academic writing 2005 teachers notes - AGU Integrated English

ACADEMIC WRITING 2017 TEACHERS' GUIDE
Academic Writing is the most difficult course in the IE Program. Many more
students fail this course than any other and all agree on its difficulty.
At this point, a capsule review of the history of this course may be in
order. For more than 24 years, the English Department has offered an
Academic Writing course. At its weakest, a few teachers interpreted this
course to mean that students would work on paragraph writing until they
could produce sentences that were error-free. Most teachers, however,
agreed on the need to develop their students' understanding of the
"academic genre" of essay writing. The course was re-organized some seventeen years ago after student
complaints about the overlap between the essay assignments in IE Writing II
and III, and those in Academic Writing. After a needs analysis of students
in their junior and senior years, we developed a new course focusing on
research skills and on quoting and paraphrasing source material. Many
Japanese students have not had much opportunity to develop research skills,
nor critical reading and thinking, due to the emphasis on facts and
recognition in high school education. The Academic Writing text includes information about assignments and
extensive examples of the APA Style. An important aspect of the new
Academic Writing course is to develop these skills through library research
activities. The differences between the courses and their objectives are
shown below: |IE Writing I |IE Writing II |IE Writing III |Academic Writing |
| Paragraph | Introduction to | APA Style for | A 1,500-word |
|Writing: |the Essay |references and |Research Essay: |
|1) Classification|(350 words each):|quotations in 2 |1)Bibliography and |
| | |essays of 350 |citations in APA |
|2) Comparison- |1) Comparison- |words: |style |
|Contrast |Contrast |1) Classification |2)Develop and |
|3) Persuasion |2) Analysis | |research a topic |
| | |2) Persuasion | | Please note the word-length for each of the essays. We ask you to use these
lengths in your class and in fairness to your students, avoid longer or
shorter assignments. Students inevitably compare assignments from one class
to another and they will complain it they perceive that they are being
treated differently in your class. Even though Academic Writing is a very difficult course, it is only one
semester in length. You will need to take extra care to keep track of your
students and to warn some of them as they fall behind. Please collect
contact telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from them in the first class
in order to keep track of those students who have difficulty in keeping up
with the class. All the same, as in other courses, you need a warm
relationship with your students, rather than hectoring them on due dates
and rewrites.
|CONTENTS |
|I. |SCOPE AND SEQUENCE |4 |
| |............................................... | |
| |(a) Essay Specifications | |
| |(b) Sequence of Instruction | |
| |(c) Grading Assignments | |
| |(d, e) Use and mis-use of Wikipedia; Word-Processing| |
| |Assignments | |
| |(f, g) Accessing the Library; Accessing AGU's Online| |
| |Databases | |
| |(h, i) Smart Google Searches; Your Class as a | |
| |Writing Community | |
|II. |TEACHING THE APA STYLE |20 |
| |........................................ (a) Citing | |
| |Electronic Resources | |
| | | |
| |(b) In-Text Citations | |
|III. |PLAGIARISM AND ACADEMIC WRITING |29 |
| |........................ | |
| |(a, b) Defining Plagiarism; Detecting Plagiarism | |
| |(c) Using Quotations | |
| |(d) Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Note-Taking | |
| |(e) The Student Writing Database | |
|IV. |CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES |30 |
| |........................................... | |
|V. |GRAMMATICAL ERRORS |32 |
| |............................................ | |
|VI. |RESPONSES TO WRITING |33 |
| |.......................................... | |
| |(a) A Protocol For Conferencing | |
| |(b) Recorded Conferences | |
| |(c) Marking Symbols | |
| |(d) Commenting Online | |
|VII. |PRESENTATIONS |37 |
| |....................................................| |
| |... | |
|VIII.|A GRADING SCHEDULE |38 |
| |.............................................. | |
|IX. |ESSAY RATING SCALES |39 |
| |.............................................. | |
| |GROUP RATINGS |41 |
|X. |....................................................| |
| |.... | |
| |(a) Teacher Comments | |
| |(b) Student Models | |
|XI. |TEACHER |43 |
| |RESOURCES...........................................| |
| |.... | |
| |(a) Further References | |
|XII. |MARKING SYMBOLS |45 |
| |................................................... | |
|XIII.| |46 |
| |THE WRITING DATABASE | |
| |........................................... | |
About this Teachers' Guide:
1. Use it in tandem with the exercises in the Academic Writing Student
Booklet, including those on paraphrasing, summarizing, and creating a
thesis;
2. As longs as their topics fall within the broad category of English
Literature, Linguistics, and Communication (ie. Film, Music, other
Media), encourage your students to follow their interests; 3. While it can be useful to teach students a few discrete grammar points
such as the use of the colon and semi-colon, research indicates that
teaching grammar can be demotivating to them. Instead, grammar
correction should be given on an individual basis and within the
context of a piece of student writing.
4. When showing examples from students' papers in class, please respect
their privacy and conceal their identities, especially when
criticising their work; 5. Help your students' to manage the writing process by breaking up the
research essay task into manageable parts. This will help them avoid
last-minute efforts as well as the temptation to plagiarize. 6. Keep the essay task to 1,500 words to maintain consistency between our
Academic Writing classes. 7. Mark and respond to at least two entire drafts of the essay from each
student.
8. Ensure that the teacher-student conferences are short and well-
structured.
9. Research, response from student evaluations, anecdotal reports from AW
teachers, all point to the success of this method as students can
replay your comments at home. We have included many activities and as much information as we could in the
Academic Writing Student Booklet to save you from copying class sets of
exercises and student models. Meanwhile this Academic Writing Teachers'
Guide includes additional suggestions for classroom activities, further
references, and answer keys for the JSTOR library activity and for rating
sample student essays. In this guide, we have also included Internet
resources, some of which are meant to be used as demonstration in class.
A good resource in planning additional classroom activities is Longman
Academic Writing Series 4: Essays (5th ed.) by Alice Oshima and Ann Hogue
(2013), Pearson Education: Upper Saddle river, New Jersey. It includes a
very helpful section on writing an essay and exercises on paraphrases and
quotations, and with developing a bibliography.
A full reference for it and other reference books is included at the end of
these notes.
Because the student booklet has such an extensive list of examples of
proper APA documentation, we no longer ask students to purchase additional
reference books although you may certainly use other books as a teacher's
reference or to show on the OHC. First and second year students are required to take computer courses in
using MS Word, so all of their assignments must be typed and the spelling
corrected (as this can be easily checked on their computers). This also
enables teachers to easily test students' writing for plagiarism by
entering phrases from a student's essay into a "Google search." I. SCOPE AND SEQUENCE
There are three major goals in Academic Writing: (1)a rev