Teachers' Retreat, June 11, 2006
Improving Academic Essay Writing
Participants: Andy Barfield, Jamelea Nader, Jean Pierre Chretien, Milt Miltiadous, Saeko Nagashima, Satsuki Ohsaki, Suzanne Jensen, Kyoko Yamamoto & Yuri Komuro.
We started off by talking about student strengths in this course. Jean Pierre reported that his students were getting good at giving peer feedback and providing specific feedback on each other's writing (word choice, organization, fluency, voice, grammar and ideas).
Jean Pierre asks his students to check each other's writing carefully before they submit drafts to him for feedback. He also explained that students are surprised that they have permission to become expert. Milt took up this theme and mentioned the challenge of encouraging students to put things in their own words. This led into a discussion of referencing and voice, and the group agreed that APA would be a better guide to follow than MLA. So, it would be good to start moving from MLA to APA over this year and formalize the change at the start of the next academic year.
Jamelea was interested in the use of near-peer role model essays and using both negative and positive model essays to help students raise their awareness of writing organization and choices. She felt that her students were more confident this year after they had spent a few classes reading and discussing different essays at the start of the semester.
We returned to the earlier theme of voice (Suzanne) and using sources and references (Milt). Milt had students look at examples of quotation, citation, paraphrasing and summarizing and mentioned that students found it difficult to paraphrase appropriately in their own words. Suzanne felt that students generally had limited experience of writing in Japanese and that they tended to report what others had said about an issue rather than explore the issues from their own point of view and interest. Saeko confirmed that in high school students might have had limited opportunities to do their own research and write analyses of issues. Jamelea came back to the question of paraphrasing and said one way to deal with this was simply to get students to put everything away, before asking them to write in their own words a summary of what a particular text had said. They could then compare their rough drafts to what the original had said and move gradually away from being controlled by the source text. She felt that it was also useful to have students write summaries and paraphrases of each other's writing.
We tended to agree that students find it challenging to be critical in their own writing and that the whole issue of voice pervaded the development of students' academic writing in the second year. Things that second-year teachers find students need to develop further are:
We also felt that in the second year students needed to spend a lot of time reading each other's writing and responding to it. Jamelea, for example, mentioned that her students may read 10-12 near peer model essays at least, and also use these as a source for highlighting and retrieving phrase-based sentence organizers (such as "An important difference is that..." and "A final critical aspect of X is..."). Some teachers felt that it was good to have a specific focus on particular parts of an essay (such as introductions) and help students build their awareness of academic writing organization through a series of stages. This offered useful review for students who had done essay writing in the first year and basic scaffolding for students who had previously done paragraph writing or grammar translation. We also discussed how we get students to give feedback to each other's writing, and whether such feedback should be anonymous or not.
More broadly, the discussion turned to how students practice reading and what reading skills they need to develop for a research-based academic essay writing course. Generally, writing teachers felt that it was helpful to train students in skimming and scanning, alongside note-taking skills, for the overall development of their academic literacy in English. We further discussed free-writing (and asking students use to pens, not pencils, to avoid erasers) and using surveys as a way of getting students to collect 'live' data on issues that they had done some reading about. Suzanne, for example, had used the general theme of education as the umbrella topic for her students to develop their own more specific lines of inquiry from. This had been a great success. Finally, we touched briefly on questions of assessment (continuous assessment vs. exam-based testing).
As for the developing the curriculum between the first and second-year essay writing courses, the second-year teachers felt that it would be great if first-year teachers could give clear and consistent emphasis to helping students develop control of:
(summarized by Andy Barfield)