sbally’s blog

 

Informal Response for March 17^th, 2009

            I find Neman’s dilemma of students’ trouble with writing to an audience was particularly interesting. Students often get the idea that they are not writing to an actual audience and that their writing is merely practice for “ real world” writing. This is ironic because students in the middle grades likely will not be writing to an audience in the “real world” or facing any real life situations to where their writing is so critical. One solution to this problem is the teacher establishing a target audience for the students to write to. However this method is flawed because the students know that their writing will actually be read by the teacher and not by the target audience. As teachers we must be sure to stay objective as possible in grading these works by not grading them as teachers but grading them as the target audience.

            I also like Neman’s approach of students finding the voice of their “better” self. This idea suggests that the most persuasive voice is that of the author. The task however is the author’s task of achieving himself/herself as a credible source in making a persuasive argument. This is achieved first when students establish their expertise with the content being discussed. Such an obstacle is tough for students who have had little previous exposure to the content compared to other students who may understand the content better. It is for these students, that teachers must stress the idea of research in the classroom and study time that will build their content knowledge of the subject area. This will be specially significant in my future classroom as an English teacher when assigning research papers. I think an affective means of getting my students to learn and express their feelings about a topic will be to assign a research paper that they likely know little about. As a former student, this is a task a did not particularly enjoy but one that always made me work and built my content knowledge of specific topics.  

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