Writing+Instruction

toc =Writing=

Writing in the 21st Century
The ideas that students must be taught to write through formatting and "recipes" is not progressive enough for the 21st century. The "bottom-up" model in which students are taught in parts, from beginning to end, how to compose a paper, is not only constricting for students, but also is quite teacher-centered. This method results in the much-lamented "5 paragraph essay".

What many teachers and education specialists are starting to suggest is a more organic method for teaching students to write. Rather than assuming that they are illiterate and unable to compose pieces of writing without the strict guidelines of the 5 paragraph essay, students should feel free to challenge and debate through the written word. Gregory Shafer writes, "The fact is that children don't need to be taught language. Simply being around literate people and being given a risk free climate in which to commit errors is all that children need to acquire speech."

Writing in the 21st century is about giving freedom to opinions and form, encouraging authentic learning, and allowing students to truly express themselves through writing. Shafter concludes that "The goal of every informed, twenty-first century teacher should be to forge a turly democratic, collaborative encironment-- one in which learning emanates from various voices and is always in flux."

Grammar
In the article, "To Grammar or Not to Grammar: That is //Not// the Question", the authors illustrate that grammar is an important part of English instruction; however, it cannot be taught well with "skill and drill" activities. Grammar needs to be taught in context to be effective. One must revise a student's work with the student, not simply take a red pen to the paper. One example given, shows how after a student was shown how the piece would be read by a newcomer to the text atnd how that differed from the student's intent of the piece. Once the student was engaged with the editing process, it was easier to correct the grammar mistakes together.

Another example provided, is how a teacher first had students write a poem where they had to include adjectives and adverbs, and then secondly after a serious of prewriting activites, students were then told to write a five senses poems. The grammar and style in the students poems improved drastically, when the students were not focusing on grammar. Below is a copy of the before and after poems of two students.



**Principles for Teaching Grammar**
In //Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing//, Constance Weaver presents her ideas of teaching grammar in conjunction with writing. This approach enables her to meet the goal of improving students’ writing. Weaver’s twelve main principles are reproduced below.

1. Teaching grammar as a separate subject divorced from writing wastes valuable instructional time because few students transfer their grammar study to writing without teacher guidance. 2. Most of the grammatical terms used in traditional grammar books are not really needed to explain grammatical options and conventions. 3. The acquisition and development of students’ grammatical repertoire—the emergence of more sophisticated grammar—is fostered in literacy-rich and language-rich environments and classrooms. 4. Grammar instruction should not be limited to the scope and sequence found in a textbook series, but should build on student’s developmental readiness. 5. Grammar to enrich students’ writing—options for adding detail, structure, voice/style, and fluency—is partly learned through extensive, authentic reading and is most readily taught and learned in conjunction with literature and authentic writing. 6. There is minimal value in teaching the conventional prescriptions for grammar, usage, punctuation, and other aspects of mechanics in complete isolation from writing. 7. Teachers do little good and often a great deal of harm by making numerous “corrections” on students’ papers. 8. Conventions to enhance writing can be taught more efficiently learned more effectively during and in conjunction with the editing process than in completely effectively isolated lessons on grammar, usage, and mechanics. 9. It is important to each all students relevant skills for editing their writing according to the conventions widely accepted in mainstream society—while still honoring each student’s home language or dialect. 10. When students experiment with new grammatical options or try out new skills in their writing, their efforts often result in new kinds of errors that are signs of progress. 11. Grammar taught in conjunction with writing will be most effective when reinforced through more than one phase of the process with numerous writing situations and assignments. 12. There is need for more research on differing approaches to teaching grammar when the primary goal is to strengthen students’ writing.
 * Principles for Teaching Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing:**

Mentor Texts and Sentence Stalking
In the book //Mechanically Inclined//, Jeff Anderson encourages teachers to teach grammar by using a mentor text. A mentor text is any text that can teach a writer about any aspect of writer’s craft. Instead of just preaching the grammar rules, Anderson suggests that teachers use any piece of literature to make the grammar and mechanic points for them. To find mentor texts, teachers should become “sentence stalkers”—that is, as teachers read, they should always be on the lookout for mentor texts. Teachers should pass this habit on to students to encourage them to become connoisseurs. To promote sentence creativity and to share ideas, teachers should post up a sentence-of-the-week written by a student.

Understanding Linguistics
There are three areas of linguistic study that place demands on spelling: phonetics, semantics and etymology. Phonetics, the strongest demand, correlates with our desire to spell words the way they sound. Semantics reflects the notion that words from the same root and therefore same or similar meaning should be spelled the same. The etymology demand asks that words reflect their historical context. Our writing system is more complex and abstract than letters mimicking the sounds we make. Students need to understand the more abstract nature of the English language.

To help with understanding vocabulary within a writing context, Alleen and Don Nilson suggest asking students to plug similar words into sentences which give them clues to help them succeed. For instance, a teacher could choose to teach the word "amble" and use words that contain that word in them, such as "ambulances," "ambulatory," "perambulators," and "somnambulent". The following sentences would be given:

1. By remembering that //insomnia// relates to sleeping, I can figure out that someone who walks while sleeping is a __.__

__2. What American mothers call //strollers//, British mother call__ __, or //prams//, for short.__

__3. The first__ were stretchers and medical kits carried onto battlefields where their name meant something like //walking treatment//.

4. In nursing homes, the cost of care is less for patients because they can walk to the bathroom and dining room.

Common Grammar Errors
These are the most common grammar errors. If teachers focus on helping students avoid these twenty errors, then their students will be ahead of the game.

1. No comma after introductory element 2. Vague pronoun reference 3. No comma in compound sentence 4. Wrong word 5. No comma in nonrestrictive element 6. Wrong/missing inflected endings 7. Wrong or missing prepositions 8. Comma splice 9. Possessive apostrophe error 10. Tense shift 11. Unnecessary shift in person 12. Sentence fragments 13. Wrong tense or verb form 14. Subject-verb agreement 15. Lack of comma in a series 16. Pronoun agreement error 17. Unnecessary comma with restrictive element 18. Run-on or fused sentence 19. Dangling or misplaced modifier 20. It’s versus its error
 * 20 Most Common Errors in Order of Frequency (Connors and Lunsford)**

Revision
Writing is all about revising, but for many students it is a difficult and challenging task to do. Students must learn to see their writing for what it really is, not what they wish it to be. Several students are confused as to what exactly revising means. When students are asked what revising means, they will normally respond, “adding period and checking spelling.” This is an inaccurate definition of revising that we, as teachers, need to address.

Before teaching students how to revise, teach students why they need to revise. Without seeing a purpose for revision, students will see it as a waste of time. This will require a discussion on writing on general: why we write, the different kinds of audiences we want to reach, etc. Writing involves two people—the writer and the reader. Students must adjust their writing in order to reach the reader. With an audience in mind, revision changes from assignment to assignment. Students must begin writing with revision in mind. “A first draft is written on paper, not carved in stone.”

To begin revision, have others (yourself, other students, other teachers, etc) read your students work and respond with feedback. Have students ask questions about each other’s work and make comments to give back to their peers. Conferences with two writers at a time with the teacher are helpful too and will encourage constructive criticism versus harmful comments. Try to adopt the “ read two, send the third” strategy when doing peer conferences. This means that students will read and revise their work twice before passing on their work for a third revision to a peer to find ambiguities and places of confusion. Also, encourage “reflective pauses” during students’ writing. Students need pauses in the writing process in order to reflect on what they have written. One way to do this is to have students writing multiple pieces at any given time. This allows students to break and clear their minds when they encounter a difficult time in one piece. Before turning in a final copy, students should conference with the teacher one last time. During this conference, discuss the three different drafts and how each draft changes, allowing students to reflect on the process of revision.


 * Remember, revising is different from editing—“help students understand that revision is about shaping a message, improving ideas, and making the style snappier, not adding punctuation and checking spelling.”

Revisions big four structural levels

 * 1) Over-all text structure
 * 2) Paragraph structure
 * 3) Sentence structure
 * 4) Word structure

Peer Response/Conferences
Teachers get frustrated easily during peer responses and conferences when it comes to revision. Often times students are untrained and don’t give feedback that students can use to improve their writing. They give vague comments that rarely help students revise their work. Teachers sometimes will even avoid peer conferences because they view them as a waste of time.

P-Q-P (Praise, Question, Polish) is an effective strategy that focuses students’ responses during peer conferences. It also helps them maintain a positive attitude towards the revision process instead of becoming discouraged and angry with their peers or revision in general. This process requires groups of two to five students in which the author will read their story aloud as the others follow along on a printed copy.

Praise: What is good about the writing? What should not be changed? Why? Question: As a reader, what do you not understand? Polish: What specific suggestions for improvement can you make?

These questions and responses are given to the author both verbally and on paper. To further increase focus, teachers can encourage students to focus on the topic taught through a mini-lesson earlier in the class period. If the class learned about imagery that day, students should then put more focus on finding good imagery in their peers’ writing pieces.

Even with these guidelines, students still tend to be somewhat vague in their responses. To help avoid this, teachers should scaffold useful feedback. To do this, teachers can put different types of feed back on the board or overhead and have the class as a whole evaluate their usefulness and if they can be used in revision. Students learn that useful responses are specific, not general. This activity can then be taken down to the group level where students are given different scenarios and asked to tell why the responses are ineffective. Eventually, students will work at the individual level. They can be given a worksheet with three ineffective responses in which they must correct the responses and make them more specific and useful. This would make for a great exit slip activity. After these initial lessons, drills should be repeated before each peer group conference to remind students to be specific and to tell why the change could be needed.

To teach the art of revision, eighth grade teacher, Jim Frederickson, uses a rubric. He focuses on making the rubric about what the student’s work did do, rather than what it didn’t do. The rubric is based on the following traits: ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. He tells the students that writers “generally proceed through revision from the outer ring to the center bullseye. In other words, writers generally revise by clarifying their idea, organizing it for their reader, spotlighting the important information, manipulating sentences to make the piece cohesive, choosing precise words, and correcting any conventional errors that distract the reader”. Ideally, students will be able to internalize these things through practice and repetition and be able to depart from specific words in the rubric in order to compose and revise well-written pieces.

Writing Workshop
Good writers are not born; they are made. Every child has the ability to write well—they just have to learn how to do so. Nancie Atwell asks her students at the end of each trimester which lessons helped them develop as a writer the most. The following four categories seemed to help the most:

These lessons changed how Atwell set up her writing workshop which include the following conditions:
 * 1) Lessons about topics: ways to develop ideas for piecing of writing that matter to kids and their readers.
 * 2) Lessons about principles: ways to approach drafting and revising deliberately in order to craft meaningful, literary prose and poetry.
 * 3) Lessons about genres: ways kids and the teacher collaborate to observe and name the qualities of good poetry, short fiction, memoirs, essays, books, and other genres.
 * 4) Lessons about conventions: what a reader’s eyes and mind will expect from a piece of writing, and how marks and form give writing voice and make reading predictable and easy.

Mini-lessons followed by individual conversations with students can help shape their experiences as writers. By conducting mini lessons and then following them up with conversations, students have something they can focus on in their conferences with the teacher, which can in turn help later with their revision process. These lessons and conferences make students aware of their writing and writing processes.
 * a predictable structure: a whole-group discussion or demonstration at the start of each workshop, followed by quiet time for independent writing and conferring with the teacher and peers;
 * a regular schedule for writing: in the case of my classroom, four days every week; and
 * student discretion about topic, process, pace, approach, and audience.

In order to write well, students must gain a deep understanding of sentences. A study was done that discovered that High School students did not know the relationship of the words they had chosen to put in a sentence. One teacher's method consisted of sparking a dialog between students to help them verbally diagram the sentence. This is especially helpful with complex sentences. This not only aids students in understanding sentences, but in their overall analytical skills. This technique could be used in a grammar and writing workshop. The author of this article argues that the two cannot be separated.

"To grant voice, grant freedom." The ABC's of Writing article discusses how to encourage voice and power in student's writing. The teachers need to help students understand writing beyond the basic models and sentence structures.

The teaching of writing can be done most efficiently done in the writing workshop format. Thomas argues that the workshop must contain four things: "chaos model of the writing process, an honest portrayal of writing forms, a primary focus on content over surface features, and an avoidance of oversimplifying the huge and complex act" of writing. These things will reframe the focus on the writing portion rather than the grammar portion. He argues that the writing classroom has become too grammar based, merely driven by standardized tests. Teachers should stop being consumed with those tests and really teach their students the passion behind writing. In Katy Bussert-Webb’s story, “I won’t Tell You about Myself, but I Will Draw My Story”, she tells the story of how she came into a middle school classroom dedicated to sixth through eighth grade pregnant students. She entered the classroom to try and better understand how to help these students begin to write more effectively by using their personal lives which created tensions because some of the students considered it to be that Bussert-Webb was meddling into their lives which are separate from school. The crucial aspect from Bussert-Webb was gaining the trust of her students which she had not done because of how long she had interacted with the students. So, she chose drawing as an activity for the students because it was less readily self-revealing. Through their artwork, the students began to explore and share their personal lives, which could be a starting point to use for a future writing project. Through the students drawing, they begin to engage in practices of good readers (for example, they begin to imagine themselves in the other students lives and the characters lives that they are reading about).

Rebecca Bowers Sipe writes in her essay “Lesson For Learning” reflects on her first year as a teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. She writes that she was expected to teach the basics, but after a month she brought in stacks of local newspapers and used them to explore the differences in styles of writing depending on the section and to pick out pieces of language to develop poems from the newspapers. Sipe advocates collaborative writing instruction and the implementation of choice. She asks why should the students act any other way than they are acting because the expectations that have been placed on them: none (she says that they had previously been labeled as “broken vessels”). She also advocates the technique of writing for audiences outside fo the classroom to promote authenticity and enthusiasm. Sipe also advocates incorporating “wandering and wondering” into the classroom experience to support writing and to allow students to focus their writing specifically on what the are interested in. .

Pat Schnak explores a reading and writing project called “Partners in Reading: A Community Reading/Writing Project”. In this project, Schnak invites students to choose a book that interests them and then creates a list of these books to provide to willing members of the community who want to engage in the project. Then, the adults choose one book from the list, thus choosing a student-partner. Both the adult partner and the students partner read the same book and pass a journal back and forth during the five week span of the project. Then, at the end of the five weeks, the student and the community member meet. Since the students are writing for an audience, their community adult partner, the students are more careful with the writing and are more curious about the writing process. Also, Schnak says that the community response grew rapidly, and the community members really enjoy the project. **Poetry** John Ciardi once said, "But now and then I have gone to high schools to talk about poetry. Oh, and they are dead! I don’t know who delivered the deathblow. I don’t know how it came around. But somewhere between the third and eleventh grade something important, a potential source of joy and rejoicing has died. (14)" Upon reading that line, Fred Barton was willing to admit what killed the student's joy in poetry: "teachers like me, who, over a period of time, lost their true purpose and smothered the fire that was poetry with a blanket of academic structure."

However, Barton did not think his students absolutely dead, not quite yet, to the joy in poetry. As he reassessed his methods, he found this line of truly affecting prose written by a biographer of Dylan Thomas: ""All poets start from love of words and wordplay. Then they learn to love poetry as well, or the Muse herself, and make poems from this love of poetry..."(69)" After that, the poetry unit came more fluidly, more honestly. He says, "So I’ve given up trying to teach poetry writing and started trying to make poets because that’s where it starts." He begins by asking students their favorite word to say, sends them to dictionaries to find words for their sound, not their meaning. And now he has discovered that his students ask to be taught form once they have finished playing with their words, because they want more ways to expand and sharpen what they want to say. He explains, "Students are first a little wary of what appears to be a pretty nonacademic approach, but after a short time they are down in the muddy verbiage with the rest of us, rolling around and pelting each other with disingenuous, loquacious, rectrix, segue, prevaricate, contretemps and even lagniappe. This raucous, ndisciplined, but highly entertaining wordplay jumps off the walls and on to our shoulders, sitting there like parrots repeating and repeating until we listen. And then the poems come."

On Grading
A common theme among W. David LeNoir's undergraduate students--and indeed likely, some teachers as well--is the idea that to grade poetry is to grade a student's individuality, the idea that "students' poems reflect the individual authors so throroughly that criticism of one equates to--or at least is interpreted as-- criticism of the other." LeNoir opposes what he terms 'anything goes' grading--where a grade is offered simply for getting the assignment done--in terms of poetry because it does not fit in with the way other writing is graded in the classroom. He advocates only consistency; 'anything goes' is okay with poetry assuming one also uses it for other types of writing in the course. "The key," he says, "Is finding methodologies with which both you and your students are (or can be made) comfortable."

He even offers some methods to be used instead of 'anything goes'. Introducing with No Grade-When beginning a new genre, begin with 'anything goes' for the first effot, and then begin grading at a negotiable point. Rubrics- LeNoir recommends letting the students help write the rubrics, for all types of writing. There are several attributes that "make recurrin appearances in the rubrics my students have constructed: creativity/originality, imagery, readability/flow, style, detail/development, clarity, mechanical cleanliness, conformity to curricular requirements (e.g., form), effectiveness/cleverness in use of language and language devices (e.g., simile, metaphor), and complexity of thought." Collections- LeNoir thinks some struggle with the complexitydea of taking a single piece as representative of a student's work, and so recommends instead requiring multiple pieces to be turned in together. Conferencing- LeNoir explains, "In its most basic form, conferencing involves a dialogue between individual students and the teacher. As a step toward evaluating student poetry, conferencing allows for the establishment of a context for the poem in that the teacher can hear from the students what they are attempting to do in the work and can see the various versions the students are producing." Self-Evaluation- "In essence, self-evaluation asks the students to consider and articulate their strengths, their weaknesses, their goals, and their progress." It gives the teacher context for appropriately assessing the student's text. Explication- In addition to the poem, the student also submits a written explanation of what the poem is, does, and how it is what it is and does what it does. "Insert Your Favorite Here" -As he says, the grading of poetry should fit into the grading of all writing in the class, and so the methods a teacher uses to grade prose, methods he or she is comfortable with or particularly likes, are equally appropriate.

Publication
When words are published, they become powerful. There is a difference from a student that is writing for the world, and a student who is writing solely for a teacher and a gradebook. Susanne Rubenstein explains that her students are willing to edit, revise, and rewrite pieces so that they are "right" - in a grammatical sense, but alos in a this is what I want to say sense - when they are going to be published and read by an outside audience. In other words, there is a purpose behind their writing. Also, the last page of her article has a list of possible publication places.

The Internet's Role
With the technology of today, it is very easy to get student work published on the internet. Online magazines and webhosting sites allow students to publish online for free. As stated above, publishing for an audience has more influence on student writing, one student commented, "When I see my writing on the Internet, it's kind of amazing to know that people all over the world have access to your work....You also want to make sure that people understand what you're implying....Overall, getting published is pretty cool!" Another student, said they cared more about errors when it was more than just the teacher reading it.

The article, "Getting In Line to Publish Online" also reviews several ezines and web hosting sites. To see the full list, please click on the link to the article in the reference page.