Education Commons^™

Student Bonding As Community-Building, James Edward Martin

Research Collection Centre for English Communication

The concept of student bonding is likely to be supported by most teachers. It is quite clear that student attitudes influence learning, and bonding is often seen as a way to help create a positive atmosphere that will promote participation in class (i.e., making students more comfortable in the often “socially risky” environment of the English language classroom). For this purpose and to maximize bonding, cooperative language learning techniques, for example, have sometimes been used (see, e.g., Wichadee & Orawiwatnakul, 2012).

In this article, however, I will focus my discussion on a related but somewhat different rationale for bonding and …

Formulaic Writing Advice: A False Panacea, James Edward Martin

Research Collection Centre for English Communication

Over the past decade, as the long institutionalized process writing pedagogy has been increasingly questioned, many teachers have found it a challenge to create viable classroom teaching philosophies and practices. As Richard Fulkerson (2005) has noted, there is currently a wide lack of consensus about how to teach writing. In this environment, it is not surprising that teachers sometimes tend to rely on commonsensical formulae to ground their instruction. In fact, this tendency toward formulaic teaching has been common in the field of writing instruction for a very long time, although it may have taken different forms. To give an …