September in BU: Registration is open!

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Originally posted on The Daily Post:
September is a big month for Blogging U! Get your blog off the ground with Blogging 101: Zero to Hero, help it reach more readers with Blogging 201: Branding and Growth, or cultivate a writing…

WANT, but I have NOT

Sometimes, I feel I strongly want to write a story, but no words come out as powerful as my feelings and desire to express my inside. I am quite good at writing instructions and explanations to my students and colleagues, posts about my teaching experiences, or debates to explain my viewpoints with others. My problem arises when it comes to writing stories and descriptions. 

Want 2 Write Fiction! Why NOT Join FutureLearn FREE Course on April 28, 2014!

Derek Neale starts a new online course “Start Writing Fiction“ on the FutureLearn platform on April 28, 2014 for 8 weeks. This hands-on course helps you to get started with your own fiction writing, focusing on the central skill of creating characters.

My e-dventures of Writing

Retrieved June 20, 2013 from here

Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade is another amazing adventure that I have just completed on Coursera. It was offered by Mt. San Jacinto College, and instructed by Lorrie Ross, Lawrence (Larry) Barkley, & Ted Blake. The course was broken into five weekly units with each unit spanning one week. Each weekly unit had the following items: video lectures, in-video quizzes, readings, journal writings, discussion forums, peer reviewed writing assignment, and weekly quiz. Our first week started with a video by Lorrie Ross giving us some tips on how to become a successful online leaner. We spent the whole week reading the syllabus, taking the course guide quiz, checking the weekly materials, creating a success list, and a calendar as an effective way to organize the work. Then, we introduced ourselves in the discussion forum. It was just as an exploration tour for learners in order to be familiar with the platform of Coursera. By clicking each week on the sidebar, one can find all the required activities and assignments with links, benchmark dates, credit points, and estimated time to complete them. This well-designed format helped us a lot to be more organized, and saved a lot of our time. Here is a screenshot of week 2 activities:

We spent the second, third, and fourth weeks analyzing parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections), clauses, phrases, and sentence types (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex). One can say that this is just a grammar course, but for me it is a course of writing basics making use of the grammatical structures effectively to construct well-designed sentences as a step towards composing a good paragraph. The last week was all bout the writing process stages: inventing, organizing, drafting, revising, and editing. Despite of its importance for writers, that week was a little bit theoretical. The readings were so helpful and detailed; however, we needed more practice and training for each stage with some examples or models. We just watched the video lectures, read the materials, and then we were asked to compose a direct paragraph of fifteen sentences about one of four topics. I think that there was a missing week that could be added to provide a unit about how to use these stages on a real basis.

One of the most interesting features of this course was the involvement of e-journals as an activity to practice writing and store assignments. It was not obligatory, but it was necessary for self-growth. We had many choices to create our blogs such as Blogger, WordPress, Google Doc, or MS Word program. I decided to use WordPress because I wanted to know more about its potential before launching my students’ blog in the next semester. Really,  I was so impressed by its smooth use, and various features. We used our e-journals to apply all what we learned each week, and to draft the peer writing assignments before submission. I extremely enjoyed drafting, publishing, and responding to my readers. However, not all participants accomplished this activity effectively as it was optional. Here is a screenshot of my blog: 

Another great feature of this course was the main questions provided by the instructors to discuss in the forums. Although these questions had no any credit points, there were many active, and fruitful discussion threads throughout the five weeks. Among the topics we discussed together were the reason behind taking that course, the value of learning from peers around the world, writing style and how it reflects one’s interests, cultural background, educational experience, … etc., and the process we follow when composing a piece of writing. By the end of week four, I managed to identify my favorite writing styles: Teacher (i.e., expository), and Activist (i.e., persuasive). Actually, I’m good at writing explanations and tutorials to others, and I also love arguments and have some abilities to persuade others with my ideas. This explains why my descriptive and narrative writings are not creative and rich. I feel so relieved now; however, this doesn’t mean I can’t write descriptions or stories. I only need to learn more and practice a variety of writings to improve these potential abilities. 

At last, I would like to talk a little bit about the peer assessment. Unfortunately, most peers were not familiar with such assessments, and there were many complaints by the participants. They lost many scores as a result of their peers’ inability to evaluate using rubrics. Furthermore, they didn’t use the feedback box wisely and effectively. I think that learners need to be trained before evaluating their peers, and giving them some feedback. It is preferable to teach evaluation and feedback explicitly by, for example, recording a video in which the instructor analyzes an assignment using a rubric and gives some constructive feedback focusing on both the good and bad sides. I hope they take these suggestions into consideration when offering this course again in Mid-September 2013. 

In general, I enjoyed this course so much considering it as a staring point for being an effective and creative writer. To grow and move forward, I only need to increase my vocabulary base and expose to a variety of writing styles. This can be done by reading more short stories and analyzing their genres to know more about the writers’ voices and purposes. I think that there should be another adventure of writing that is coming soon!

Tasking Writing

Develop Your Students’ Composition Writing Skills Using Task-Based Learning is my first book published by Lambert Academic Publishing. To view its details, please click the image below:

 

This book deals with a very important area of learning English as a foreign language. EFL students spend a hard time struggling with the written tasks. They always suffer from many problems when writing. That’s why I selected this area to study and suggest some easy-to-follow solutions for other teachers. 

Analyzing previous literature on the composition writing, I found three major approaches to teaching writing: Product, Process and Genre. Following the product approach, teachers are mostly concerned with the final product of writing, and what that product should “look” like. Also, a good deal of attention is placed on “model” compositions that students would emulate and on how well a student’s final product measured up against a list of criteria that included content, organization, vocabulary use, grammatical use, and mechanical considerations such as spelling and punctuation (Brown, 2001). In the process approach, writing has become a process of natural generation of ideas with focus on meaning and communication that precedes concerns about form and grammar. It allowed students to manage the writing task by breaking it into phases. Students could now focus on topics they cared about and on each phase of the process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing (Peregoy & Boyle: 1997). In contrast to the process approach, the genre approach views writing as a social and cultural practice. This involves not simply activities in a writing process, but also the purpose of writing, the context where the writing occurs, and the conventions of the target discourse community. In this sense, relevant genre knowledge needs to be taught explicitly in the language classroom (Gao, 2007).

These product, process, and genre approaches alike have their advantages and disadvantages. However, they are complementary rather than conflicting in nature. In the classroom, we can draw strengths from these approaches and attain a balance among them. This is what I have done to solve this problem. I adapted the task-based learning (TBL) model by Willis (1996a; 1996b). This model consists of three phases: the pre-task, task cycle, and language focus. These phases are modified putting in mind the strengths of the genre, process and product approaches. The adapted framework, thus, begins with models and analysis of the rhetorical patterns of each genre (e.g., description, narration … etc). Through exposure to these models and samples, students can detect the specialized configurations of that genre, and they also can activate their memories of prior reading or writing experiences whenever they encounter the task of creating a new piece in a familiar genre. Student writing is then subjected to the sequence of drafts in the process approach. When students finish writing their pieces, they cooperate with their teachers in the language focus phase to notice new things about language, to write down expressions they like, new words, and phrases they have used and examples of grammar patterns.

Students loved this way of teaching writing. Their written skills extensively improved and their attitudes towards writing have become more positive. This three-steps framework is easy to follow as it is well-organized and has clear instructions.

Content of this book:

1. Rationale for choosing the writing problem among students.
2. Task-based learning model; definition, theoretical bases, models, … etc.
3. Writing composition; definition, nature, purposes, types, difficulties, skills needed, approaches and evaluation.

Resources:

1. Brown, H. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. 2nd ed. London: Longman.
2. Gao, J. (2007). Teaching writing in Chinese universities: Finding an eclectic approach. Asian EFL Journal, 20 (2). Retrieved Aug. 15, 2007 from http// http://www.Asian-efl-journal.com/may-07/pdf. 
3. Peregoy, S., & Boyle, F. (1997). Reading, writing, & learning in ESL: A resource book for K-12 teachers. 2nd ed. New York: Longman.
4. Willis, J. (1996a). A flexible framework for task-based learning. In J. Willis & D. Willis (Eds.), Challenge and Change in language teaching (pp. 52-63). Oxford: Heinemann.
5. Willis, J. (1996b). A framework for task-based learning. London:
   Longman.