Assignment 2: Rhetorical Situation

Last semester I took the class CIR 306, Introduction to Literacy: A Language Arts Approach, with Christine Selman as the instructor. She required the class to critique three articles on three different topics. Each topic was pertaining to Language Arts and its different contents. My best article critique was on an article called Interactive Writing Beyond the Primary Grades.

This article was about using interactive writing lessons as a method of teaching writing mechanics in contexts. Three key points of the article are interactive writing, interactive writing in a third grade classroom, and interactive writing for special need students. The article defines interactive writing and gives examples of how the teacher implements it in her lesson and makes modifications for the group of students she is teaching.

According to this article, interactive teaching was developed in 1991 by researchers with the Ohio State University. Interactive writing assignments are a process of writing content which the teacher guides the students. The teacher takes lots of time to talk bout phonics prior to the lesson and during the lesson.  This writing process was created to promote independent writing in primary grades. During these lessons teachers will select students, intentionally based on their ability, to add a section to the sentence. The reason is to have a grammatically correct sentence. This can be done with small groups or the class as a whole. Research has proven that children using this type of writing process have shown improvement in their writing. Reading comprehension has also improved by using interactive writing lessons.

In this article the author states that the third grade class uses interactive writing to create their weekly parent newsletter. The students and teachers create each sentence together. Together they also decide on the topic of the weekly newsletter. The teacher draws a name out of a can and has that student decide on how to start the paragraph or sentence. As the student makes a suggestion the discussion continues. Once the student starts the paragraph the students work together to determine if it is good or corrections are needed. In the beginning of the year the sentence are simple, but as the year goes on the sentences progress into using clauses as sentence openers and compound sentences.

The teacher teaches interactive writing with special needs students a little different than the regular education students. The interactive writing is worked in smaller groups. These students write summaries of previously read texts. They create really big graphic organizers. Since the teacher uses small groups everyone participates and the work becomes a group effort. Interactive writing can be modified for any grade or special needs group.

This was a very interesting article. I think this article does reflect good teaching, because the teacher modified the interactive writing lesson for each group she was teaching. I like have my students do writing assignments and now with my new knowledge of interactive writing I will definitely incorporate this into my lessons. I think having the ability to write properly is very important. Proper techniques should be taught at a young age. As students grow older their writing styles will progress maturely, but the basic techniques are instilled in them as young children. I like the idea of letting the students make the decisions. It helps them want to be involved and participate. It gives the students a sense of ownership.