Recently we have seen a flowering of historical crime fiction as the subgenre attains maturity and becomes increasingly popular and innovative. Jason Goodwin, Philip Kerr and Susan Hill were all shortlisted for the prestigious Crime Writers Association Dagger this year (recent historical winners include Arianna Franklin, Jake Arnott and Craig Russell). Clearly the combination of thriller, crime and historical detail is compelling. Anne Perry’s new Inspector Pitt novel, Betrayal at Lisson Grove (out in paperback from Headline this year) is a pacy, twisting thriller. It is 1895 and Pitt is up against a conspiracy...
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...understanding and awareness of the diversity in the classroom (Villegas & Lucas, 2002); however, such a simplistic definition does not recognize the many dimensions involved in the pedagogy of culturally responsive teaching, which for students includes seeing germane links between subject matter and lessons and their experiences outside the context of the classroom and how those links influence what and how they learn. The purpose of this literature review is to examine the many facets that make up the term Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) and the impact and implications implementing such a broad concept may have on the education system. While the literature discusses several topics connected to CRT, I will confine this review to the following: (1) CRT Background/Definition (2) The methods of study, the participants involved and the significance of the outcomes (3) and finally No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and mandated curriculum vs. the use of CRT based curriculum. I located the material for my review using databases made available by the University of Texas at El Paso, using education as my search parameter. EBSCO Host featured many peer reviewed research articles. Using the terms culturally diverse classrooms, culturally...
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...reading. On one side are the skills which include phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, and simple comprehension. On the other side is the will to read. A good reader has both skill and will. In the "will" part, we are talking about motivation to read. This describes children's enjoyments, their wants, and their behaviors surrounding reading. A student with skill may be capable, but without will, she cannot become a reader. It is her will power that determines whether she reads widely and frequently and grows into a student who enjoys and benefits from literacy. So we think you should care about motivation because it is the other half of reading. Sadly, it is the neglected half. Y What is motivation? Many teachers think of a motivated reader as a student who is having fun while reading. This may be true, but there are many forms of motivation that might not be related to fun and excitement. What we mean by motivation are the values, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding reading for an individual. Some productive values and beliefs may lead to excitement, yet other values may lead to determined hard work. We talk about three powerful motivations that drive students' reading. They operate in school and out of school, and they touch nearly every child. Some students may have all of these motivations and some may have only one. For some students, these motivations appear in the positive form driving students toward reading. For other students, the motivations are negative...
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