Education Commons^™

Essay Writing Instructional Lexicon And Semantic Confusion, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

“Introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” are the most accessible words in the instructional lexicon for ESL writing teachers when they want to describe the structure of a typical five-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay or its shorter variations for standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. They are frequently employed to refer to the three tiers of the hamburger essay in textbooks, on classroom boards, and in YouTube tutorials.

Not surprisingly, English learners also might give you the same words if asked what the main components of an essay are. Like ESL teachers, students usually use the same terms or their equivalents …

Adolescent Literacy And Collaborative Inquiry, Rob Simon, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

In a teacher education classroom in Toronto, groups of middle school students, teacher candidates, and university researchers, members of our research collaborative, the Teaching to Learn Project (Simon et al., 2014; Simon & the Teaching to Learn Project, 2014), discuss projects developed from curricula they coauthored for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986). Maus documents Spiegelman’s father’s recollections of the Holocaust and the author’s own struggles to come to terms with what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor.

Youth and teachers involved in the Teaching to Learn Project collectively worked through what historian …

Teaching Anglo-American Academic Writing And Intercultural Rhetoric: A Grounded Theory Study Of Practice In Ontario Secondary Schools, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

This qualitative research project is a grounded theory study of the experiences of five EAL (English as an additional language) academic writing instructors with intercultural rhetoric. Following the academic conversation about contrastive/intercultural rhetoric, this investigation explores narratives of classroom practice in Ontario secondary schools in order to underline L2 writing activities that are sensitive to intercultural rhetoric. This paper includes explanations of the phenomenon of intercultural rhetoric as identified by the interviewed instructors and lists practical strategies employed by the participants. These strategies are organized in three categories: (1) strategies that use the potential of students’ first languages and mother …