Approaches to Writing Instruction in Aotearoa: The Influences of Teachers' Beliefs and Practices on Progress

<p>In the educational context, social constructivists are those who view knowledge as constructed through social experiences. In the class-room, these theorists favour student-led and cooperative group work over teacher-directed and individual work and de-emphasize the explicit teaching of technical skills. Literacy teaching in New Zealand has been influenced by constructivism since the 1980s. Whether this influence has been positive is, however, open to doubt. According to current achievement data many students are under-achieving. A very different perspective is offered by social cognitivism, according to which experimental and quantitative methodologies are used to assess the effectiveness of various teaching approaches. While more widespread use of these methods could bring about much-needed change, advocates of constructivism have discouraged their uptake by (i) associating their own approaches with social values and (ii) representing scientific methods as unsuited to the contexts at stake. International research has shown that teachers take a more pragmatic view: Studies have demonstrated that the majority of teachers are comfortable with a range of approaches, and thus that seemingly disparate approaches may co-exist. There has been very little research on the beliefs of New Zealand teachers, although Ministry of Education publications for teachers are essentially constructivist. Study One investigated the ideological context of the New Zealand primary school. A total of 626 teachers completed a survey on their beliefs and practices for teaching writing. Principal components analysis of beliefs isolated three dimensions, which appear to reflect valuation of (i) explicit, (ii) socio-cultural and (iii) process-writing approaches respectively. Principal components analysis of practices isolated six dimensions: (i) explicit and structured approaches; (ii) socio-cultural and process writing approaches; (iii) attention to surface features; (iv) advanced writing practices; (v) basic writing practices, and (vi) teacher goal selection. In the second phase of this study, a sub-sample of 19 survey respondents supplied writing samples from the students in their classes, at two time points, allowing for the measurement of progress over time. Teachers’ scale locations for reported beliefs and practices were compared with their students’ rates of progress. Explicit teaching beliefs and practices emerged as being strongly – although only marginally significantly – correlated with progress and socio-cultural practices were negatively – and significantly – correlated with achievement. In addition, a number of individual survey items were positively, and significantly, correlated with achievement, all belonging to the explicit teaching dimensions. Two items were negatively and significantly correlated with achievement, and these belonged to the process-writing and socio-cultural practices dimension. A sub-sample of eight teachers were interviewed in order to gain a deeper understanding of their beliefs and practices. In general, teachers’ comments reflected their scale locations in the survey data. While those who focused on the explicit teaching of technical skills achieved the greatest gains for student achievement, others used socio-cultural and process approaches thoughtfully to address students’ social and emotional needs. The pedagogical method that is the subject of Study Two, “Fast Feedback”, was developed in line with social cognitivist findings and is thus at odds with the quasi-official view. Fast Feedback centres on individualized goals and regular, focused assessment in order to accelerate student progress. In 2015 nine teachers were engaged to trial this method – in seven classrooms, across three Wellington schools. Achievement data were collected for 136 student participants, and were compared with the equivalent data from students at a control school. Data analysis revealed that the treatment group made significantly more progress than the control group (ES 0.5). It also revealed variability across classrooms. Interestingly, the highest rates of progress were achieved (in all classrooms) during the first half of the intervention. Clearly worded, process-oriented goals were the most effective. The addressing of technical skills – sentence writing, spelling and handwriting – proved to be essential. In interviews, teachers observed that the predictable structure of Fast Feedback lessons was motivating for students, and led to a greater sense of self-responsibility on their (the students’) part. In conclusion, these two empirical studies together indicate that explicit approaches – informed by scientific research – are most likely to raise student achievement. The Ministry should therefore work with urgency to ensure teachers have information about these methods, so that more New Zealand students will experience success in learning to write.</p>

Approaches to Writing Instruction in Aotearoa: The Influences of Teachers' Beliefs and Practices on Progress

<p>In the educational context, social constructivists are those who view knowledge as constructed through social experiences. In the class-room, these theorists favour student-led and cooperative group work over teacher-directed and individual work and de-emphasize the explicit teaching of technical skills. Literacy teaching in New Zealand has been influenced by constructivism since the 1980s. Whether this influence has been positive is, however, open to doubt. According to current achievement data many students are under-achieving. A very different perspective is offered by social cognitivism, according to which experimental and quantitative methodologies are used to assess the effectiveness of various teaching approaches. While more widespread use of these methods could bring about much-needed change, advocates of constructivism have discouraged their uptake by (i) associating their own approaches with social values and (ii) representing scientific methods as unsuited to the contexts at stake. International research has shown that teachers take a more pragmatic view: Studies have demonstrated that the majority of teachers are comfortable with a range of approaches, and thus that seemingly disparate approaches may co-exist. There has been very little research on the beliefs of New Zealand teachers, although Ministry of Education publications for teachers are essentially constructivist. Study One investigated the ideological context of the New Zealand primary school. A total of 626 teachers completed a survey on their beliefs and practices for teaching writing. Principal components analysis of beliefs isolated three dimensions, which appear to reflect valuation of (i) explicit, (ii) socio-cultural and (iii) process-writing approaches respectively. Principal components analysis of practices isolated six dimensions: (i) explicit and structured approaches; (ii) socio-cultural and process writing approaches; (iii) attention to surface features; (iv) advanced writing practices; (v) basic writing practices, and (vi) teacher goal selection. In the second phase of this study, a sub-sample of 19 survey respondents supplied writing samples from the students in their classes, at two time points, allowing for the measurement of progress over time. Teachers’ scale locations for reported beliefs and practices were compared with their students’ rates of progress. Explicit teaching beliefs and practices emerged as being strongly – although only marginally significantly – correlated with progress and socio-cultural practices were negatively – and significantly – correlated with achievement. In addition, a number of individual survey items were positively, and significantly, correlated with achievement, all belonging to the explicit teaching dimensions. Two items were negatively and significantly correlated with achievement, and these belonged to the process-writing and socio-cultural practices dimension. A sub-sample of eight teachers were interviewed in order to gain a deeper understanding of their beliefs and practices. In general, teachers’ comments reflected their scale locations in the survey data. While those who focused on the explicit teaching of technical skills achieved the greatest gains for student achievement, others used socio-cultural and process approaches thoughtfully to address students’ social and emotional needs. The pedagogical method that is the subject of Study Two, “Fast Feedback”, was developed in line with social cognitivist findings and is thus at odds with the quasi-official view. Fast Feedback centres on individualized goals and regular, focused assessment in order to accelerate student progress. In 2015 nine teachers were engaged to trial this method – in seven classrooms, across three Wellington schools. Achievement data were collected for 136 student participants, and were compared with the equivalent data from students at a control school. Data analysis revealed that the treatment group made significantly more progress than the control group (ES 0.5). It also revealed variability across classrooms. Interestingly, the highest rates of progress were achieved (in all classrooms) during the first half of the intervention. Clearly worded, process-oriented goals were the most effective. The addressing of technical skills – sentence writing, spelling and handwriting – proved to be essential. In interviews, teachers observed that the predictable structure of Fast Feedback lessons was motivating for students, and led to a greater sense of self-responsibility on their (the students’) part. In conclusion, these two empirical studies together indicate that explicit approaches – informed by scientific research – are most likely to raise student achievement. The Ministry should therefore work with urgency to ensure teachers have information about these methods, so that more New Zealand students will experience success in learning to write.</p>

EXPLORING NOMINALIZATION USE IN GRADUATE THESIS ABSTRACTS: AN SFL APPROACH TO ACADEMIC WRITING

becomes the mandatory part of an article which should be concise and lexically condensed. Unfortunately, not all academic writers can meet this demand. Following Halliday Matthiessen’s (1999) types of the grammatical metaphor in which the nominalization plays as the main tendency of the construal, this study investigates nominalization cases and how they are manifested in the texts. Seven graduate students’ thesis abstracts of the Linguistics Department of a state university in Indonesia were opted as the object of the investigation. Each instance of the nominalization was coded, counted, and classified to decide their types and an in-depth elaboration of how they are manifested in the texts is provided as well. The results showed that the graduate students employed all types of the nominalization to increase the abstracts’ conciseness. The Process nominalization realized from the process-thing transference highly dominates the abstracts. The findings also reveal a wide gap of the nominalization use between the process nominalization and the other types indicating the students’ lower intermediacy of the nominalization mastery in the academic writing. Therefore, the explicit teaching of the nominalization is highly recommended as this could be of value to the students involved in the scientific publication in this university.

Incidental Exposure to Categories

Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teaching. This research investigated whether incidental exposure contributes to building category knowledge by rendering people "ready-to-learn" - allowing them to rapidly capitalize on brief access to explicit teaching. Across five experiments (N = 438), we found that incidental exposure did produce a ready-to-learn effect, even when learners showed no evidence of robust category learning during exposure. Importantly, this readiness to learn occurred only when categories possessed a rich structure in which many features were correlated within categories. These findings offer a window into how our everyday experiences may contribute to building category knowledge.

Mapping the Use of Boosters in Academic Writing by Malaysian First-Year Doctoral Students

This article details an attempt to understand better how first-year doctoral students construct persuasive arguments in academic writing by exploring the patterns of boosters in drafts of doctoral research proposals. Eight Malaysian first-year ESL doctoral students produced 43 drafts of doctoral research proposals across four areas of study in education during their first year of doctoral studies. These drafts were analysed by coding the various linguistic items used to persuade readers of a text, and the analysis was based on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse. Results show that the (i) overall frequency of booster markers used is relatively low (n=158), reinforcing the argument that first-year doctoral students lack understanding about the interaction between booster markers and the context in a more complicated discussion in academic writing such as the doctoral research proposal. Then, the (ii) further analysis of booster marker sub-categories indicates that Malaysian first-year doctoral students struggle to make appropriate booster markers with different meanings and strengths in academic writing when used in context. Therefore, our study suggests that direct and explicit teaching of using various booster markers categories should be implemented in postgraduate writing courses to heightened the students’ perceptiveness regarding semantic features associated with creating convincing arguments in academic writing.

The status of conventional metaphorical meaning in the L2 lexicon

This paper investigates how L2 speakers of English process conventional metaphorical expressions. While much of the literature on L2 processing of figurative expressions focuses on idioms only, the aim of this paper is to investigate how L2 speakers process conventional metaphorical expressions. The results of a cross-modal semantic priming task show that conventional metaphors have a special status in comparison to literal language in the L2 lexicon. The differences in reaction times show that L2 speakers are aware of the connections between literal primes and targets, resulting in slower reaction times, while this effect is not found in the metaphorical condition. This demonstrates that even when metaphorical language is very conventional, it can cause difficulties for L2 speakers. Furthermore, these results show that conventional metaphorical expressions can pose a semantic and pragmatic challenge for language learners, thus creating a need for explicit teaching of metaphorical meanings of polysemous words.

Explicit Instruction and Executive Functioning Capacity: A New Direction in Cognitive Load Theory

Explicit instruction is a teaching strategy that aims to avoid cognitive overload experienced by students which aims to improve academic performance. Previous research has mentioned working memory as a cognitive capacity that processes information and cognitive control and supports the success of explicit teaching on student academic performance. The core components of the executive function consist of working memory, but also inhibitory control and shifting. This review of the article provides new directions for the development of cognitive load theory on explicit teaching and research on executive function-based information processing aimed at avoiding cognitive load.

Evaluative methodology to develop higher skills

The objective of this research is to provide an evaluative methodology to develop higher cognitive skills. From the methodological perspective, a qualitative was required, based on primary and secondary sources of research to increase thinking. The results showed that a series of premises must be implemented for the development of lower and higher thinking, among them, purpose, explicit teaching, intentionality of the evaluation, evaluation criteria, simple and complex strategies, monitoring, formative evaluation, process feedback and homework, metacognition, among others. As part of the discussion, it seems that teachers need to apply training strategies and implement permanent monitoring in students to promote learning. On the other hand, they must recognize the lower skills that are not internalized in the learners, because these are the starting base to achieve the higher taxonomies. It is concluded that formative evaluation and feedback are effective actions to generate higher taxonomies.

RESOURCES OF ATTITUDES IN STUDENTS’ TOURISM BLOGS

Studies concerning the use of attitude resources in students’ writing have been conducted by researchers. However, limited attention has been given to investigate how resources of attitude are used in a hybrid genre, such as blog. This paper aims at reporting how attitude resources are realized in students’ tourism blogs. 10 tourism blogs written by the seventh-semester students of English Education Department, taking English for Tourism course were purposively selected as the source of data. These data were chosen because their topics were about tourist attractions in Bali. The data were analyzed by following appraisal language analysis theory. The results show that appreciation and affect resources were used by the students in their blogs. However, the resources used by the students were basic and repetitive words. This study suggests English instructors provide explicit teaching of attitudinal words that the students can use when they are writing tourism blogs.