Content Pedagogies: Theory, Principle, and Practice

Beginner Writing Experience

            I remember extensive formal writing in English, my L1, in primary school. We would begin by writing out letters, which extended to words, then sentences, and eventually a string of correlated sentences to form short paragraphs. The majority of we wrote consisted of nouns, adjectives, our names, and numbers. My amazing kindergarten teacher started us writing sentences by filling-in-the-blank adjectives that described ourselves such as hair color or eye color. By the end of the year, we were writing a paragraph consisting of simple sentences that were usually thematic. We would write about friends, family, or what we do close to specific holidays or about a book my teacher would read aloud to the class. We also kept composition journals. I can’t remember now what we wrote in them exactly, but we wrote everyday.

University Writing Courses

            English1302, taken during my time as an undergrad, provided me with a foundation for writing research papers and giving presentations. I was prepared for how much time I needed to prepare for a large and abstract writing assignment. While what I presented for the Celebration of Writing held at TAMUC was far from my best work, it was the most effort and thought I had ever put into research and it set the foundation for how I would approach large projects during the rest of my undergraduate career. My professor employed what Ferris and Hedgcock (2014) would describe as focusing on readers and discourse communities (p.77-80). We were tasked with finding literacy within our daily lives (an extremely abstract task) and then to do research on what we find. Throughout the course our writing was evaluated and edited to give feedback on appropriate topics, sources, and general guidance on the project. However, we were mostly left to our own devices as literacy is a broad and abstract subject and construct the research portion much like an academic journal.

Writing Theories in Classroom Instruction

            While I was reading this chapter I immediately identified being exposed to all of the theories through my many years of being a student. I remember the product orientation and the process orientation beginning in fourth and fifth grades when learning how to structure an essay and again in 9^th and 11^th grades in my AP English courses. The main differences in instruction are that in my formative writing years the prompt required more expressivist approaches and later in my education instruction was centered more product-oriented with emphasis on cognitivist approaches to writing. More thought was given to establishment as a writer when you’re younger so that by the time you’re in college it is expected that a student only needs instruction on what post-secondary writing in academia consists of (Ferris&Hedgcock, 2014, p.63-68).

Second or Foreign Language Writing in the Classroom

            About two to three years ago I took a Spanish course at the university level. The course focused on writing quite a bit, however it was mostly on spelling and correct accent marks. Most of what the course focused on was correctly identifying nouns and adjectives. Since I was exposed to Spanish previously, I didn’t note many differences in writing in Spanish than in English other than the accent marks and that the noun comes before the adjective. Other than the aforementioned, I didn’t note any other notable instructional differences writing.

Hypothetical Instructional Method

            I’m making my assumptions based on if I were the writing teacher for students in the fourth grade.

I would start the school year off by having my students write a narrative on several provided topics. This exercise would mostly be to gauge where students’ strengths and improvements lie in their writing composition. After I’ve returned the papers with positive comments, I would show the class department-approved ways to form an essay and have them choose their preferred layout. After choosing their topic and outline, I will define terms such as paragraph, sentence, and essay to provide a refresher for those that know and to teach those that are just gaining that knowledge.  After students show progress in following an outline, I would then focus more heavily on spelling, syntax, grammar, and transitional phrases among other things. They will continually write their story, showing progress with each paragraph, until they have a completed essay. After the essay is completed then I would have them rewrite their story, do a final revision, and then turn it in for a grade.

I can’t choose a specific skill or strategy that I would like my students to develop other than being confident in their writing. Writing is a life-long learning process that even the most developed and scholarly of writers can improve on in some area or another. In practice, all teachers should use a combination of the theories presented because not every assignment or student fits into complete structure or complete freedom. Writing is a cultural process. However, it shouldn’t be completely about conformity.

Becoming an Effective Composition Instructor

Gaining knowledge of diverse models of writing and instructional methods could help me become an effective composition instructor because it’s important to understand the type of former writing instruction that a student as had before coming to my class. It gives me an idea of the student’s comfort zone and what I can do to show the student that there are other forms of writing. Not every culture writes the way that we do in the United States and as a teacher coming into contact with students and their families, we can’t afford to be ethnocentric in the name of our own comfort zones.

References

Ferris, Dana R. and John S. Hedgcock. Teaching L2 Composition: Purpose, Process, and

Practice. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print