A Method to Develop Critical Thinking: Playing the Devil’s Advocate

The ability to think critically is at the foundation of an equitable and just society. One aspect of critical thinking (CT) is the ability to create and develop structurally sound arguments. Curricular requirements often restrict addressing this issue. Furthermore, students arguing their own opinions often assume agreement and therefore do not see a need to fully explain. As such, I examined how CT can be developed through the use of a timed-writing activity wherein the students argue against their own positions. I employed an action research approach to compare CT development in the intervention class with another class that did not receive the intervention. Analysis of the data suggested that this method was effective, and that encouragement of dissociation has a positive effect on CT development in students.

How Do EFL Students Perceive Brainstorming in L2 Writing Classes?

Brainstorming is a valuable pre-writing activity in enabling learners to get started in writing classes. The present qualitative study explored the participants’ perceptions regarding the use of the method after experiencing it in online writing classes. The participants were selected based on convenience sampling, and their age range was 19 to 23. They had participated in private writing classes and volunteered to take part in interviews performed after the course. The interviews were also done virtually via WhatsApp, during which the respondents answered six questions. The analysis of the interviews led the researchers to extract eight significant themes, which were then divided into advantages and disadvantages. The interviewees mentioned idea generation, encouraging new ideas, becoming open-minded, enhancing motivation to write, and creating stronger rapport with classmates as the positive features of brainstorming. The disadvantages consisted of being distracted by too many ideas, being influenced by others’ ideas, and accepting ideas expressed by the majority. The study has implications for language teachers, educators, and ELT specialists.

“Everything Is in the Lab Book”: Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre Analysis of Symbolic Mediation in Medical Physics

Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

THE SUMMARY AS A TEACHING STRATEGY FOR FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

In language teaching, written production is an important educational issue for the assessment of language learners in class. Thus, the summary remains a pedagogical purpose and a typology of the F.L.E's teaching strategies, which encourages learners to develop a text to improve this linguistic component essential to the acquisition of a foreign language. In this article, the question is whether the summary as a teaching aid serves as a test for the development of written expression skills. By relying on summary examples where written production represents a linguistic skill promoting the learning of the target language, and to advance learners during this writing activity in a university setting. Our research work is a reflection on the importance of written production in the learning of FFL, considered as a task allowing learners to mobilize skills in writing when writing a summary.

Students’ emotional engagement in online collaborative writing through google document

Learning writing has been conducted by using various methods. Collaborative writing is one of method that used in writing learning practice. Studies about collaborative writing reveal that online collaborative writing is effective to promote students’ writing quality. There are many previous studies have explored the students’ perception, effectiveness, and benefits of collaborative writing. However, the study about students’ emotional engagement in collaborative writing is limited. This study aims to explore students’ emotional engagement during online collaborative writing through Google Docs. The exploration of students’ emotional engagement is beneficial to understand students’ feelings and emotions during the learning process. Classroom Action Research is used as the research design of the study. Participant of the research is four eleven grade high school students. The research was conducted at the SMA Negeri 1 Cikarang Barat in three weeks. Semi-structured interview and documentation were used for collecting the data. The result of the study showed that online collaborative writing through Google Docs involves students to learn writing enthusiastically. Online collaborative writing also involves students cognitively by acquiring new vocabulary during the online collaborative writing activity.

Efforts to Improve Simple Dialogue Writing Skills Through the Guided Writing Activity Strategy (SAMT) in Class IV Students of SDN Malaka Jaya 06 Pagi

The use of the Guided Writing Activity Strategy (SAMT) method in making a simple dialogue script can be applied by the teacher to optimize the ability of students. SAMT method makes the role of the teacher who so far has only been a giver of assignments will switch in the form of collaboration with students. SAMT method in fifth-grade students of SDN Malaka Jaya 06 Pagi East Jakarta is intended to make efforts to improve the quality of learning, especially on simple dialog scriptwriting skills that are expected to affect improving student learning outcomes in writing simple dialog scripts.

Writing Process Photo Essay

This article describes and reflects on experiences teaching students to compose a “Writing Process Photo Essay” in the context of an upper-division college writing course that satisfies a campus-wide writing requirement. As the culmination of a quarter-long student inquiry into their own writing processes, this multimodal assignment asks students to combine text and images to help them reflect on the environments, tools, habits and routines that surround their writing activity. This assignment takes its inspiration from calls for renewed scholarly attention to material and embodied aspects of writing process. In the end, this assignment creates opportunities for students to recognize, reflect, and reimagine their own writing activity in school contexts and beyond.

THE INFLUENCE OF COMIC STRIPS MEDIA IN TEACHING WRITING SKILL TO THE TENTH GRADE STUDENTS IN CIANJUR

Writing is an important skill for students because it helps them in their life but sometime they have difficulties when they start to writing. Therefore, the teacher must be able to find and use the right strategies for teaching writing activity especially choosing teaching media. One of the media that can be used in teaching writing is comic strips. The objective of this research is to find out whether there is an influence of using comic strips media to improve writing skill in the tenth grade students. This research employed pre-experimental design and used test questions as the instrument. The sample was the tenth grade students in one of SMKN in Cianjur, consisting of 36 students. The research compared the mean of the pre-test and post-test to identify the influence of comic strips media in improving writing skill.