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Formative Assessment Task 2

Examine a piece of a struggling students writing and identify spoken- like features,
drawing on specific metalanguage introduced in the 2 key readings (Martin and
Hammond). Present your analysis as a Wiki.
Analysis
Text 2.1- the student response was composed for a Year 9 English Assessment Task
under examination conditions. Due to its brevity, lack of cohesion and abundant
grammatical item errors it is evident that the composer is a struggling student. In
order to assess the quality of the response, I will firstly analyse the response, then
review my scaffolding process and consider why it failed to adequately prepare the
student for this task.
The students brief introduction- The best laid schemes of mice and men do oft go
away. Lennie and George want to buy a farm or at least try to they never got the
farm- immediately reveals his difficulty in composing the analytical exposition genre
and indicates a lack of preparation and/or language processing difficulties. Firstly, the
student incorrectly repeats the question quote, writing away rather than awry, and
fails to interpret the question or provide a context for establishing an argument. As a
result the second sentence is not cohesively linked to the question and therefore
cannot function as a thesis or outline a series of arguments (Humphrey, Droga & Feez,
2012). These errors demonstrate the students lack of understanding of the analytical
exposition genre and ensure that the ensuing paragraphs are unsubstantial,
disconnected points rather than a cohesive argument. In fact, the past tense narration
of the second paragraph more accurately resembles a literary recount than the present
tense analysis of a analytical exposition.
Although the brevity of the response and incorrect rewriting of the question suggest a
lack of preparation and attention to detail from the student, the abundant grammatical
item errors and colloquial spoken language allude to greater language processing
deficiencies. According to Hammond (1990), the main function of grammatical items
in a text is not to provide the message, but to establish and maintain the relationships
between the lexical items (p. 36). Therefore, incorrect use of similar phonetic wordstwo, then, there rather than too, than, there- misspelt conjunctions- dindt, dont
instead of didnt, dont- and inconsistent use of capitals disrupts a logical
connection of cause and effect and contributes to the lack of lexical cohesion at
sentence, paragraph and text level organization.
The students inappropriate use of colloquial or spoken language is exemplified
through the misspelt, colloquial word alot and several uses of you in the
declarative sentence: Steinbecks tells us in the story if you want something you have
to work hard for it. These examples of you are common traits of a struggling
students exposition responses and a concerning trend of the digital generation whom
are exposed to more informal multimodality language. Although this sentence would
be appropriate for a speech or conversation, you needs to be replaced with more
formal language such as person/ people or individual to produce a more
appropriate, formal exposition sentence such as: Steinbeck informs the reader that if
a person wants something then they have to work hard for it. Thus the students use

of spoken language and difficulty in organizing and presenting information to make


meaning reveal that the students written language is yet to develop at a level that
allows him to compose the analytical exposition genre (Hammond, 1990). More
notably, Hammond (1990) suggests that if students do not develop effective control
of the features of written language, their chances of academic success are minimal (p.
43).
The Year 9 Term 3 close study of John Steinbecks novel Of Mice and Men focuses on
analysing the novel and preparing the students compose an analytical exposition by
using functional literacy pedagogy strategies. The process of analysing the novel
consists of reading the novel aloud as a class and completing a cloze passage and
paragraph response at the conclusion of each of the six chapters. In addition to the
text, the students are introduced to relevant contextual information. Ultimately, the
students breadth of knowledge is synthesized by two documents Themes activity
and Themes-Techniques. During the reading and analysis of the text, students
practice writing formal paragraphs that are designed to introduce students to writing
in the correct formal register and applying textual evidence required for analytical
exposition genre. For the scaffolding of these chapter paragraph responses, I modeled
and jointly constructed sample responses on the white board and supplied students
with two language scaffolding documents to explicitly assist students with selecting
appropriate phrases and assisting verbs for formal expositions and effectively
integrating quotes to develop their independent construction of paragraphs.
After completion of the Themes activity and Themes-Techniques documents,
students are explicitly introduced to the skills and structure of the analytical
exposition genre that will be assessed in the across the form assessment task in several
weeks time. The most important step of the scaffolding process is using Text 2.2Essay Model document to build upon the PEEL paragraph structure of the chapter
paragraph response and expose students to the structure of an analytical exposition
structure consisting of an introduction, three main body PEEL paragraphs and a
conclusion. For the Essay Model task, the class and I jointly construct an
introduction, one main body PEEL paragraph and a conclusion, and the remaining
two main body PEEL paragraphs are independently constructed by the students. The
purpose of this detailed joint construction is to ensure the students understand the
structural requirements of an analytical exposition.
After marking this first analytical exposition response, I reevaluate the best mode of
scaffolding to prepare the class for the assessment task. From marking the student
responses, I ascertained that the quality of paragraphs had not progressed from the
earlier chapter paragraph responses. Consequently, I provided the students with
individual and whole class feedback, and samples of the better responses. However, I
deduced that the students were struggling to comprehend the content of the whole
novel in addition to composing an analytical exposition, thus adopted an authentic
literacy strategy by instructing students to research information on any place of their
choice and compose an analytical exposition in response to the generic question:
Explain what is the most beautiful place in the world?
As predicted the students were able to more appropriately replicate the structure of an
analytical exposition when in control of more appealing and understandable content
than the novel Of Mice and Men. The efficacy of this strategy illustrates that students

are able to explicitly focus on and execute the skills and structure of written responses
when in control of their own content (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).
In the week leading up to the Assessment Task, the students independently
constructed an open book response- with the aid of all of their notes- in forty-five
minutes, to be prepared for the more challenging closed book- without any notesforty minute Assessment Task. This scaffold is a step closely to a completely
independent construction but does not overwhelm the unprepared or struggling
students because they still have access to their notes and can therefore with the greater
confidence to utilize their notes and focus more on structuring their analytical
exposition than recalling the content. Therefore providing the students with an
additional step between joint construction and independent construction and supports
Martins (2015) inference that some students may need extra support or more than one
attempt of the curriculum cycle before they confidently construct their own responses.
In conclusion the scaffolding of content and written response skills in this unit of
study resembles a classroom of high challenge and high support where students are
most likely to be working within the (Vygotsky) zone of proximal development
(Hammond, 2005) However, a combination of the nature of the analytical exposition
task of Text 2.1- which restricts the students ownership of language and content- and
the students grammatical item errors and use of colloquial-spoken language suggest
that I, like most secondary school teachers, needed to incorporate more one-to-one
micro-level scaffolding for this particular student to succeed. Despite the inauthentic
nature of certain writing genres, time pressures and class sizes preventing a teacher
from effectively using didactic literacy pedagogy to develop an individual students
written expression, Text 2.1 illustrates that teachers of the digital generation face the
challenge of implementing micro-scaffold didactic literacy pedagogy strategies into
the overriding functional and critical literacies pedagogy.

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