Module#5 Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography assignment was conducted by Jua Lee    , Yunjoung So, Ahrim Jung as a group work. This work aims to help teachers design curriculum for middle school students writing class. Below are sources that my team locates.

Citation 1:

Peterson, S.S. (2007). Teaching content with the help of writing across the curriculum. Middle School Journal, 39(2), 26-33.

Summary:

This article investigates that integrating the teaching of writing across the curriculum leads to consolidate students’ content understanding as well as students’ being better writers. The result of applying this method to eighth grade’s science classroom illustrates that writing not only facilitates the learning of content-area concepts but also engages students in higher thinking and reasoning processes. The author asserts that teaching content using writing project enables students to engage wholeheartedly in a writing project and also to show a good understanding of the concepts.

This article shows that teaching writing in content classrooms is effective in that students write on any topic they choose, using whatever genre and tone seem appropriate for the topic. In addition, content area subjects provide real-life questions and topics, authentic contexts for student writing and a breath and depth of knowledge about concepts and genres that students can draw upon in their writing. The author argues that the types of activities associated with content classes such as working with concrete materials, field trips, interviews, reading print-based materials of all types, small-group discussions provide information for students’ writing and teach the content concept.

Writing lessons also give advantages to support students in determining the types of information that would be important and in helping them to record that information so it could be later used in their writing. It does not mean that teachers have to include a written project for every unit and rather can select some units that provide plenty of scope for students’ writing. Students can work on content writing or free-choice writing during writer’s workshop but it is important to schedule writing time as often as possible. The ways that students read out their writing to classmates, audiotape or videotape readings of their writing for peers to listen to and upload their writing to a school web site or in newsletters are effective to stimulate students’ motivation. If teachers and students work together checklists for assessing their writing, students can have a shared sense of ownership of the assessment procedures.

Review:
The article presents the positive effect of teaching writing across the curriculum. Incorporating the teaching of writing across the curriculum enriches students’ content learning and their motivation to learn. Students can use the writing they do in any subject area to explore new ideas and consolidate their content understanding. The author mentions the importance of writing instruction that teaches content concepts arguing that once students have expressed their learning in writing and visual images, they have something to look back and reflect on to shape and consolidate their learning. To be sure, teachers will likely be overjoyed by seeing students engaging sincerely in a writing project.

Citation 2:

Firkins, A., Forey, G. & Sengupta, S. (2007). Teaching writing to low proficiency EFL students. ELT Journal, 61(4), 341-352.

Summary:

This article suggests that a combination of two explicit teaching methodologies, a genre-based and activity-based pedagogical approach to teaching writing are particularly suitable for educational contexts where the students are low proficiency English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The authors examined the effect of two approaches. The genre-based approach, which aims at focusing on strategies to improve student writing, is based on a teaching-learning cycle where strategies such as modeling texts, joint construction, and independent construction are prompted. At the same time the activity-based approach is also utilized for students to develop their language physically modeling the genres through a range of different activities.

The study is initiated with thirty-two secondary students with low proficiency English who demonstrate consistent low performance in English but do not have intellectual disability. The genre-based approach is selected along with the activity-based approach to foster students’ learning. The authors chose Halloween as a topic with a number of related activities, each repeating the genre through a text and providing opportunities to reiterate, develop, and practice vocabulary, meta-discoursal and lexico-grammatical features. Twelve 35-minute sessions are held, concentrating on one activity-per session related to writing procedural texts. All sessions are logically linked to previous sessions. As activities are presented in similar ways and there is a reiteration of linguistic choices, students are also able to generalize from one activity to the next.

The learning-teaching cycle consists of three parts. First, students model through the activity such as making the mask to understand how the procedural text functions in context. Second, the students jointly construct a procedural text and revise vocabulary and language patterns. These two steps are repeated. Third, in the stage of independent construction, students write their own instructions on how to make a mask. One limitation authors present is time. They say given more time, the students would have further developed the flexibility to independently write a variety of procedural texts. Above all, this approach is seen to be positive by all the English teachers and has been included as part of the writing program in the general English curriculum.

Review:
According to this article, the activity-based genre approach clearly assists students to organize their writing and understand the nature of a text within an activity based context. This article demonstrates how teachers can combine, modify, and apply a positive learning environment for students with generally low proficiency. However, this article has limitation in that participants are volunteers with strong will to learn yet with low proficiency, which is contrary to most students with less interest and participation in real classrooms. That is, the will of students may lead to the positive result. Nevertheless, it is no doubt that the writing genre approach with students’ authentic activities is very helpful for students to involve in.

Citation 3:

Andrad, H., Buff, C., Terry, J., Erano, M., & Paolino S. (2009). Assessment-driven improvements in middle school students' writing. Middle School Journal, 40(4), 4-12.

Summary:

This article chronicles a successful attempt by the authors and their colleagues to teach writing by making improvements in the assessment of writing in the classroom. The participants of this article began in the fall of 2005, when Shaun Paolino, the principal, invited Heidi Andrade to help improve students' writing skills and scores. To meet the overarching goal of improving the assessment of writing at Knickerbacker Middle School (KMS), Prof. Andrade collaborated with the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers of English and social studies with set three goals:

1. Make assessment processes, criteria, and standards crystal clear to students.
2. Provide frequent, useful feedback to students about the quality of their work via teacher, peer, and self-assessment.
3. Use the assessments to analyze the strengths and weaknesses in students' work and to plan instruction.

These three goals are grounded in the literature on formative assessment. A significant element of effective classroom assessment is formative—the kind of ongoing, regular feedback about student work that leads to adjustment and revision by both the teacher and the students. A formative conception of assessment honors the crucial role of feedback in the development of understanding and skill building.

The research shows that peer and self-assessment are key elements in formative assessment, because they involve students in thinking about the quality of their own and each others' work, rather than relying on their teachers as the sole source of evaluative judgment. Without the rubric, they may not have fully understood what specific changes to make as they revised, or how to make them. But simply handing out rubrics would not magically produce good writers and high test scores, teachers must concern with the matter of engaging students in carefully considering the strengths and weaknesses of their works in progress, according to the standards set in the rubrics.

Review:
Students' writing ability does not change overnight. But if teachers make it a continuous effort with students in collaborative circumstance, they will slowly develop their writing skills and their writing will improve. Making assessments also must be clear to students, providing frequent feedback about the quality of their work via teacher, peer, and self-assessment. Teachers try to make students visualize which criteria they were strong and the area that could be improved by assessing their writing based on rubric.
Summing up, I want to emphasize again the authors’ beliefs for this article as below.
. High expectations for every member of the learning community
 .Students and teachers engaged in active learning
 .Assessment and evaluation programs that promote quality learning

Citation 4:

Shin, S. J. (2006). Learning to teach writing through tutoring and journal writing. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 12(3), 325–345.

Summary:
This study focuses on the development of teachers’ views and practices regarding the teaching of second language writing skills in one-on-one tutoring arrangements that lasted from 4 months to over 1 year. In particular, this study explores new teachers’ emerging conceptions of teaching second language writing and what it means to be a teacher, learner and writer. The participants were 12 pre-service teachers with little or no experience in teaching writing who reflected regularly in journals upon their experience of tutoring English language learners in writing.

This article describes ways in which both native and non-native English speaking pre-service teachers adapted their instruction to meet the particular needs of individual ESL writers and what they learned in the process. Teachers with little or no training regarding how to provide feedback on second language writing often find it difficult to decide whether to start correcting all errors which often results in crossing out and rewriting entire blocks of sentences or to leave the errors untouched because there are simply too many of them. What does a successful teacher response to student writing look like? Successful teacher feedback results in substantive and authentic improvements in students’ perceptions and practice of writing. The author of this article states that as teachers consider how to respond to student writing they are faced with following questions.

1. Exactly when—and how frequently—during the writing process should I respond?
2. How can I respond to the student’s writing so that the student can process the comments and apply the specifics of my response?
3. What forms of response (written, oral, individual, group, class, formal, informal would be most successful for the students?
4. When should my response be global or summative (focusing mainly on the major strengths or weaknesses) or discrete (focusing on single items within the essay)?
5. What are my objectives for this writing task (for example, improvement in topic sentences, organization, details)? What do I want the student to learn?

To answer these questions teachers must examine the specific needs of individual students and consider the student’s perceptions of what he/she considers his/her strengths and weaknesses as writers. Writing instruction must be individualized through teacher feedback on student writing because mere exposure to standard writing conventions does not improve students’ writing.

Review:
According to this article, most of the pre-service teachers came into the tutoring arrangement with little or no experience in teaching writing but seemed to have developed more confidence and competence in teaching writing partly as a result of this reflective clinical practice. The writing journal entries seemed to help them to critically examine what they know, to evaluate their various roles as writing teachers and to reflect on the socio-cultural and political nature of teaching writing in English to speakers of other languages. Overall, the journals played an important role in helping teachers to better understand the successes and difficulties that the pre-service teachers experienced as they developed as writing teachers. Class discussions and journal entries can highlight pre-service teachers’ beliefs about writing instruction, their attitudes to writing and teaching writing and the problems they had with students of different proficiency levels and first language backgrounds. This leads not only to useful discussions but also changes in the pre-service teachers’ strategies.

Citation 5:

Paulus, T.M. (1999). The effect of peer and teacher feedback on student writing. In Attetwell, J. & Savill-Smith C. (Eds.), Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(3), 265-289.

Summary:
This article investigates about the effect of peer and teacher feedback on student writing. Peer and teacher feedback is commonly used in English as Second Language (ESL) and English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, and the research about how the activities can improve student writing is needed. Author plans the research to examine how peer and teacher feedback affects students’ revisions in a multiple-draft, process-approach writing classroom and whether required revision through multiple drafts of an essay improves the overall quality of written work in a classroom situation.

The study was conducted with 11 international students enrolled in a pre-freshman composition writing course which is designed for those students who need further development of their academic writing skills before enrolling in the composition course required for graduation. The students were asked to do critical reading and discussion, summary writing, journal writing, in-class writing, revision, and development of the traditional five-paragraph academic essay through ten-week course starting with paragraph-level work and ends with the production of the traditional five-paragraph essay. Students received written and oral feedback from their classmates on the first drafts of the essays; then, they revised and wrote a second draft. After that, they received written teacher feedback on the second draft. Finally, they revised again and wrote a third draft. The author tape-record two think-aloud protocols (TAPs) for observation and used taxonomy of revisions for data analysis.

The most common type of revision students made to their essays was meaning-preserving changes that paraphrased and essentially re-worded concepts present in the text. The results indicate that students did use both the peer and teacher feedback to influence their revisions. They take their classmates advice seriously and make meaning-level changes to their writing. Also, they take 87% of teacher comments and make global-level changes to their writing. The results of this study reassures writing instructors that their written feedback can be used by students to make meaning-level revisions to their work.

Review:
The article presents the effectiveness of peer and teacher feedback on student writing. It shows that students are affected by peer’s opinions in their communication by writing because they take a large percentage of others’ advices in meaning-level. Regarding teachers feedback, students have more trust in teacher than students. Students make more global-level changes, including surface-level changes, taking teachers’ comments. The fact that the multiple-draft process did result in better essays encourages teachers to make revision and re-writing, combined with meaningful peer and teacher feedback, an integral part of the writing classroom

Citation 6:

Monroe, B. W. & Troia, G. A. (2006). Teaching writing strategies to middle school students with disabilities. The Journal of Educational Research. 100(1), 21-33.

Summary:
This article addresses the usefulness of strategies to facilitate planning, self-regulation, and revising while writing opinion essays. The goal of this study is to teach students with writing problems to use multiple strategies for planning, revising, and self-regulating that separately have been shown to positively affect the writing performance of students with disabilities. The results present that at post-treatment persuasive essay, the three students who received planning and revising strategy instruction made a notable gains in each of the five quality traits: content, organization, sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. In addition, at posttest, the students in the treatment group outperformed the group of students with disabilities who did not participate in the strategy intervention.

This study was conducted at an urban middle school in the Pacific Northwest. Six students from special educational language arts class with learning disability (LD) were selected as a special educational control group while six additional students were selected randomly from general educational classes as a general educational group. The special educational control group was taught (a) a strategy prompt for writing opinion essays, (b) a strategy prompt for revising their papers, (c) a simple scoring rubric for monitoring and assessing their own writing performance and that of their peers, and (d) procedures for establishing personal writing goals and generating self-talk to support self-regulation of the writing process. Also, the authors observed whether the students would benefit from short-term, explicit instruction in a set of writing strategies that targets multiple aspects of the writing process and the characteristics of good writing.

The study shows that teaching the planning, self-regulation, and revising strategies to students with LD results in marked improvements in their persuasive writing abilities. The outstanding finding is that strategy instruction helped 2 of the 3 students with LD write papers of nearly the same quality as a group of students without disabilities who did not participate in the strategy instruction. Another worthy result is that collaboration helped the students view writing as something more than a solitary activity and appropriate higher writing standards.

Review:
The article suggests that writing strategy instruction is effective as a valid and robust approach for improving the writing attitudes, behaviors, and performance of students with and without disabilities at most grade levels and in varied contexts. The authors argue that teaching multiple strategies for tackling all of the elements of effective writing is feasible and will be educationally meaningful benefits for students with learning problems. However, this study has a few limitations. The small sample size and nonrandom selection and assignment of participations to conditions restrict the generalizability of our findings. Nevertheless, if strategy instruction is integrated with process writing instruction, typical classroom writing instruction is expected to be improved substantially