assignment of-reading-writing

Design instructional activities ideas approaches to writing

Abstract

Writing well is not just an option for young people it is a necessity. Along with reading

comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for

participation in civic life and in the global economy. Yet every year in the United States large

numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required

by colleges or employers. In addition, every school day young people drop out of high

school, many of them because they lack the basic literacy skills to meet the growing demands

of the high school curriculum. Because the definition of literacy includes both reading and

writing skills, poor writing proficiency should be recognized as an intrinsic part of this

national literacy crisis. This report offers a number of specific teaching techniques that

research suggests will help 4th- to 12th-grade students in our nation’s schools. The report

focuses on all students, not just those who display writing difficulties; although this latter

group is deservedly the focus of much attention. The premise of this report is that all students

need to become proficient and flexible writers. In this report, the term low-achieving writers

are used to refer to students whose writing skills are not adequate to meet classroom

demands. Some of these low-achieving writers have been identified as having learning

disabilities; others are the “silent majority” who lack writing proficiency but do not receive

additional help. As will be seen in this report, some studies investigate the effects of writing

instruction on groups of students across the full range of ability, from more effective to less

effective writers, while others focus specifically on individuals with low writing proficiency.

Recent reports by the National Commission on Writing have helped to bring the importance

of writing proficiency forward into the public consciousness. These reports provide a

jumping-off point for thinking about how to improve writing instruction for all young people,

with a special focus on struggling readers. Carnegie Corporation of Bangladesh used up-to-

date research to highlight a number of key elements seen as essential to improving reading

instruction for adolescents. Writing next sets out to provide guidance for improving writing

instruction for adolescents, a topic that has previously not received enough attention from

researchers or educators.


Recommendations

Eleven Elements of Effective Adolescent Writing Instruction This report identifies 11

elements of current writing instruction found to be effective for helping adolescent students

learn to write well and to use writing as a tool for learning. It is important to note that all of

the elements are supported by rigorous research, but that even when used together, they do

not constitute a full writing curriculum.

Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and

editing their compositions

Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to

summarize texts

Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work

together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions

Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they

are to complete.

Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for

writing assignments

Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex,

sophisticated sentences

Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize

ideas for their composition

Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help

them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task

Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities

in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing for authentic

audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing

Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate

models of good writing

Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content material.

The Writing Next elements do not constitute a full writing curriculum, any more than the

Reading Next elements did for reading. However, all of the Writing Next instructional

elements have shown clear results for improving students’ writing. They can be combined in

flexible ways to strengthen adolescents’ literacy development. The authors hope that besides

providing research-supported information about effective writing instruction for classroom

teachers, this report will stimulate discussion and action at policy and research levels, leading

to solid improvements in writing instruction in grades.

Real writing

Through learning experiences designed by three English teachers, it can be concluded that the

teaching of writing employed by the English teachers at three high schools modeling the

competence based curriculum is categorized as the product-based approach of writing

instruction. It is characterized by the linear model of instruction in which learners do not

receive adequate time and opportunities to produce the final product of writing through

revising process. Besides, the students’ product of writing is expected to:


Meet certain prescribed English rhetorical style.

Reflect accurate grammar.

Be well-organized.

The teachers are influenced by the linear view of writing pedagogy viewing writing as a

linear process of finding ideas, drafting, and finished composition. Learning experiences

designed by the English teachers at three high schools are summarized. It can be identified

that Teacher always begins pre-writing activities by asking students to collect

information/data related to the writing tasks. To gather information for carrying out the

writing tasks, Teacher used the techniques of questioning, observation, interview, and

reflection. Asking students’ about their elementary education, asking students to observe

pictures, to interview a friend and to reflect on their conditions are the examples of pre-

writing activities designed. Having gathered the ideas to be written, then students are asked to

write those ideas in the forms of writing. Feedback is given from the samples of students’

writing. Similar to Teacher, in designing writing tasks, Teacher also frames the design of

teaching writing by adopting the conventional procedure, i.e. prewriting stage, drafting stage,

and feedback stage. The conventional procedure is characterized by its linear process of

writing. Summarizes learning experiences designed by Teacher. Describes the fact that in

designing learning experiences. Teacher is also influenced by the linear view of composing

process. Due to this, learning activities are formatted in three stages. In prewriting stage,

Teacher activated students’ background knowledge through picture and model text and

sharing ideas. In writing a message, the teacher used the picture of high school building as

stimuli; in discussing simple past tense the teacher asked students to observe the texts; in

discussing procedural texts the teacher asked students to observe the language and

organizational features of the model text. Having activated students’ background knowledge,

students were instructed to write, and collect the finished composition. On the basis of

learning experiences designed by the teachers as shown, it is concluded that the teachers in

the model schools still could not design learning experiences that are appropriate with the

targeted writing tasks they designed.

Intensive writing

Intensive writing Reflective writing, which is part of the elemental genre of personal recount,

is one of the most important types of writing that art and design students engage in. Many

applied subjects such as nursing use reflective writing to encourage students to be self-critical

and self aware. It is a particularly well theorized area. Who wrote one of the seminal books in

the area, identified the importance of reflection in and on action as a response to the positivist

tradition that dominated universities from the late 19th century. He sought to revalue the

ability of practitioners to act and to reflect on tacit knowledge, arguing that “practitioners

may become reflective researchers in situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and

conflict... Here the exchange between research and practice is immediate, and reflection-in-

action is its own implementation”. This is strikingly similar to characterization of the skills

gained through the practice of art. Thinking underpins many of the writing assignments in art

and design, as dealing with uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and conflict are both

characteristic of artistic creation and are outcomes that modern art frequently tries to


encompass. In their approach to reflective writing, art and design differ from many other

practical or applied disciplines, such as nursing. In other disciplines, reflective writing tasks

are often highly structured; using frameworks such as Gibb’s reflective cycle. Because art

and design often try to generate instability, they draw on more playful approaches to

reflective writing. Reflective texts in art and design need to be open to the variety of

experiences, visual and verbal, that may influence students, and this would not be enhanced

by a highly structured form. One area that tutors and writing instructors in art and design

draw on is writing development, adapting strategies that are used to overcome writer’s block

and other inhibitions to writing. Writing is a practice, one that is different from artistic

practices but which as a process shares similarities. Some of the methods used to engage

students with writing tasks are derived from writing studies, while others advance from these

ideas, often by using materials other than pen and paper or computer. All are intended to

encourage reflection and writing in stages. For other courses and programmers, the approach

to the final essay or dissertation may be quite different, but the issues that tutors try to address

through the written texts are often similar: to establish through writing a relationship between

students’ practice and their values and interests. One example from the Writing PAD website

described the aims of the dissertation for students: write their own experiences

To be personally reflexive, reflecting upon the ways in which their own values,

experiences,

Interests, beliefs, political commitments, wider aims in life and social identities have

shaped their research to be aware of other knowledge’s and to understand and

evaluate their own place within those

Knowledge’s both practically and theoretically.

Writing Assessment

In relation to the writing assessment, summarize the teachers’ assessment strategies. shows

that in assessing students writing performance Teacher only assessed students’ finished

composition. Moreover, he did not correct all the compositions rather took only four to five

samples of students’ compositions. The sentences that are not grammatically correct in the

sample compositions were discussed together in class. From samples of ungrammatically

correct sentences, the students are expected to be able to produce grammatically correct

sentences when they are assigned to write a composition. In short, correction on samples of

students’ composition serves as feedback in the form of whole-class feedback. In this case,

the teacher did not provide individual feedback. In addition to assessing the product

composition, Teacher consistently gave formative written test at the end of each unit. The

formative test materials consist of the four language skills listening, reading, speaking, and

writing. In each formative test, speaking was tested indirectly, i.e. by way of asking students

to apply knowledge of language forms in the contexts of dialogue. The writing test was also

given indirectly because in the test tasks students were not assigned to do real writing rather

to reorder the jumbled sentences to form a paragraph or to choose the correct forms of

language from the available options. The results of formative test were used to classify

students having achieved the basic competence of writing and those who have not yet

achieved the basic competence of writing. In summary, Teacher consistently assesses


students’ product for the purpose of providing feedback. For measuring the students’

attainment of basic competence in writing, the Teacher consistently gave formative test at the

end of each unit. The result of the test is used to categorize students having mastered the

basic competence and those having not mastered the basic competence. Writing different

genres though a recent study of writing at university identified up to 22 different types of

academic writing, coursework assignments tend to be dominated by “the essay.” However, in

some disciplines, particularly emergent or practical disciplines, there is greater variation than

in disciplines that have a longer history of university study. Art and design are among the

disciplines in which students create a wide range of types of text or genres. Genre identifies

the purposes of texts, and, from that, suggests their structure and goals. Although Nesi and

Gardner identified a large number of genres, the number can be reduced to a set of

“elemental” or basic genres: personal recount

Narrative.

Taxonomic report (classifying and describing phenomena).

Procedure.

Explanation.

Discussion or argument.

As Coffin.

Precise classification of a text requires finer discrimination such as that done. In contexts in

which texts are important such as academia, genres are increasingly specialized and are

frequently combined in more complex texts. However, for the purposes of this chapter, the

broad categories can be informative. The essay falls in the category of discussion or argument

and is characterized by a thesis or position and arguments for and against an issue. It depends

on an array of evidence, and is usually supported by references and a bibliography. Art and

design students frequently find essay writing challenging; Swift argues that “the

conventional, academic essay form, which appears to encourage simplification and

authoritativeness, can be seen as part of a hierarchical education system set up to

disempowered rather than empower students”. Instead of setting tasks in the discussion genre,

lecturers in art and design frequently choose other genres, such as the personal recount

reflective writing, taxonomic reports classification and description, and procedures the stages

of a process. Reflective writing is extremely important and will be treated separately, but both

the taxonomic report and the procedure offer significant advantages for students writing in art

and design. Many students find them easier to write than discussion texts, as they can be

based on students’ experience rather than on the synthesis of other’s research, and they allow

students to create multimodal texts using images and drawings as well as words. Texts in

these genres are often structured chronologically or by the steps of the procedure, so

organizing the paper is simpler than the discussion genre. They can also be directly related to

students’ professional practice, leading to greater engagement with the writing task. For

example, at one institution Year students in Fashion Design were asked to choose a clothing

store and document its layout and allocation of space in relation to stock and target

customers. The essence of the task was a taxonomic report, in which students had to analyze

customers, merchandise, store, and implicitly, its competition. This complex analytic task,

though, was arranged so that students had to pay close attention to the design of the store in

order to make sketches and layout plans, as well as to think through the marketing of the


clothing that the store stocked. The combination of multimodal presentation and descriptive

writing facilitated the development of the students’ analytic skills far better than essay

assignments that try to instill analytic skills more directly. Writing in the genre of procedures

can involve students explaining the steps of a craft or skill, or other staged process. In

describing procedures, often procedures that they are quite familiar with, students have to

analyze and make explicit tacit knowledge. Through tasks such as these, students’ writing

ability is improved along with their transferable skills.

Conclusion

In summary, Teacher also assesses the product of writing intended to provide feedback. For

measuring the attainment of basic competence in writing, Teacher 2 also consistently gave

formative test at the end of each unit. It is the paper-pencil test designed to measure four

language skills. In this case, speaking is tested indirectly through the objective test in multiple

choice and completion formats. Apart from that, some writing skill is also tested indirectly in

the formative test. Of the four formative tests, composition task was given once at the end of

unit 3. From the result of the test, it can be identified students who have mastered the basic

competence and those who have not mastered the basic competence. These tasks help

students understand how writing can support their art and design practice. Tutors in art and

design frequently assign tasks that get students to write small amounts of text, but to write

them more frequently. These tasks are often not directly assessed, but instead they contribute

to assignments that gather up the small bits of writing into a larger, coherent whole. This

reduces the marking load on the tutor, while making the writing task more manageable for

students. Multimodal texts are used in many disciplines, as images, graphs and charts provide

clearer and more concise ways to present information than writing. Art and design tutors also

ask their students to combine visual content with written, but they also prompt students to go

beyond these forms of information design to investigate the support that texts are written on

and the ways that texts might be presented. Drawing on the inherent strengths that students

bring to the study of art and design, these tasks elicit in some instances strikingly innovative

responses.

assignment of-reading-writing

Education