Teachers Retreat June 11 2006
Introduction to Academic Essay Writing Discussion
Participants: Andy Barfield, Andy Martin, Satsuki Ohsaki, Yamamoto-sensei & Yuri Komuro.
Andy M explained that he is using a journal writing approach (where students write guided entries for 20 minutes or so, exchange notebooks and respond to each other's writing). The course started with students discussing and writing about their language learning histories and is going well. The students read each other's writing a lot, as well as model essays written in a standard introduction-body-conclusion format. Recently, the students have been working on their own for and against issue in class, and then finding their own research resources outside class. The students also use English a lot in pairs in class. Andy has taken time to focus on plagiarism and expects to spend much more time on developing paraphrasing and summarizing skills later.
Satsuki talked about her Introduction to Academic Paragraph Writing class, where she has been using issues from the taught in English website. She also uses a journal writing approach and has students work in groups of 4. They use Japanese quite a lot, but Satsuki feels they can discuss more deeply and get more comfortable and confident about their English writing. Though students are initially dependent on their Japanese-English dictionaries, they are moving to building their vocabulary on different topics by reading English texts. The goal is to get them to write several paragraphs on a particular issue. Model paragraphs and essays are very useful. Referring to her second-year Improving Academic Paragraph Writing class, Yuri expanded on some of the questions that Satsuki raised, particularly with regard to theme-based vocabulary building and the use of (near-peer) models of writing.
Andy B shared some portfolios in progress from his Introduction to Academic Essay Writing class, which follows a journal approach. Students had already written about 24 journal entries in a variety of formats: brainstorming, quick-writing, note-taking, responses to other students' writing, responses to simplified readings, and reflections on their own writing and ideas. To make the portfolios, students had chosen 6 pieces of work and written a one-page commentary on how they saw their development in the first 6 weeks of the semester. The portfolios also included a word-processed first draft and second draft of their English learning histories. The class had recently started doing drugs and was currently reading, note-taking on and responding to different texts on drugs issues in Japan and other societies. The rest of the semester would focus on developing a research-based academic essay on a particular aspect of drugs issues that each student wanted to write about (e.g., medical use of cannabis, comparing drugs policies in different countries, and arguments for and against the legalization of drugs).
What common concerns do we share between the different types of writing courses that we teach? These include:
We also talked about the need to revise 'The Basic Guidelines for Citing Sources' to make them easier to use for students. We felt that at the very least that students needed to put author/producer, date, title, URL, and date retrieved for any source that they used.
In the final part of our discussion, we talked about the development of academic literacy in Japanese and English. Faculty of Law students have introductory seminars in their first year which focus on the development of academic literacy through Japanese. Yamamoto-sensei explained that many of the issues and areas that were being dealt with in the taught in English academic writing classes were of similar concern and interest across the curriculum in the introductory seminars.
(Summarized by Andy B)