>> Here are my materials:  PowerPoint slides and handout

I was running against the clock, so I wasn’t able to do justice to this powerful technique for teaching writing. The method was developed in the 1990s for Australian elementary schools, and in itself, it makes no distinction between L1 and ESL learners. The teaching-learning cycle (TLC) is a challenge to the dominant pedagogy in second language writing in the US, which is a strange amalgam of process writing, the writing process, and current-traditional rhetoric; or to put it another way, we’ve become really good at teaching a process for writing a five-paragraph essay.

Whereas process writing (the expressivist approach to writing typified by Murray, Graves, Elbow and the writing workshop idea) takes essentially an individualist view of writing (the lonely writer in the university library searching for a muse), the TLC is grounded in genre theory, which sees all writing as socially situated. In Martin’s formulation, a genre is a “staged, goal-oriented social action.”

This insight suggests that our job as writing teachers is not to help learners find their voice or discover their inner author, but rather to make explicit the stages and social purposes of the genres that will facilitate students’ success.  These genres can be described in many ways but might include exposition, discussion, recount, and report. Each of these has different required and optional elements (some have thesis statements; others don’t!), but the stages are described in terms of their function not their structure. So, we don’t prescribe a certain number of paragraphs (the entire text might be a single paragraph), but rather describe the ways that writers typically arrange information to achieve their goals. This is coupled with attention to the ways that language choices make the writer’s meanings at three levels: experiential (the content), interpersonal (attitude), and textual (information flow), to use the terminology of Michael Haliday’s systemic-functional linguistics.

The TLC consists of five stages, in Rothery’s (1996) version: building field, deconstructing and modeling the genre, joint construction, independent construction, and linking to other genres. These are explained more in my powerpoint and in far more detail in Feez (1998), Rothery (1996), and Martin & Rose (2008) — all in my reference list on the handout.

Some of the advantages of the TLC that I have seen in my classroom are:

•  reading, discussion, and writing are integrated
• errors of genre awareness and organization can be prevented rather than corrected and remediated
• students are empowered to write well
• deconstruction improves both reading and writing skills
• students understand the social function of the stages (not just “because you have to”

I hope this brief synopsis explains better what I was trying to say. There’s a list of references on my handout, and I welcome comments and discussion here, as I have only scratched the surface of this powerful technique.

]]> http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/pushing-a-10k/feed/ 1 Nigel nigelteacher.wordpress.com 2011-10-31 22-41-14 http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/conferences-coming-up/ http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/conferences-coming-up/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:57:48 +0000 Nigel Caplan http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/?p=445 Continue reading →]]> I’ll be presenting at these conferences in the coming months. Stop by and say hallo!

• Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), March 2012, St. Louis: “Preparing and Supporting Graduate Student Writers Across the University” (my paper is called “Teaching the Genres of Academic Writing”)
• TESOL, Philadelphia, March 2012: “Preparing for Excellence: Practical Strategies for Improving Graduate Writing.” Workshop with Christine Feak, Grace Canseco, and Jennifer Greer.
• TESOL, Philadelphia, March 2012: “Making Grammar Choices in Advanced Academic Writing” (publisher session for my new grammar textbook from the University of Michigan Press, forthcoming)
• Genre 2012 – Rethinking Genre Twenty Years Later: An International  Conference on Genre Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 26-29, 2012: “Genre and Cognition in an MBA Program.” (results from a needs analysis of language skills required for international students in UD’s MBA program)

Our book is written for advanced-level students to help develop critical reading and writing skills along with grammar and vocabulary. We used authentic texts from a wide range of sources and academic disciplines — from linguistics to business to communications to recycling to a whole short story by the great Nick Hornby (“Small Country”). Students also get access to Q Online Practice, which has at least one practice activity for every skill in every unit in the book (about 100 extra exercises). We’ve also written the teacher’s book, and that has answers, tips, alternative assignments (in case you don’t like ours!), and rubrics. Update 11/20/11: The Teacher’s Handbook with Test Generator is now available from your OUP rep (I haven’t seen it yet in print!).

A great deal of planning, writing, and re-writing has gone into the book (Scott and I have been working on this project for over 3 years!), and we hope you like using it! Every reading, every exercise, and every skill box has been looked at by many pairs of eyes (not all of which saw the same thing!) in an exhaustive — and at times, exhausting — process. In the writing assignments, we encourage students to write three drafts of their essays. In our case, we wrote far more than that! Leafing through my copy, I’m very pleased with the product and grateful to the editors who finally got our manuscript into a printable state.

Contact your friendly local Oxford rep for an exam copy! Feedback is most welcome.

Nigel Caplan & Scott Roy Douglas, Q: Skills for Success Reading and Writing 5 Student Book Pack (includes Q Online Practice). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-19-475642-6. (Available at amazon.com)

In doing research for my forthcoming grammar textbook for graduate student writers, I came across these interesting nuggets about the frequency of modal verbs, which I thought I’d share:

• The most common modal verb overall in academic writing is can (I suspect because it has so many meanings!)
• The most common modal verb for hedging (showing uncertainty or deference) is may
• Both can and could are frequently used with passive infinitive verbs
• Fewer than 5% of modal verbs in academic writing are followed by a perfect infinitive (might have done)
• Just over 0.5% of modal verbs in academic writing are followed by a progressive infinitive (may be growing)
• Help isn’t technically a modal, but it’s an awfully interesting verb because it can sometimes be followed by a to-infinitive (help to make) and sometimes by a bare infinitive (help make). I suspected that the shorter form (help make) should be more common in academic writing because academic writers tend to reduce the number of function words (little “grammar” words like prepositions) to increase the lexical density (number of content words per sentence). And my data supports that: only 16% of clauses with help are followed by the to-infinitive. Unfortunately, that turns out to be the highest proportion of all the registers in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so actually academic writing is more likely to use to than spoken or other written registers, but still far more likely not to bother. Oh well, the advice still stands: the shortest form is usually the best. On which note …

Stay tuned for more tips on writing and more information about my new grammar textbook for graduate and research writers.

(All statistics are based on my searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English.)

For the record, I spent a wonderful Father’s Day (my preference) playing with my son at the shore (not the “beach” or the “coast,” by the way in these parts) and I am now busy revising my new grammar textbook, due out some time next year. More blog posts coming soon, I hope.

Until marks the “endpoint” of an action or state, and it can be a preposition or conjunction:

(1) I played the piano until I was 12 years ago.
(=I stopped playing the piano when I was 12; you don’t know when I started.

(2) The cafeteria is open until 6pm.
(=The cafeteria closes at 6pm.)

It is not easy to move until 6pm to the  front of sentence (2) (?”from 6pm, the cafeteria is open”) because until 6pm completes the meaning of is open, and so has to come after it. To put it another way, until 6pm is an adverbial expression of time that modifies “is open”, not the entire sentence, so it needs to come after the verb.

However, when the clause is negative, the meaning is more complex. Here is the example from CGEL:

(3) I didn’t notice my error until later.
(=I only noticed my error later)

There is no positive version of this sentence (*”I noticed my error until later” is ungrammatical). The adverbial until later tells us “how long this negative state of affairs lasted.” That is, not … until tells us when something started happening. You can’t move it to the start of the sentence because is modifies the verb, by telling us when the negative (didn’t notice) stopped being true.

So, in the class example from the GMAT practice book (I’m paraphrasing):

(4) Scholars did not begin to study Native American poetry until 1900.
(=Scholars began studying Native American poetry in 1900.)

Since the adverbial (since 1900) is part of the verb “did not begin”, it cannot simply be moved to the start of the sentence. (On the other hand, we can say: After 1900, scholars began studying poetry because “after 1900″ modifies the entire clause.)

However, it is possible to move any element to the front using an it cleft. The negative (not) needs to move with until because they create the meaning of a starting point together:

(5) It was not until 1900 that scholars began studying …

Please post questions or other examples!

Reference: Huddleston & Pullum, Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

• perhaps (255 instances per million words vs 189)
• clearly (177 vs 144)
• presumably (27 vs 13)
• significantly (203 vs 12) — probably because of the technical meaning of statistical significance
• somewhat (76 vs 46)
• theoretically (14 vs 4)

On the other hand, some adverbs are rather less frequent than in spoken English:

• of course (143 instances per million in academic writing vs 414 in speaking)
• obviously (42 vs 199)
• maybe (31 vs 400)

That last word was more surprising: my guess is that writers use the modal verb  form (may + be) rather than the adverbial (maybe). It’s not surprising that academic writers use more tentative adverbs and fewer definitive ones, although it is interesting that words like of course, obviously, always, and never do occur with some frequency in the corpus. In Eli Hinkel’s study of undergraduate students’ texts, she found relatively little use of always, never, and ever in native-speakers’ writing, suggesting perhaps that these words are reserved for published experts who can more confidently assert that something always or never happens, or that it is obvious.

I’ll be posting more tricks of the academic writing trade like this in the coming months as I work on my forthcoming grammar textbook for graduate students. Stay tuned (but don’t hold your breath)!

• essay my former instructor  (I hope it wasn’t me)
• nigel pronunciation (that’s “ni” as in night, and “gel” and “angel”, with the stress on the first syllable, please)
• pronunciation of neigel (fail)
• just alive
• alive oder living englisch (ja!)
• english grammar+day off
• cursing at a teacher (one of my students?)
• teacher should avoid boring classes (ditto)
• a sorry to your teacher – essay (you get the picture)
• foreign film where teacher has to discipline two children, swearing
• i need an essay now
• i need a 5 paragraph essay now
• write an essay role of teacher to print
• five paragraph essay teacher (definitely shouldn’t like to my site!)
• daddy speak teacher
• funny passive verbs (rotfl)
• 5 paragraph essay content (contradiction in terms)
• the meaning of caught in the heavy rain

Of course, writing this post pretty much guarantees more of these hits in the future. So, for those of you look to plagiarize a five-paragraph essay about the qualities of English teachers, or if you want information on foreign movies about foul-mouthed child-abusers, or if you’re wondering whether English is a dead language, or if you just need a weather report … feel free to keep clicking.

Happy searching.