Identifying thesis and conclusion statements in student essays to scaffold peer review

Peer-reviewing is a recommended instructional technique to encourage good writing. Peer reviewers, however, may fail to identify key elements of an essay, such as thesis and conclusion statements, especially in high school writing. Our system identifies thesis and conclusion statements, or their absence, in students' essays in order to scaffold reviewer reflection. We showed that computational linguistics and interactive machine learning have the potential to facilitate peer-review processes. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Asynchronous group review of EFL writing: Interactions and text revisions

The current paper reports an empirical study of asynchronous online group review of argumentative essays among nine English as foreign language (EFL) Arab university learners joining English in their first, second, and third years at the institution. In investigating online interactions, commenting patterns, and how the students facilitate text revisions, a three-level analysis of learners’ comments in terms of the language functions, nature and focus area, and connections to subsequent text revisions was conducted. The learners produced a number of 1792 comments which were exploratory, including scaffolding and non-scaffolding (72%), procedural (11%), and social (17%) comments. In relation to the nature and focus area, 53% of the exploratory comments were revision-oriented comments—focusing on global (n = 799; 84%) and local (n = 149; 16%) issues of learners’ essays—whereas non-revision-oriented comments (47%) focused on learners’ socio-relational space (74%), task management (23%) and technical challenges (3%). The findings also showed that 46% of the overall global (n = 615) and only 10% of the overall local (n = 838) text revisions were connected to learners’ comments, indicating the value of global oriented comments in facilitating learners’ global text revisions. Differences of occurrence of these commenting patterns among the three groups were found. Such findings suggest that global text revisions need to be modelled by instructors

The Effects of Strategy Instruction with a CDO Procedure in General Education Settings

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a revision strategy for middle school students in a three general education classrooms. Three teachers and 23 sixth-graders in an elementary school in an urban school district in the Northeast participated in this study. Classroom teachers were trained in the revision strategy and provided instruction to their respective students. Although all students received instruction, data was collected on four pairs of students from each class (2 high-achieving, 2 average achieving, 2 low achieving, and 2 students with learning disabilities). This study examined the effects of a Compare-Diagnose-Operate (CDO) procedure (using the acronym FIX) embedded within a self-regulation strategy (SRSD) to allow students the opportunity to internalize the elements of revising. The strategy emphasized the need for students to (a) examine their draft, focusing specifically on the essential elements or parts of an essay, (b) identify problems in their essay between what they wanted to write versus what was actually written, and (c) act on, or execute necessary changes to the draft in response to specific problems they had identified. Improvement in students' writing and revising skills was based on number of meaningful changes, quality of changes between first and second drafts, and holistic quality of the students' revised essays. The effects of teaching the revising strategy were assessed using a multiple-probe design with multiple probes at baseline. The results of this study showed that all students regardless of achievement level benefited from instruction. Students showed significant gains in the number of meaningful changes made from baseline to postinstruction. In addition, holistic quality ratings doubled for students across all achievement levels. The findings emphasize the importance of providing strategy instruction in the classroom and the need for future research in this area

What’s within a thesis statement? Exploring features of argumentative thesis statements

Developing strong academic writing skills often requires years of experience and training within a discipline. When novice writers are asked to write an argumentative essay, they are usually required to draft a thesis statement presenting their position on an issue. In argumentative writing, a thesis statement addresses the writer’s main argument and is the foundation of the entire essay. Features of thesis statements are often defined with respect to their location and length within the essay (e.g., Petric, 2005), or functions. As a result, further research exploring characteristics of argumentative thesis statements could expand understanding about the distinctive features that operationalize the quality of thesis statements. Results of such research would have strong practical implications for instructors regarding what to teach about writing thesis statements. In the present study, four major features of thesis statements were identified (context, positionality, reasoning, and specificity). Two raters were asked to assess the presence of each feature for the 78 thesis statements, extracted from the argumentative essay outlines of an education course. A set of multiple regression analyses were conducted to investigate whether each feature, and a composite of the four, contributes to the quality of the introduction and the argumentative essay outline. Key findings indicated that the context feature and the positionality feature are of importance in predicting the quality of introduction and the essay outline. Based on the findings, a revised version of Ken Hyland’s model of argumentation is proposed and several important implications for teaching writing are recommended

The Writing Process Revisted

The writing process is an instructional method that teachers have been using for decades, and it has proven to be successful in many classrooms. When teaching in a secondary classroom, I noticed my students were not mindfully going through each step of the process. Their writing was lacking clear ideas and skilled synthesis of their research. Additionally, the students often skipped revision altogether. In order to re-teach the writing process, I designed specific activities that engaged students with the various steps of the writing process. After the sequence of lessons, the students scores improved in all sections of the rubric, proving the mindful teaching of the writing process to be effective

Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development To Teach Middle School Writing

Being able to write well is a skill critical to students’ success in higher education. Yet standardized test scores reveal that many students are moving into high school and college without these writing skills. Writing is a complex task; in addition to content knowledge, students must use self-regulation skills (including staying focused on the task, working through frustrations) to see success. This capstone project sought to answer the question: How can the teaching of self-regulated skills be integrated into lessons focused on developing the expository writing of middle school students? The result is a series of lesson plans that seek to meet the academic, social, and emotional needs of middle school students by combining academic instruction with the teaching and practice of self-regulation skills

Final Master\u27s Portfolio

Final portfolio for a master\u27s degree in English with a specialization in English teachin

Academic language socialisation in high school writing conferences

This study examines multilingual high school writers’ individual talk with their teachers in two advanced English language development classes to observe how such talk shapes linguistically diverse adolescents’ writing. Addressing adolescent writers’ language socialization through microethnographic discourse analysis, the author argues that teachers’ oral responses during writing conferences can either scaffold or deter students’ socialization into valued ways of using academic language for school writing. She suggests what forms of oral response provide scaffolding and what forms might limit multilingual adolescent learners’ academic literacy. Constructive interactions engaged students in dialogue about their writing, and students included content or phrasing from the interaction in their texts. Unhelpful interactions failed to foster students’ language development in observable ways. Although teachers attempted to scaffold ideas and language, they often did not guide students’ discovery of appropriate forms or points. These interactions represent restrictive academic language socialization: while some students did create academic texts, they learned little about academic language use

Teaching academic writing to Iraqi undergraduate students: An investigation into the effectiveness of a genre-process approach

A modified integrated process-genre approach (MIM) was implemented with EFL undergraduate students in Iraq. Some students subject to the MIM were better able to construct structurally complex and reasonably-grounded arguments and to employ a wider range of informal reasoning patterns group.Combining the merits of both the process and genre approaches has the potential to develop a more coherent model of writing by taking into account cognitive and social demands