Week 8 Blog Post – Language for Academic Writing
The reading on “Language for Academic Writing” is one that resonates strongly with me. I can’t stress enough the importance of writing. As stated by Zwiers: “Academic writing usually requires the thinking skills of analysis, casual reasoning, argumentation, and evaluation” (Zwiers 196). These skills are valuable and will be used in any job that a student will apply for in their future. Furthermore, writing is extremely important because it teaches students to learn “new ways to organize and present new language” (Zwiers 195). For many students, they only experience oral language at home and do not engage in any type of written language. As teachers, we are able to give students the tools required to express themselves in another form of language that they will only benefit from in the future.
After completing my short practicum over the past two weeks, it has reinforced in my mind the importance of both reading and writing in the classroom. The benefits that come from reading and writing are immense. In every classroom that I observed, students were required to read some sort of text and respond in writing to those texts. For example, I observed a chemistry class. The students were given a worksheet where they were required to read a word problem, analyze the problem, and then answer the question appropriately using both mathematical skills and writing out a final answer in a sentence. In the drama class that I observed, students were asked to read a script that they would later be performing, analyze the script, and then write a series of stage notes that would be able to assist them in their performance. I also observed numerous English and Humanities courses. In these classes, students were continuously asked to read texts, decipher their meanings, and often argue for or against a particular point.
These numerous observations have affirmed in my mind that reading and writing are two of the most important skills that students can take away from their education. We can scaffold the language of writing by giving students a variety of activities for analyzing texts and expressing their ideas.
Erin Milne