A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map strategies for reading and writing.
Tag: English
Creative Writing Assignments in a Second Language Course: A Way to Engage Less Motivated Students
This article makes a case for using creative writing in a second language course. Creative writing increases students’ enthusiasm for writing skills development and supports students’ creativity, which is a fundamental aspect of education. In order to engage less motivated students, a series of creative writing assignments was implemented in a second language writing course. This study presents the rationale for the use of creative writing grounded in critical pedagogy and the context of instruction. Data collection focused on the content of students’ writing and their attitudes towards creative writing and critical pedagogy. The results show that all the participating students found the assignment both enjoyable and beneficial for the development of their writing ability. However, the students’ perceptions of critical pedagogy varied. The author argues for greater employment of creative writing in second language courses in the future.
Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines (READ): A Strategy to Improve Student Success
This paper describes the structure and activities of READ (Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines), a pilot initiative to improve students’ critical reading skills, disciplinary literacy and academic success. READ employs a multimodal design that consists of faculty training in disciplinary literacy instruction and curricular enhancement, development and implementation of active reading assignments and assessments, peer-led team learning, and the dissemination of discipline-specific teaching and learning resources on an Open Lab site to provide an interactive teaching and learning environment for students and faculty. Empirical evidence of the initial effectiveness of the pilot in three gateway courses in Biology, Electromechanical Engineering Technology, and Marketing showed improvement in student pass rates after implementation of reading strategies and instructional approaches that guide students through the reading process.
Promoting Critical Reading with Double-Entry Notes: A Pilot Study
Recognizing a need to promote critical reading among students at our STEM university, the authors implemented an active reading strategy called double-entry notes across four general education writing and humanities courses. We hypothesized that the tool would help engage students in the critical reading strategies they tended to lack. The tool aimed to encourage students to think critically about assigned readings by analyzing texts, applying assigned readings to the world outside the text, synthesizing multiple texts, and the like. After assigning the tool, we assessed its effectiveness through a survey of students’ perceptions and coded artifacts (N=182) for six markers of critical thinking. Results suggest that the tool succeeded in helping students to think critically about texts but that some markers of critical thinking were more consistent than others. Also, students’ perceptions of the double-entry notes’ benefits did not align with our findings based on analysis of their texts. Because results revealed critical engagement in reading, we plan to continue the study, adjusting the tool to address more specific critical thinking strategies.