Self-reported problems of L1 and L2 college writers: what can writing instructors do?

Understanding self-reported problems of L1 and L2 writers regarding the writing process holds important pedagogical implications for instructors to address their students’ specific writing needs. L2 writers were usually reported to have more difficulty setting goals and generating material, and to produce less accurate and effective texts (Leki, 1992; Silva 1993, 1997). This paper compares the self-reported writing difficulties of two groups: L1 (N=19) and L2 (N=19) freshman composition students from an American university. To analyze the group differences, a questionnaire (using 5-point Likert scale) about the perceptions of writing difficulties and approaches to writing process was used. Findings from the descriptive statistical analysis suggest that despite self-reported common problems, such as keeping clarity by using appropriate syntax, the L1 and L2 students presented different views on the importance of visuals in a text. While L1s find visuals to be least important for the reader to understand the text, L2s find visuals to be most important. The results reveal that although instructors focus on teaching essay organization, both L1 and L2 students need more instruction on creating better sentence structures. Encouraging L2 students to use visuals (pictures and graphs) in their persuasive essays would prove beneficial for them to overcome writing problems in English

Writing curricula design: Aims and practices

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Omen and Anti-omen: The Rabbinic Hagiography of the Scapegoat’s Scarlet Ribbon

Abstract This article proposes that the place and meaning of various objects among religious communities can be explored in terms of “hagiography,” that is, through the narratives constructed around sacred objects sometimes long after their physical disappearance. It takes as its point of departure the assumption that in the same way that written accounts of saints’ lives disclose more about the authors of these accounts than about the protagonists, so narratives regarding “things” reveal the concerns and debates of their authors, and in particular their concerns about materiality and divine presence within physical objects. The article explores the rabbinic narratives concerning the scarlet ribbon tied to the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement, its function and its vicissitudes, as developed in the Mishnah and in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Using both a synchronic and a diachronic lens, the article shows how the scarlet ribbon is utilized in the rabbis’ attempts to define their own times vis-à-vis earlier times, and to grapple with pressing religious uncertainties

The last sunset on mainland Europe

This paper documents the places in mainland Europe at which the sun sets latest, by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), on any given day (distortion due to differences in local standard times is ignored). In contradiction to the na\"ive assumption that the sun always sets latest at the westernmost point, the point of last sunset changes cyclically over the course of a year due to the changing orientation of the axis of the Earth with respect to the sun. Specifically, between the winter and summer solstices the last sunset shifts successively from Cabo de Sao Vicente (Portugal) to Cabo da Roca (Portugal) to Cabo Tourinan (Spain) to a site near Aglapsvik (Norway) to a location in the Norwegian municipality of Masoy south of Havoysund; and it shifts back again between the summer and winter solstices. There are two days in the year (April 24th and August 18th) on which the last sunset of mainland Europe (shared in those days effectively by Cabo Tourinan and the Aglapsvik area) coincides with the last sunset of mainland Africa, at a site in Western Sahara near Cap Blanc. A similar analysis of the first Spanish sunrise shows that from April 22nd to August 20th it occurs on the Costa Brava at Cap de Creus (Catalonia), and the rest of the year at Punta de s'Espero (Balearic Islands), the easternmost point of Spain.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Ritual Studies and the Study of Rabbinic Literature

In the last two decades several important studies have been published that focus on ritual in rabbinic literature, and consider ritual to be a critically important conceptual and analytical category in approaching rabbinic texts and rabbinic culture. This article provides an account of the intersection of Ritual Studies with the study of rabbinic literature, surveys key works and significant developments and shifts in the field, and identifies the central challenges in and benefits of examining rabbinic texts through ritual lenses. The article pays special attention to the complex relations between texts about rituals and ritual performances, as well as to the blurry boundaries between law and ritual in the realm of rabbinic halakhah