Book’s Blog 8

Chapter 5        Supporting Academic Writing at the Paragraph and Sentence Levels

    

The Freemans shift their attention to look closely at paragraphs and sentences. I like the following quotation from the first paragraph:

                      “Academic language is complex, but when teachers underst

                        and the different levels of academic language, they can scaffold

                        instruction and help all their students learn to read and write

                        the academic language of school” (p. 104)

Because of such quote, I think the authors analyze academic language at multiple levels: text, paragraph, sentence, and word in last, current, and next chapters. For each of these, they provide examples of academic language and targeted strategies teachers can use as they teach language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The authors also examine subject-specific textbooks, describing the challenges these pose for students and recommending ways to make texts more accessible to ELLs and struggling readers. They get to the practical issues of how to guide students to read academic textbooks, write for academic purposes, and learn academic vocabulary.

In English, there is an expected structure for paragraphs in academic writing. They give a lot of suggestion on different ways students can construct coherent & cohesive paragraphs and create smooth, focused paragraphs with all sentences linking back to the main topic. They talk about 3 patterns of cohesion in paragraphs: constant, derived, and chained. They also suggest several activities to help students learn how to use the previous 3 patterns to give their paragraphs greater cohesion. Here is a very helpful link for all learners.

From their description, I think that students can learn that there is more than one way to achieve the goal of a focused paper with proper scaffolding to start experimenting. I like how they give an example of doing an activity to analyze paragraph structure from an integrated physics and chemistry book.

After that, they move their talk to the language at the sentence level by showing the learners how the writers of academic texts connect their sentences and guiding them to better writing. They offer different ways of clauses are linked in English and describe different types of clauses such as embedded, paratactic, and hypotactic clauses.

They show how the teachers can help students to understand the complex writing of academic texts through sentence combining that is an effective strategy for improving students writing. This step will lead them to produce more complex writing and, then, they need to develop a repertoire of words and phrases. 

Finally, The Freemans describe 2 strategies to help struggle learners to read & write academic texts:

a)     Sentence transformation. 

b)     Paraphrase.

Regarding the framing questions of this course, I have found that This chapter helps to answer the questions which focuses on the how to write and writing to learn as I explained above