Homework week 6: Writing Groups and the Less Proficient ESL Student

The first point of interest that I found in the text was the big line “Most students need to be taught the social skills needed for effective peer collaboration.” I think this is relevant in the sense that some young learners are not all used to work in group. Some of them are probably the only child in their family, so someone, the teacher, must, most of the time, teach his or her students how to work with others. Not every student is able to do this right, but if they learn how to work well with their peers, it will result in better work, better cooperation and therefore better grades.

The second point of interest is that they write that “L1 studies provide a persuasive argument in favor of writing groups by suggesting that students develop critical thinking skills…” along with many other skills that they improve with writing groups. I agree to the fact that they improve their critical thinking skills because they have to work with their peers, so they see how their team members work and write and they can develop their own writing techniques. They can judge if the techniques of their peers are good and how they write.

Writing Groups and the Less Proficient ESL Student

Nelson and Murphy’s paper advocates the use of peer revision in writing with less proficient ESL students through a research that the authors conducted. Their research is interesting since along with the conclusion they came to, they also found out that it is possible to identify which type of error that students notice through peer revision. I believe this to be of great importance because I used to think that the amount of time needed to introduce peer revision and to train students for such activities maybe was not worth the result. I now realize that a teacher can greatly benefit from such a practice as peer reviewing can help to point out the recurrent errors in a given group. Moreover, the researchers mention in the conclusion that students coming from other parts of the world might need more practice, as they might not be used to collaborative work in schools. This affirmation caught my attention because I believe that the economic system in which we currently live teaches us, humans, to be competitive since being better leads to economic success. Hence, I am glad to see that research is starting to prove, or rather keeps on proving, that collaboration definitely promotes success for all. 

Reading week 6: Writing Groups and the Less Proficient ESL Student

Reading: Writing Groups and the Less Proficient ESL Student

By Gayle L. Nelson and John M. Murphy

            When I started to read this article, right in the third paragraph, there was a contradiction between what the authors say and what I have been taught in my teacher training within the BEALS so far. The authors express their uncertainty about the effectiveness of pairing up less proficient students with more advanced ones and also that they are worried about the potential problems that might occur from the students’ different cultural backgrounds. These factors (achievement level and cultural background) are in my opinion, as I was taught by Spencer Kagan and his Cooperative Learning approach, are to be integrated in the students’ daily routines so they get to know each other and gain more cultural awareness, social skills and cooperation.

            However, this is how I was taught but I do not always agree with Kagan’s theories! I am also very concerned about the fact that less proficient students might have more difficulties to identify other students’ errors and mistakes. I am wondering if these lower level students are more likely to be confused from misunderstanding sentences due to their lower proficiency and actually not noticing organization, development irrelevancies, topic sentences and cohesion errors.

Guiding Principles for Effective Peer Response Week 5 homework

1  Text by Jette G. Hansen and Jun Liu

s    Guiding Principles for Effective Peer Response

            In the text about peer response, the authors argue that peer response can be useful not only at the end of the writing process, but at all stages of it. I personally think this is true, because our peer can help us find ideas about what to write about and, in team, students can brainstorm or exchange ideas on subjects and their peer can help to find an idea that they will write about. Students can also share their knowledge about the subject that their peers have chosen and this will help them to create a better text since they can have the opinion/thoughts from an outside view.

2.      Hansen and Liu suggest that the teacher should model the peer response process. Thus will surely help students to go through this peer to peer response process. When the teacher shows exactly what he (or she) wants students to do, the teacher will not spend more time explaining to one student after the other what peer response is. The teacher should provide examples on how peer review helped other students to improve their text or how the teacher himself (or herself) is helped by peer response when writing a text. Modeling is probably one of the most important step when doing an activity with a group of students.

Reading homework week 5: Guiding principles for effective peer response

            

Guiding principles for effective peer response
by Jette G. Hansen and Jun Liu

         The authors in this article suggest that in the process of creating purposeful and appropriate peer response sheets, the teacher could, on purpose, leave some blank space on the sheet for students to fill in. The teacher should prepare some pre-established sentence starters such as: “I have difficulty in _____” etc. I think it is a very interesting way of making the students aware of their own weaknesses and it also allows the other students, the one who will be writing the peer review to focus on certain grammatical elements which might require a particular attention.

            In the introduction, the authors mention the collaborative learning theory which I do not think I have studied before. However, in the following paragraphs, in the guiding principles, I have found very interesting the idea of using peer responses not only for reviewing the final result of a writing production but to use peer-responses to write collaboratively. I think students could greatly benefit of peer reviewing right from the beginning of the writing process, from brainstorming, to plan, outline, etc. This I believe could help some lower level students and students who are avoiding failure to have some positive feedback from fellow students and maybe to increase their motivation level.

Guiding Principles for Effective Peer Response

Hansen and Liu’s text is useful in that it is really straightforward; it presents one by one the techniques that are known to foster good peer reviewing in class. I first want to point out that it is interesting to see the way in which all the principles mentioned by the authors focus on having the student at the center of the learning process. The majority of the principles they advocate are to be used before the peer response process itself, they aim at giving students all the tools they need to work on peer response by themselves; meaning that they are taught not simple facts about peer reviewing but they are rather taught the skills to peer review. I believe this to be very effective considering that these skills will be useful for a whole life. An activity which I find of particular interest is the mock peer activity. I believe that humor has its place in a class, especially in a SLA class, as one of the greater barrier to learning a second language in class is anxiety. Everybody likes humor; having students imagine sentences they should not use in such an activity would therefore be really effective because most students would listen (yes, everybody wants to laugh) and thus everyone understand and acquire skills.

Scaffolding Assignment

1.      In the writing program section, where the students have to write a 1000-word paragraph, they specify that they gradually incorporate new elements in order for the students to produce a good essay. In the first essay, they focus on certain points  like using signals, keywords, links, transitions etc. For the second essay, they have to incorporate text from published sources and so on. Being a student, I know how hard it is to produce a sort of text that I have never produced, so I think it is a good idea to not push students and go gradually in order to help them develop their writing skills.

2.      In the section about “Feedback from peers and tutors” they argue about how important it is to receive feedback from an outside view. In order to become better in writing essays, receiving comments from your peers will help a lot because they are doing the same kind of text. By reading your text, the person can give you some advice, or give you some tips that can be helpful. Also, receiving feedback from the tutors is really helpful because they are the ones who will correct the essay, so they are able to steer the students.

Reading homework week 4 : Scaffolding

Scaffolding for second language writers: producing an academic essay
by Sara Cotterall and Robin Cohen

            Since I started the BEALS program, I have been introduced to a great number of learning theories, methods and approaches. One that have always interested me and that I have always thought that made sense was Vygotsky’s socio-constructivist approach. Especially the notion of Scaffolding, it is nevertheless to say that I was very interested in this article. I believe that Scaffolding is a great way to fill the learning gaps that students might experience during the course of their studies.

I found very interesting that the topics given to the students for the writing of the essay allowed them to reflect and use their own experiences and to activate their prior knowledge, this I believe reduced the stress level and helped to demonstrate their actual writing ability as there was less anxiety.

The second point of interest I have found in this article is how structured the writing task was. I believe that allowing students to work on a section of their essay at the time also reduced the anxiety and stress level. I think it is always a good idea to break down the task to be done, this way the essay does not seem to be a huge and endless work, it makes it “manageable” as cited by the author. 

Reading: Scaffolding for Second Language Writers: Producing an Academic Essay

Here is my reflexion for week 4's reading.

The authors of this article deconstructed the concept of scaffolding in order to make it usable by ESL teachers in class. As I formerly thought that scaffolding mainly referred to modeling, I believe that an interesting point the writers of this article raised is that scaffolding refers not only to modeling but also to cues to adopt new strategies, opportunities to practice and discuss the new strategies, and immediate feedback. Thinking back on my second practicum, I can fairly say that students really do need to be presented writing strategies in a comprehensive way that not only involves modeling but direct dealing with the given strategies, or else they might not fully comprehend and internalize them. I also strongly believe that the authors are right in the way they see language acquisition as they argue that it is okay for learners to incorporate the language modelled during group discussion as the authors say it demonstrates learners’ ability to master function and form. I trust that some language forms cannot be directly explained (as they have no logical rule behind them) and that the best way for a second language learner to use those given forms is first to reproduce form what they have seen in authentic texts.