Teacher feedback, writing assignment quality, and third-grade students' revision in lower- and higher-achieving urban schools

The relation of the quality of writing assignments and written instructor responses to student writings to the quality of subsequent student work was investigated in 29 urban third-grade classrooms in 8 schools. Writing assignments were generally of a higher quality in the 4 schools that served primarily middle-class, higher-achieving students, most of whom were white or Asian, versus the 4 schools that served primarily low-income and lower-achieving students, the majority of whom were Latino. Across all classrooms, however, teachers focused on standardizing students' written output, which led to marked improvement in the writing mechanics of students' work. Results of regression analyses indicated that the amount and type of feedback students received predicted a significant, although small, proportion of the variance in the quality of the content, organization, and mechanics of students' final drafts. The quality of the writing assignments predicted a small but significant proportion of the variance in the quality of the content of students' final drafts only. These findings raise questions about the implementation of broad educational policies in classrooms, such as using the writing process approach, and indicate a need for professional development for teachers

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

ESL programs at U.S. community colleges: a multistate analysis of placement tests, course offerings, and course content

When U.S. English learners (ELs) attend college, they are more likely to enroll in 2‐year community colleges than in 4‐year colleges. Prior research points to the tension between English as a second language (ESL) programs providing support to ELs and lengthy ESL programs acting as barriers to ELs seeking access to mainstream college coursework. Nevertheless, community college ELs and ESL programs remain understudied. The researchers investigated community college ESL placement, course sequence length, and types of ESL courses offered across the United States by examining the 2017–2018 catalogs of community colleges in nine states. Two hundred seventy‐two community college catalogs were analyzed. Findings include that 81% of colleges reported offering some ESL‐specific coursework and that ESL course sequences varied on average from 2.3 to 4.7 semesters in length across states. For most states studied, ESL courses were solely structured around skills‐based instruction. Furthermore, although general English placement information was accessible and often standardized within states, ESL placement information was rarely available and sometimes out of date. Based on these findings, the authors recommend that community college ESL programs implement valid placement procedures, award college credit for ESL coursework, and streamline student access to discipline‐specific academic and vocational content.Accepted manuscrip

Locating Assisted Performance: A Study of Instructional Activity Settings and their Effects on the Discourse of Teaching

In an effort to locate instances of Tharp and Gallimore's assisted performance in educational settings, teacher-student interactions in typical teacher-fronted classrooms are contrasted with the organization of talk across a variety of alternate educational participant structures—a teacher-student conference, small group work, the making of a class video, and a problem-solving interaction in a computer lab—that deviate from the traditional "default script" (Cazden, 1988, p. 53) of classroom interactions. We consider how each learning arrangement affects the extent to which students are able to initiate, control, and maintain interaction, and the extent to which their agendas are articulated. We further consider the influence exerted by the multiple facets of each encounter's institutional and interpersonal context. This range of influences precludes a monolithic transfer of knowledge, pointing to the obviously agentive role of the novice as well as to ways in which historical and institutional expectations are represented (or altered) in interactional encounters. Hence, locating assisted performance uncovers a web of relationships among participants, tasks, and talk that both facilitate and constrain learning in a given novice-expert episode

Using moral dilemmas in children's literature as a vehicle for moral education and teaching reading comprehension

Moral development research has previously demonstrated that more extended discourse is a vital element in effective moral education, although the difficulty of implementing this type of discourse into classroom practice has seldom been discussed. In this study, transcripts of lessons were examined of a teacher systematically assisted to develop a more conversational style. These lessons were taped over the course of the school year at different times, beginning in the fall of the year. In addition, writing samples from children who participated in the lessons were subject to content analysis for themes relating to moral questions. Analysis of the lesson transcripts suggests that young students initiate discussion of values-implications of the texts they read if opportunities for connected discourse are increased. Evidence of the impact of more "conversational" discussions was found in the essays written by students in the class of a teacher using a more conversational style but not in the essays of students who were taught using a conventional format. © 1996 The Norham Foundation

Watery passion: The struggle between hegemony and sexual liberation in erotic fiction for women

Erotic texts have historically been written for male consumption and women's erotic preferences were either marginalized or assumed to coincide with men's. Following Lakoff (1987), this paper examines the metaphors and semantic associations constructed in and through the first erotic genre explicitly directed to a female audience: the erotic romance novel. The sexual experiences portrayed in 16 romances representing a typical contemporary North American selection were excerpted for a detailed analysis guided by the precepts and methods of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 1993) and cultural critiques (Christian-Smith, 1993; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). The genre presents a unique erotic style (Youmans and Patthey-Chavez, 1992) even as it reflects prescriptive formulas meant to enhance its marketability (Paludan, 1994). The analysis reveals that it is contested ground - at once consummation of female desire and hegemonic channeling of that desire into the safety of accepted/acceptable patterns of female agency and female experience. © 1996 SAGE

Learning to Write in Urban Elementary and Middle Schools: An Investigation of Teachers' Written Feedback on Student Compositions

In writing instruction, feedback from teachers provides a critical opportunity for students to revise their work and improve as writers. Contexts in which students routinely receive feedback on their work include peer reviews and teacher-student conferences. For many teachers, however, written comments on student papers remain a significant method of response. Despite the importance of teacher responses to student work in facilitating the learning process, little research has examined the relationship between teacher feedback on early drafts of student work and the quality of students' subsequent drafts. Even less research has examined the nature of teachers' written feedback to students in K-12 settings. This study investigates the nature of written instructor responses to student writings and the relationship of these written responses to the quality of subsequent student work in urban elementary and middle schools. Most of the 22 instructors who provided the study's corpus of student writings (N = 114) provided their students with some written feedback, and most of their students incorporated that feedback into their subsequent drafts. Instructors tended to focus most on standardizing their students' written output, with measurable success. Student papers received little feedback about content or organization, and these qualities generally did not change over successive drafts

Creating a Community of Scholarship with Instructional Conversations in a Transitional Bilingual Classroom

This report explores the ways in which instructional conversations between a teacher and her students contributed to building an academic community in a transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Through an analysis of reading lesson transcripts, classroom events, and student essays and journal assignments, this report shows how classroom experiences fostered the development of students' understanding of the concepts of sacrifice and responsibility. This report describes how, at both the individual and classroom community level, instructional conversations deepened student understandings of the texts they read in class by encouraging students to make connections between particular textual concepts and their own experiences. In addition to tracking student gains in understanding, this report shows how the conversations helped build a classroom community that incorporated the cultural beliefs and concerns of the students