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
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.