In urban middle schools, educators find it challenging to meet the literacy needs of the many struggling readers in their classrooms, including language-minority (LM) learners and students from low-income backgrounds. One strategy for improving these students' reading comprehension is to teach essential academic vocabulary in a meaningful, engaging, and systematic way. This article describes the development and evaluation of an academic vocabulary curriculum for sixth-grade mainstream classrooms with large numbers of LM learners who struggle with comprehension. In a study conducted in 21 sixth-grade classrooms, the curriculum was found to be effective both in improving students' vocabulary and reading comprehension and in supporting teachers' learning about how to teach academic vocabulary. Seven universal learnings for all classrooms are described and illustrated with specific examples of activities, perspectives from teachers, and insights from students, drawn from the study.
A collection of lessons in the form of questions for both informative and practical knowledge. Questions appear in a form that is similar to the teacher's voice.
This presentation explores Asao Inoue’s 2014 assertion that “students find reasons to learn and
grow as writers when their labor is truly honored” in the contexts of basic writing student
reflection and contract grading.
This presentation proposes ways in which we can better design, deliver, and assess mobile
learning environments for a diversity of students in composition classrooms.
The emerging scene of using mobile devices for composition instruction is ripe for inclusiveness, and can be considered an iteration of Mary Louise Pratt’s “linguistic utopia.”
This session examines reading in the composition classroom building from a qualitative analysis of student annotations. Participants will explore social annotation tools that facilitate collaborative, strategic reading among students and instructor feedback on students’ reading strategies. Participants are encouraged to bring an electronic device to participate in this demonstration.
Brief, varied, and meaningful “linked” activities engage students by incorporating a variety of pedagogical methods and modes during a single class session.
This demonstration focuses on using free verse poetry to strengthen L2 writers’ interpretive and invention skills. Drawing on the recent “translingual” turn, it explores poetry as a bridge to academic writing for language learners. Participants will read a short contemporary poem and compose their own “connotative definition,” using brainstorming exercises.
In a media landscape dominated by polarizing rhetoric, writing instructors have a renewed
responsibility to thoughtfully engage students. Utilizing a multimodal assignment, Rogerian and
Toulmin argument models can be applied and assessed by students in real-world and online
settings to foster empathy for opposing viewpoints by analyzing assumptions.
This is a metacognition teaching tool designed as a method of teaching students the connections between emotions, thoughts and behavior through a cognitions diary. This presentation will demonstrate how students can use their cell phones to monitor, examine, and draw conclusions about how their emotions affect their capacity to learn. As a result of the process, students will develop ways to transform cognitions in such a way as to enhance learning. This presentation will include: 1. A guideline for developing a baseline scale of emotions; 2. A table for using a cell phone to log emotions and thoughts; 3. A rubric for reflections and analysis of the journal.
An additional goal of this tool is to provide an experiential basis for students to build understanding for the connection between affect and cognitions.
