Write to Learn, Learn to Write: Writing Intensive Curriculum Program Newsletter

SPRING 2019

WRITE TO LEARN, LEARN TO WRITE WRITING INTENSIVE CURRICULUM PROGRAM NEWSLETTER

Index Boosting Multilingual College Students’ Reading Comprehension: Six Practices to Borrow from the ESL Classroom Cong Ding Providing Helpful Writing Feedback for English Learners Christina Norris

The WIC program recently launched a Canvas site with information about the program as well as resources for the teaching of writing across the curriculum. You can access the site through the Salem State University website.

In addition, the WIC program recently launched an exciting new initiative, the Course Embedded Tutor Program (CETP). The CETP pairs a faculty member and their W-II or W-III class with an experienced writing center tutor. Working closely with the faculty member, the tutor provides writing support to students in efforts to help them improve their writing and achieve course learning goals. Please visit the WIC page at salemstate.edu/WIC or contact Tanya Rodrigue at trodrigue@salemstate.edu for more information.

Welcome to the eighth issue of Write to Learn, Learn to Write, the Writing Intensive Curriculum (WIC) Program newsletter. This issue features articles written by two graduate students in the Salem State University Master’s Program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and focuses on supporting multilingual students. The writers, Cong Ding and Christina Norris, composed versions of these newsletter articles in Melanie Gonzalez’s PhD, Teaching Reading, Writing and Vocabulary to English Learners course in Spring 2019.

Cong Ding is an international student from Xi’an, China and is in her second year of the SSU MA program. Her article, “Boosting Multilingual College Students’ Reading Comprehension: Six Practices to Borrow from the ESL Classroom,” provides instructors with guidelines on how to support multilingual students’ reading comprehension.

Ding said she chose to write on this topic because “reading is one of the most important skills within both Chinese and American classroom settings.”

Christina Norris has worked in the field of education since 2014. Her article, “Providing Helpful Writing Feedback for ELs,” functions as a research-based guide on how to give multilingual writers effective feedback. The information provided is also meant to help save instructors time when engaging with student work.

Due to budget cuts, this unfortunately may be the last issue of Write to Learn, Learn to Write. I’m hopeful I will be able to publish more newsletters in the future.

Sincerely, Tanya K. Rodrigue, PhD WIC Coordinator and Associate Professor of English

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Boosting Multilingual College Students’ Reading Comprehension: Six Practices to Borrow from the ESL Classroom

By Cong Ding, MA in TESOL candidate What is the basic key factor contributing to academic success in a college classroom?

I would argue that the answer to this question is reading comprehension.

Students not only need to understand textbooks not just in their academic subjects but also readings outside school that support their learning.

However, multilingual students for whom English is an additional language might have various kinds of difficulties reading college-level texts. Some multilingual students might struggle to find the right words to paraphrase the main ideas or find details within the North American rhetorical style. Others might have difficulty understanding the purposes of a paragraph or text or knowing how to connect with an American audience. Here are suggestions from research on teaching ESL and from my perspective as a multilingual college student myself to support reading comprehension for your students who read in multiple languages.

meaning or usage of even just a couple of words in a text, they may struggle to understand the content of the whole reading. Research has shown that growing multilingual students’ comfort level with high-frequency words (words like “driven”, “read into”, “lines”, etc.) in new contexts and explicit attention to new content or topicrelated vocabulary that helps them to comprehend and later engage in reflecting on your assigned course readings. Consider inserting word and phrase lists into your text sets that add to multilingual students’ knowledge of the words and phrases used in the context of your course or discipline in order to grow their English lexicon.

1. Use a ‘text set’ approach to course readings

The cultivation of English reading ability cannot be separated from the development of listening, speaking, and writing. Research shows that oral language (listening and speaking) forms the foundation for reading comprehension. 4 Writing helps multilingual students to reinforce concepts and vocabulary gained from reading. For example, teachers could often organize formal and/or informal in-class listening and speaking activities, like pecha kuchas or pair and shares, where students get to orally share their connections and reflections on a reading. Informal and formal writing activities like journaling, reflection papers, or posters can help reinforce concepts learned from reading.

Designing course activities that engage all four language domains helps multilingual students develop their English language skills more robustly.

A text set is “[a collection of] resources from different genres, media, and levels of reading difficulty that are designed to be supportive of the learning of readers with a range of experiences and interests.”1 It is a core best practice for K-12 English as a second language (ESL) teachers to provide varied, appropriate, and interesting texts to support a main textbook (or “anchor text”) for students, and it is a practice that can benefit the college classroom too. A text set approach also expands the definition of a “text” beyond the written word to include videos, podcasts, etc. too. Interesting material that connects to students’ backgrounds, personal and academic goals, languages, and cultures motivates and encourages students to read and put themselves into the readings. Therefore, consider surveying your students at the beginning of a class to understand more about them and to determine what kinds of genres, media, and support texts could supplement your main course readings and engage them more fully.

3. Use multiple languages to support reading ESL teachers know not to neglect the positive effects of using students’ first or native languages during English language instruction. In terms of multilingual college students studying in the U.S., they often possess quite sophisticated reading skills in their first language and research shows that reading skills can be transferred across languages. 3 Encouraging reading in both their first language and English can help reinforce and augment multilingual college students’ developing knowledge and skills in both languages. It also validates students’ first languages as important to learning and is a culturally responsive and welcoming practice.

4. Engage all language domains in the classroom

2. Spend time on vocabulary Vocabulary is the most basic constituent unit of a text. Research states that students must know 98% of the words in a text in order to fully comprehend it. 2 Therefore, vocabulary becomes an important part of improving reading ability. When students cannot understand the 1

ReadWriteThink, “Creating text sets for your classroom,” Accessed March 2018. http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson305/creating.pdf

2

Keith Folse, Vocabulary myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

3

I.S. Nation, Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).

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5. Master and apply different reading methods

Bibliography

Teachers should encourage all students to understand when to use the various reading methods for different reading purposes. Generally, there are three types of reading methods that expert readers use: scanning, skimming, and close reading. Scanning is used when there is specific information that a reader needs to quickly locate and doesn’t need to read the text in its entirety. Scanning is helpful for looking activities like finding a relevant article in a library database, finding unknown words, or reviewing text for the answer to a question.

Skimming is usually used to understand the basic content or gist of a text and is really effective for activating background knowledge or making predictions about a text’s content. However, when required to understand the details of a text, close reading a text in its entirety is the ideal method. All too often we assume that close reading is the only method to use, but skimming and scanning can help develop good study habits that involve background knowledge activation, prediction, and reviewing for key information. Thus, encouraging and reinforcing different reading methods for different purposes in a college course can be an effective way to help students improve their reading comprehension and study habits.

Folse, Keith. Vocabulary myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Nation I.S. Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009.

ReadWriteThink. Creating text sets for your classroom. Last modified 2004. http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/ lesson305/creating.pdf

Providing Helpful Writing Feedback for ELs

By Christina Norris, MA in TESOL candidate Overview It’s a familiar refrain among writing instructors,

6. Develop before-, during-, and after-reading activities Most learning activities in the college classroom involve asking students to read a text and then perform some sort of post-reading activity to demonstrate understanding. This formula problematically assumes that all students arrive to the course or topic with the same skills, knowledge base, backgrounds, languages, and abilities.

Teachers should instead plan for reading support activities that include before-reading, during-reading, and after-reading activities. In the before-reading stage, teachers should activate students’ background knowledge, so that it could help students understand texts more easily and also reduce barriers to comprehension. We often encounter situations where, although students have sufficient vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, they still are unable to understand the full text as they lack the appropriate background knowledge. Or, we see that students possess a good deal of background knowledge but a gap in their vocabulary prevents them from activating it. Therefore, adding and referring to pictures in texts, using visuals (like infographics, charts, or graphs), and even videos to scaffold reading are effective ways of activating and building multilingual students’ background knowledge. During reading, teachers should remind students to stop often to summarize what they have just read either mentally or aloud with a reading partner or study buddy. In the after-reading stage, teachers are then able to apply forms of assessments in order to make sure students have achieved full understanding.

In Summary Reading at the college level is a complicated and daunting activity that can benefit from some strategic support and purposeful lesson planning. I really hope that you find these six reading tips from the ESL classroom helpful when supporting your multilingual students’ reading comprehension in your classes.

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I.S. Nation, Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing

Dana Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing,” Journal of Second Language Writing 16 no. 3: 165-193.

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and especially those who teach English Learners (ELs): I feel like I’m spending a huge amount of time correcting writing, and I don’t even know if I’m helping my students! This guide is meant to synthesize available research on writing feedback to help professors who want to serve students without wasting precious time on feedback that isn’t useful.

How should I think about feedback?

An important first step in giving students helpful feedback on their writing is to decide for yourself what the goal of your feedback is. Ferris reminds us that our job is not to produce (or to get students to produce) a perfect paper. Instead, we want to enable students to progress in their writing and, eventually, to successfully revise and edit their own work independently. 5 If one of your goals is to boost students’ confidence and encourage them to continue writing, make sure to strike a balance between corrections and affirming comments. Don’t forget to articulate your approach to students so they know what to expect.

What should I avoid?

Here are a few mistakes to avoid when marking papers: 1. “Teacher appropriation.” Well intentioned educators that we are, we sometimes let our impulses get the better of us and may fall into the trap of taking too many liberties with our students’ work, to the point where we actually appropriate it as our own. This is damaging for student writers, who may feel demoralized when they get their papers back and see the large number of changes the professor made. Ferris provides guidelines to follow to avoid the appropriation trap: 6 •

Don’t cross things out or re-write for students.

•

Let students know that they are allowed to disagree with your suggestions.

Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

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2. “Rubber stamping.” If you have a large stack of papers to grade, all on the same topic, they all start to blend together at a certain point, and you might find yourself writing the same feedback for multiple students or writing short, vague comments without much substance. Ferris offers advice for personalizing feedback.7 •

Write feedback with the student’s name at the top and your signature at the bottom, as in a letter.

•

Mention previous work they’ve done to highlight improvements or problems that are reappearing.

3. “Jargon.” Make sure that students understand any terms you use in your comments or corrections, whether written in short hand or full form. 8

What do students want?

When we watch students shove a painstakingly corrected paper into their backpacks, it can be tempting to think that they don’t care about our feedback, that they ignore our feedback, or that they don’t even want feedback to begin with. This is not the case.

•

First of all, ELs want error feedback on their writing. Research studies by Ferris and Roberts indicate that more or less all ELs want errors to be corrected by their instructors in some form. 9

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Second, L2 writers know that they aren’t highly skilled writers in English, and they care about improving. They aren’t offended when

How can I save time when grading writing assignments?

Less time-intensive techniques for providing feedback on writing can be even more helpful to students’ development of self-editing skills than more time-consuming ones. Ferris explains that indirect feedback (meaning pointing out errors, such as by highlighting) paired with a required second draft is more effective in improving students’ independence in editing their own writing than direct feedback (meaning correcting errors for students). 12 Furthermore, in a comparison of indirect feedback with error identification (think words circled with an error listed in the margin) and indirect feedback without error identification (words circled without margin comments), Ferris and Roberts found that students in either condition were more or less equally successful at correcting errors. 13

Bibliography Ferris, Dana and Barrie Roberts. “Error Feedback in L2 Writing Classes.” Journal of Second Language Writing 10 no 3 (2001): 161-184.

Ferris, Dana. “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

Journal of Second Language Writing 16 no. 3 (2007): 165-193.

Ferris, Dana. Treatment of error in second language student writing.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Nation, I. S. Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing. New York: Routledge, 2009.

professors correct their mistakes, but they are frustrated when they do not receive feedback. 10 •

Finally, research shows that students are much more likely to take our advice into consideration than to disregard it. 11

7

Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

8

Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

9

Dana Ferris and Barrie Roberts, “Error Feedback in L2 Writing classes,” Journal of Second Language Writing 10 no. 3 (2001): 161-184.

10

Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

11

Ferris, “Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing.”

12

Dana Ferris, Treatment of Error in Second Language Student writing, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

13

Ferris and Roberts, “Error Feedback in L2 Writing Classes.”

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