multi-genre project paper (rough draft)

It is fascinating how culture effects everything that people do and especially the way they perceive things. Reading in a different language then one’s native language is very difficult, especially if one does not know the background or have the cultural knowledge required to understand the text properly. A good example of this includes social studies in U.S. schools. Social studies is one of the most difficult subjects to teach ELLs (English Language Learners) because of all the background and cultural knowledge that one must already know to even understand basic historical concepts. The English literature is also full of passages that require one to understand the culture before they can even begin to make sense of the passage. Through this multi-genre project the cultural problems and difficulties that nonnative speakers of English have when confronted with English texts will be shown and some strategies that ELLs can use to navigate through culturally embedded texts will be introduced through the means of various genres.

It was long thought that reading in a second language was simply a slower version of reading in the first language, but recently many more factors that include the culture, language and educational backgrounds of the readers have been shown to influence the second language reading process (Singhai, 1998). Specifically, cultural knowledge appears to play one of the largest roles in reading comprehension and the entire second language literacy process (Singhai, 1998; Pritchard, 1990; Bell, 1995; Steffensen, Dev, and Anderson, 1979; Johnson, 1981).
The ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher should strive to learn as much about their students' language and cultural background, as well as trying to find as much information as possible pertaining to their students' views of literacy in their first language (Singhai, 1998). Reading strategies taught to the students in the classroom and used by the teacher in order to help ELLs comprehend reading are essential in any ESL classroom. The ESL teacher should also understand the emotional state of their students as the students struggle to learn to read and write in their second language and how their students' cultural views about literacy may affect the second language learning process (Bell, 1995).

There are many strategies that ELLs can use in order to overcome or assist themselves in the second language reading process and all ESL teachers should be aware of these strategies in order to assist their students in reading texts that may be difficult due to culturally specific language.
Singhai (1998, p.6)) outlines several strategies that second language readers can use to assist themselves in overcoming there own lack of cultural knowledge. The strategies suggested include:

- Overview the text

- Look for context clues, such as titles, subheadings and diagrams

- Attempt to relate important points in the text to one another (important points might include highlighted words, titles or subheadings)

- Try to use prior knowledge to interpret the text (prior knowledge would include things talked about in class or movies)

- Attempt to discover the meaning of words, first by context and then by dictionary

- List the main ideas of the text on a piece of paper

- Rent or barrow a movie that is related to the text

The genre related to Singhai's reading strategies is a letter from an ESL teacher to a parent of a student who is having difficulty with the reading process. In the letter the teacher outlines the different strategies that can be used by the student and encourages the parent to assist the student in developing these reading strategies. The strategies are very practical and most ELLs would be able to use the strategies with some assistance. Involving the parent in the learning process seemed to be an appropriate way of expressing this genre.

In a study done by Pritchard (1990) it was found that readers engaged in culturally unfamiliar texts used a variety of strategies. These strategies included developing awareness, accepting ambiguity and establishing intrasentential ties. Developing awareness is simply the reader being aware of their reading progress and aware of the problems that they may be having while comprehending the text. Accepting ambiguity is an extension of developing awareness where the reader notes that there is no comprehension of a particular portion of the text and continues to read with the notion that comprehension may come later on in relation to a part of the text that has not been read. The last strategy according to Pritchard (1990) is establishing intrasentential ties. There are two processes involved in establishing intrasentential ties. The first is when the reader tries to develop an understanding of a sentence they are reading without using background knowledge or relating it to any other part of the text. The second is when the reader tries to make connections between a sentence and the other portions of the passage being read. The ESL teacher should be aware of the second language reading tendencies studied by Pritchard and assist their students in developing their own mental reading processes. The genre related to this research is a reading strategies graph that clearly shows the reading strategies employed by American students when reading both culturally familiar and unfamiliar texts. Pritchard's study does not emphasize any particular strategy that should be used by second language readers. The goal of Pritchard's study is to inform people about the different strategies employed. A bar graph illustrating the research seems to be an applicable genre, making the findings a little easier to understand.

Spack (1993) outlines a teaching method that can assist ELLs in both their reading and writing simaltaniously. Spack's method includes first drawing from the ELLs' personal experience related to the text by asking questions and having the students write in a journal about the subject to be addressed in the reading. The students are then to annotate the text, write an entry in a reading journal, summarize the reading, discuss the reading, analyze the writing assignment and then finally draft the writing assignment. This information is very helpful to the ESL teacher who seeks to help build a base of background knowledge for material that might be culturally difficult to understand. The genre related to this teaching strategy is a lesson plan using Spack's specific method and building the students' background knowledge pertaining to the text. The genre also includes a cause and effect essay diagram that is needed to help the student brainstrom and scaffold the writing assignment. Teacher's need to be aware of the different things that they can do within the classroom to help build a student's cultural base when reading materials. The lesson plan is one of the most applicable genres available to the teacher in order to assist the student in any subject. Also included is another lesson plan genre that follows the CBI (Content Based Instruction) model. This lesson plan genre simply builds the student's knowledge about the Great Depression from nothing, giving the student a cultural and contextual base to read the textbook. Freeman and Freeman (1988) believe that this type of instruction is very beneficial to ELLs because it instructs both content and language at the same time.

The emotional state of students coming to the United States to study in a high school or university cannot be emphasized enough. This emotional state has a deep effect on all aspects of second language acquisition and certainly on second language literacy (Brown, 2000; Bell, 1995). Bell (1995) discusses her emotional well-being while trying to learn to read and write in Chinese. Bell's preconceived ideas about literacy pertaining to her first language were found to be irrelevant when studying Chinese, therefore causing her feelings to be affected deeply by her lack of progress. All ESL teachers need to be aware of their student's emotional states in regards to every aspect of second language learning. The genres that reflect these findings include a song written to reflect the feelings of a Spanish speaking student to his teacher and his own feelings of inadequicy and a diary entry by an Arabic speaking student and her feelings about the whole literacy process. Including the song and the diary entry makes the multi-genre project more personal. Both styles of genre are very personal in nature and often times include a deep sense of feeling and emotion regardless of the subject matter. The usage of these genres are very appropriate for this context and convey the meaning well.

A lot of different sources were used in both the construction of the different genres and in the overall thought process of putting together a multi-genre project. Some of the sources could have probably been integrated better into different genres and the genres themselves possibly could have conveyed more meaning, but the essential meaning was clearly expressed through the genres. The vast importance of understanding the fact that student's who come from different cultural backgrounds cannot comprehend texts written in English to their fullest was expressed through the genres and the feelings that students have when learning to read and write in a second language was also shown. These genres are very important in helping the ESL teacher understand their students and how to assist them with learning to read culturally different texts in the second language.

In conclusion, the multi-genre project is a great way for students to express themselves in any content area. The project also requires students to think on many different levels and interact with their topic in a number of different ways in order to express their topic's meaning through different genres. The project allows the student to easily present the topic of study to a group or a class without extended work of creating an outline or a handout, because the topic is already presented in a condensed form that can be fun and understandable. The multi-genre project also can be done in small group work, where as a research paper of the same magnitude would be very difficult to collaborate on and construct in a small group. All classes, regardless of the subject matter, should seriously consider implementing some type of multi-genre project in their classes to not only build the students' knowledge of the subject, but to also help the students develop their creative skills.

(References to be added later)

Genre number 6 - cause/effect essay diagram

Cause and Effect Essay Diagram

Topic:______________________________________________

Causes and Effects



Thesis statement:_____________________________________

____________________________________________________

The students should write the topic in the center of the diagram and then list the causes on the left and the effects on the right of the center circle.

Genre number 6 - a literacy based lesson plan

Students: High-intermediate ELLs in a college setting

Objective: The students will be able to interact with “The End of Something” (by E. Hemingway) text both in writing and orally and then write their own Cause/Effect Essay on broken relationships.

Pre-Essay writing tasks

Vocabulary: lumbering town, mill, schooners, hoisted, revolving, circular saw, hull-deep, canvas, bunk houses, sawdust, limestone, rowed, trolling, channel-bank, night lines, trout, ruin, striking, oar, bait, minnows, perch, skinned, ventral fin, leader, overboard, slab, driftwood, ran taut, click on the reel, glinted on, gone to hell, clearing and scene (Note: I probably wouldn’t explicitly teach all of these vocabulary words, but this is a list of words that could possibly be unfamiliar to the students).

Warm-up/pre-reading questions: Have you ever been in a relationship? What types of things did you enjoy doing with your girlfriend/boyfriend or husband/wife? Have you ever had to breakup with someone? How did you breakup with them?

Pre-reading/writing from personal experience: The students should write about a previous relationship where they had to breakup with someone or someone broke-up with them or something they enjoy doing now and would enjoy doing even more with someone else or write about something they enjoy doing with their girlfriend/boyfriend or spouse. The teacher should make these options clear to the students by writing the options on the board. The students should only write about a paragraph or two.

Reading: The students should read the story called, “The End of Something” by E. Hemingway and annotate the text. The teacher can demonstrate different styles of note taking while reading if needed.

Post-reading/writing: The students should write at least one paragraph about the text - this can include anything from their personal feelings to difficulties in reading.

Summary: The students should summarize the text in only a few sentences or a paragraph.

Discussion: The teacher should facilitate a student discussion regarding the text. Discussion questions might include: What are the different scenes in the text? Do they relate in anyway to the relationship? Do both Nick and Marjorie enjoy fishing? What do you imagine Nick and Marjorie to look like? Why was Nick in a bad mood? Why did Nick breakup with Marjorie? Did Marjorie expect Nick to breakup with her? Why or why not? Do you feel sorry for Marjorie or Nick? etc... The questions could certainly go on and on depending on the students’ responses. These are just a few that can be used to facilitate discussion.

Essay Writing Task - Cause/Effect Essay

Brainstorming outline: Split the students up into groups of two and have them brainstorm using the Cause and Effect Essay Diagram. The topic should be “Broken Relationships.”

Peer review of the outline: The students should be split up into different groups of two to review each other’s outlines and offer feedback. The teacher may provide a peer review worksheet.

Essay writing: The thesis statement should contain at least three causes OR three effects of a broken relationship and these should then be used as the topics for each body paragraph. The teacher may provide a body paragraph outline as well.

Peer review of essay: The students should be split up into different groups of two in order to review each other’s essay. The teacher may provide a peer review worksheet.

Language/terms: These are some of the terms that may be associated with a cause and effect essay. For an essay focused on causes - because, causes, caused by, the reason, since and therefore are all very common terms and for an essay focused on effects - as a consequence of, as a result (of), consequently, then and resulting in are all very common terms.

Genre number 6

A literacy based lesson plan

Potential voice: teacher

Potential audience: student

Rational: This will be a literacy based lesson plan developed to aid students in reading and writing. The lesson plan was developed using Spack's (1993) reading and writing cycles. The lesson plan begins by having students draw from personal experience and then write their way into reading. I think this is a wonderful reading/writing teaching style because it first tries to link the reading to the students' own backgrounds and experiences before they even try to read the given text or compose something related.
This type of lesson plan can be integrated into any writing curriculum and really can help students from all different cultures with their reading and writing.

Reference:
Spack, R. (1993). Student meets text, text meets student: Finding a way into academic discourse. In J. Carson and I. Leki (Eds.). Reading in teh composition classroom: Second language perspectives. (pp. 183-196). Boston: Heinle and Heinle.

Genre number 5 - a diary entry

Dear Diary,

It's another difficult day in the United States. I miss my home, but at least I feel safer here. School here in the United States is a lot of fun, but I'm really having problems reading and writing. I often feel like other people are judging me and that I need to do better. It's sooooo hard though, English is so much different than Arabic. The letters are really different and the whole writing style just makes me mad.
The teachers here ask me to write the letters several times so that they look just right, but I hate writing letters in English - can't they read them the way they are? Why do I have to write them again and again?
The teachers are nice though, but I often feel like they are giving me too much praise for my poor school work. In my culture teachers are harder on the students and this makes me work harder and understand what I need to work on. Here in the United States the teachers tell me I'm doing a good job and then I get my paper back and it's all covered in red because of all the mistakes I've made. I'm starting to resent the corrections that the teachers are giving me and I feel like a failure. I just don't know what to do to improve my English writing skills.
I think I just need to change my learning style. I cannot use the same strategies that I used when I learned my first language. I must develop new ways to learn English effectively. I think I also most learn to adapt to American culture better. I know that my teachers mean well and just want to help me, I shouldn't resent them and their corrections.
Tomorrow I will start to try and look at English from a cultural perspective and value what the Americans value. Perhaps my English will improve and my attitude will change, I'm just tired of being judged and feeling like a failure.

Talk to you tomorrow!

This diary entry was adapted from the study done by:
Sinclair, J.B. (1995). The relationship between L1 and L2 literacy: Some complicated factors. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 687-704. Retrieved September 18, 2007, from JSTOR database.

Genre number 5

A diary entry

Potential voice: immigrant student

Potential audience: none

Rational: This will be a diary entry by an immigrant student who is struggling to learn the language. The entry will be focused on the student's individual feelings and is adapted from Bell (1995).

Reference:
Bell, J.S. (1995). The relationship between L1 and L2 literacy: Some complicating factors. TESOL Quarterly, 29, p. 687-704. Retrieved September 18, 2007, from JSTOR database.

Multi-genre project

Well... I don't feel so good about the project. I think I'm doing everything correctly based on the feedback others have given me and the examples that I've looked at, but there is this hint of doubt in my mind.

Regardless of, I have certainly learned a lot from this project so far and even though I have two more genres to finish, I know what I want to do for at least one of them.

Genre number 5 will be a diary entry produced by a student. The entry should reflect the student's feelings while trying to learn to write in a new language.

Genre number 6 I'm not quite sure about yet, but I'm sure it will be good. I'm actually thinking about doing another lesson plan that involves the actual reading and writing of a text.

We will see!

Genre number 4 - discussion

One can see that when readers are reading a text that is culturally unfamilar they tend to rely on strategies that include: developing awareness, accepting ambiguity or establishing inrasentential ties (2). It is believed by Pritchard (1990) that readers use these particular strategies because they may have "difficulty relating stimulus sentences to other portions of the text or to their own background knowledge" (p. 288).

It is our job as ESL teachers to assist our students in using as many reading strategies as possible, especially by helping the students establish a background knowledge of the material that they are reading.

Genre number 4 - explanation

The graph is divided into two sections: The darker posts that represent culturally familiar texts and the lighter posts that represent the culturally unfamiliar texts.

The Americans in this study were observed using five different types of strategies when reading both culturally familiar and unfamilar texts. The frequency of the employment of these strategies is illustrated in the graph.

The strategies with subcategories:

- Developing awareness
1. Refer to experimental task
2. State loss of concentration
3. State failure to understand

- Accepting ambiguity
1. Skip unknown words
2. Formulate a question
3. consider other inferences
4. Suspend judgement

- Establishing inrasentential ties 1
1. Read ahead
2. Relate to previous text
3. Extrapolate from text
4. Verify an inference

- Using background knowledge
1. Use knowledge of format
2. Refer to previous passage
3. Respond affectively
4. Visualize
5. Relate to experience
6. Speculate beyond text

- Esstablishing intersentential ties
1. Gather information
2. Reread
3. Paraphrase
4. Use context clues
5. React to author's style

For the purpose of this graph I have not broken up the main headings into the subheadings listed above. Just understand that each main heading includes all the strategies listed above.

This graph was adapted from:
Pritchard, R. (1990). The effects of cultural schemata on reading processing strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 25, 273-295. Retreived September 17, 2007, from JSTOR database.

Genre Number 4 - reading strategies used by Americans

Well....Genre number 4

I've tried and faled to produce my own graph for genre 4, so I'm going to use the research from Robert Pritchard to produce a graph for the project.

The graph will show the reading strategies employed by Americans when reading a culturally unfamilar text.

I hope that you all find it helpful.

Teaching Post 11/13 - 11/15

This was an interesting week, but I feel it was a productive week. On Tuesday we finished our large group discussions about the topics and, again, I was glad to see so many students participating and asking questions. After that I just went over the general outline of what a research paper is and what it contains along with a basic strategy to immplement in writing the paper. I feel the class went well, but I hate it when I have to spend so much time lecturing. I feel that it is boring for the students and that it's too easy for the students to "tune me out." Anyway, I think I was able to address some of their concerns and make the research paper seem doable.

Thursday was another boring day :-( We worked in small groups to outline the papers based on the topic. The students were able to help each other build outlines, but a lot of the students still haven't done enough research to be able to build an accurate outline. I think next time I do this exercise I will require the students to have done some research as homework and then hopefully more would have the knowledge needed to construct a good outline of their paper. We then talked about APA citations and in text source citations. I had a couple of exercises planned and they went well, but I could see that I was losing the students - it was just a lot of lecturing and very boring. On Tuesday I will do some group work with citations and sources and we will see how that goes, I just want to make sure that the students understand the concept and how important it is to reference properly.

Teaching Post 11/6 - 11/8

Well, this week we didn't do a whole lot. On Tuesday we went to the library to participate in a short tour of the library's resources. The librarian who helped us was very kind and patient. She also explained the resources very well and gave a lot of students individual help in finding resources for their research papers. It was a very good and educational experience for all of us.

On Thursday we discussed research paper topics. I broke the students up into three different groups to discuss with each other their topics. The purpose of this was to not only get the students interested and talking, but to also help them narrow their topics or find their topics in some cases. After the small group discussions we formed a large group and everyone shared with the whole group their topic and the reason why they chose it. It was a very good time of sharing and a lot of the students asked questions and gave suggestions. I felt that the time was well spent and that it went better than I expected.