Week 4 workshop preparation and taks

Week 4: Writing

Readings

Winch et al Chapter 14
Key points

·        Writing is an expression of ideas, many different formats of writing exist each with a different purpose.

·        Teaching English and literacy typically involves focusing on these common text-type structures:

o   Recount- Retelling of an event, they typically include the who, what, where and when of the story, the writer usually shows their opinion on the event through their language and comments.

o   Procedure- A formative style of writing, describing a list of sequential steps to achieve a directed goal and includes a list of materials required.

o   Information Report- Presents information in a structured manner, the content is structured into paragraphs with topic sentences and elaborative detail.

o   Explanation- Used in scientific and technical field, this text-type is intended to explain how and/or why certain phenomenon happen, the information is sequenced logically following the format of cause and effect over a set time period.

o   Exposition- A form of text that presents an argument apposing or supporting an issue providing evidence to demonstrate the authors reasoning.

Winch et al Chapter 15
Key points

·        An individual’s writing development is a process that starts at birth and is on-going through their experiences with range of multimodal texts.

·        This process is called the writing continuum and is categorised into the following phases:

o   Writing before school

o   Experimental/early writing

o   The developing writer

o   The proficient writer

·         Students should be exposed to writing of many different forms of text before reaching school so that they become familiar at a simplistic understanding level the function of writing, what texts look like and what language is appropriate for what corresponding context.

·         Constructivist approaching writing, teachers need to consider what language and understanding each different student comes into the classroom with and how these understandings can be cognitively built on.

·         Assessing students writing and progress is an important part of ensuring development. Assessment is a means of the teacher monitoring a student’s progress against a list of criteria, from this teachers can derive how the results compare to the students previous performance, goals and their peers.

Workshop tasks and preparation discussion

As preparation for this workshop we were directed to answer a number of questions from Winch et al and collect three different text-types to discuss in class. The questions from Winch et al were focused on a small insert of text written by a nine year old and asked the text-type, grammar mistakes that exist, the tone and suggestions for improvement. This exercise got us thinking about the importance of monitoring a students work and the type of question that we need to think about when examining work samples. Collecting three different text types and answering questions about each was an excellent task, as it allowed us as teachers to realise the existence of different text types in everyday life and in many forms. This also facilitates connections with experiences outside the classroom for students who do a similar or identical activity. Each group member brought in a variety of text-types making it easy to observe the relevance of teaching about text types due to their commonplace in the world.