On week 4, I used Canagarajah's autobiography as writing sample to explain content organization and strategies when writing autobiography on one's language learning experience.
Adopted from Canagarajah (2019), five guide questions were provided for helping students' idea formulation:
1) What are the challenges you faced when learning a new language?
2) What challenges do writers face for their identity when they develop as multilinguals?
3) What strategies do they adopt to negotiate these challenges?
4) What are the motivations that explain their approaches?
5) What lessons do writers learn from this experience?
Adopted from Canagarajah (2019), five guide questions were provided for helping students' idea formulation:
1) What are the challenges you faced when learning a new language?
2) What challenges do writers face for their identity when they develop as multilinguals?
3) What strategies do they adopt to negotiate these challenges?
4) What are the motivations that explain their approaches?
5) What lessons do writers learn from this experience?
I also introduced the translingual strategies suggested by Canagarajah (2013)--
1) envoicing: semantic resources used to voice identity
2) recontextualization: textual strategies that appropriate negotiation of the texts and help
readers better understand them.
3) interactional: Outputs adopted by writers to facilitate the co-construction of meaning
4) entextualization: textual strategies that facilitate voice and meaning.
Honestly, it was not easy to help these freshmen understand these abstract and complex concepts, such as "identity", "voice", negotiation", "interaction" etc. So, when lecturing, I shifted languages between Mandarin and English in order to make my points clear to them. I also used the writing samples to demonstrate how the formulation questions can lead the story going and how the writers incorporated the four translingual strategies into their texts.
Concepts of "identity" and "voice" are very foreign to the students because their English writing practices were designed and taught mainly to satisfy the demands of entrance examinations. They rarely had chances to explore how to position themselves in different genres for different purposes. This is also my first time to teach these concepts which used to be the topics only for research purposes. I didn't like my teaching performance. I should have spent more time on discussing "identity" and "voice" and left some time for students to practice how to construct their identity through audience concerns and rhetorically creating a specific voice corresponding to the identity.
Concepts of "identity" and "voice" are very foreign to the students because their English writing practices were designed and taught mainly to satisfy the demands of entrance examinations. They rarely had chances to explore how to position themselves in different genres for different purposes. This is also my first time to teach these concepts which used to be the topics only for research purposes. I didn't like my teaching performance. I should have spent more time on discussing "identity" and "voice" and left some time for students to practice how to construct their identity through audience concerns and rhetorically creating a specific voice corresponding to the identity.
Thanks for your recommended teaching approach in our last meeting.
ReplyDeleteI adopted Envoicing and Interactional strategies while having conference with my student. For Envoicing strategies, I asked my student to choose one sentence which he wanted to revise in his writing. Because the meaning of the sentence was unclear to me, I then asked him to write down its Chinese translation on the paper. After that, I asked him to come up with two sentences for the Chinese translation again. He was able to come up with one only. This time, he was able to write down a sentence with a clearer meaning than the original one. It appears that his first language helps him to better express his intended meaning. He noted that he did not know that he could write such a sentence that clearly expressed his intended meaning through this approach.
For interactional strategies, he told me that he paid more attention to the notion of topic sentence after the previous interview with me. He knew that I emphasized the importance of topic sentence, so he made effort to check if he did include one while handing in me his essay. It is obvious that he knew that I would be his reader, so he focused on topic sentence while writing an essay.
What’s surprising is that he told me that he jotted down the importance of topic sentence and some notes about writing a good essay on his Instagram. This autonomous behavior manifests his meta-cognitive strategies in learning where he was able to monitor his own writing process through keeping an Instagram diary. With excitement, he told me that he got around 90 likes for this update on his Instagram, which in turn fostered his motivation in English learning and writing.