Recap on Week 9: Randy’s Input
Week 9 Reading: Zwiers Chapter 8
Key Points: Language for Academic Writing
1) Writing requires deeper thinking skills that challenge students to use language in order to organize facts, concepts, and opinions in strategic ways. By practising academic writing, it helps prepare students cognitively for later grades and post-secondary schooling.
2) Academic writing requires students to expand their vocabulary, vary their sentence structure, and learn how to use dependent clauses.
3) The students need writing guidance to avoid incorporating colloquial styles in their assignments because the norm fixates them down this path that may include redundancy factors.
4) Benefits of reading can increase linguistic capital that helps demotivate students to rely on oral language to complete their sentences.
5) Writing expository genres: The writing of nonfiction/non-narrative texts. This is the form of academic writing most schools look for (biographies, lab reports, responses to literature, essays, articles, and persuasive letters). Expository genres often associate themselves with a trend that starts with a main point and then support that argument with evidence.
6) Some assignments require the art of persuasion within academic writing. In order to do so, students need to be able to break down the pros and cons of the issue, take a side, and express clear understanding to support their argument while providing reasons to refute the opposing side.
7) A list of writing activities that can help promote academic writing include dialogue journals, written recap, written dialogues, and perspective papers.
Reflection: After reading and presenting on this chapter, I understand more how one develops academic writing. Personally, I loved reading as a child and my parents encouraged reading by asking me to go to the library and borrow over 50+ books on a monthly basis. Since I’ve developed an enormous amount of linguistic capita at a young age I’ve neglected to learn the process on how academic writing is supposed to be–because I’ve been performing at standard/above standard without having to worry how detrimental it might be if I didn’t know how to write academically. This chapter really broke down the steps of acquiring academic writing and helped me understand how to notice where a problem may lie if a student fails to meet a certain standard.