Academic writing
This week’s chapter on academic writing made me think about how difficult academic writing must be for some students who are ELLs. When thinking about the types of academic writing that high school students have to undertake, a few things come to mind such as science lab reports, English essays, or short answer questions on tests. Each of these examples represents a very different style of academic writing. I think that many of the writing strategies provided in this chapter would be very useful for ELLs and are strategies that we as teachers must use in our classrooms. During my practicum I saw some writing strategies in use by some of the teachers I observed. One of these strategies was used in a Social Studies 11 classroom, where students were put into groups and given a question. In their group, students were then asked to come up with a thesis statement based on their question, as well as three supporting points and a concluding sentence. The next day, the groups presented their arguments to the rest of the class. After, students were then asked to choose a partner who was not in their group, and pick one of the group topics to write a paragraph on. The partners then wrote a “proper” paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting points, and concluding sentence. The teacher told me that she would repeat this activity for every unit this year as she was trying to get students to learn to write proper paragraphs before even writing proper essays, both skills that her classes needed to work on. Something else the teacher did to help students was to intervene in their partnerships. For example, two ELL students who were struggling in the class paired up with each other because they were friends. However, the teacher split them up and paired them each with a non-ELL student because she knew by their writing level that they would not be successful together, but could be scaffolded by another student who could write at a higher level. The teacher also paired other weaker writers with stronger writers in the class for this reason. I thought this was a good strategy because she did not single out the ELL students or other students who were weak writers in the class by telling them what she was doing. Overall I found the strategy to be a very good exercise in writing a proper paragraph and I could see myself using a similar strategy in the future.