Website Second Draft Review
Lesson Materials: For the student-facing pedagogical materials needed to teach today’s class, please open the following page: Website Second Draft Review Lesson Materials
Lesson Objectives: Students understand the connection between grammar and content (the use of prepositions in writing about data, and mathematical concepts); students will understand how to revise at the sentence level; students acquire ideas from peers that they could use in their own websites
Connection to First Major Paper/Project: This lesson helps students with their first project as they edit their sentences for clarity of ideas and meaning.
Connection to Course Goals: A course goal addressed with this lesson is that of using conventions, specifically choosing the kind of syntax and word choice that is conducive to communicating a message effectively to a certain audience to achieve a particular purpose.
Sequence of Activities: 1. Discuss This American Life broadcast; 2. Lecture; 3. Think-pair-share practice activities
Description of Activities:
1. Using the powerpoint in the course site, student discuss the This American Life broadcast (50 minutes): students review the listening homework from This American Life. They go over the correct placement of prepositions in the broadcast, and draw a connection between the use of prepositions. The instructor can structure this as desired; however, one way to do so is to have students turn and talk on the following questions: 1. How many prepositions were you able to correctly place in the transcript before the listening? 2. What did you notice about the use of prepositions in writing about data? 3. What did you notice about the way in which these physicists applied their academic training to their own life? 4. What did you think of this broadcast?
Note: This is intended as a low-stakes (and hopefully fun) way of centering focus on the connection between grammar and language, and to prime students for an understanding of scientific method and inquiry, which will be essential in the following unit. A further connection can also be drawn to the previous language lessons on passive voice. This is because passive constructions also require many prepositions (e.g. “the story was written by,” “the performance was given to,”). If students have difficulty with prepositions (expected) the instructor can talk about how this may be further reason to avoid passive constructions.
15-minute break
2. Lecture (50 minutes): prepare a list of the most common sentence structure issues with which students struggle. Provide an example of a correct and an incorrect structure and analyze the differences with students.
10-minute break
3. Think-pair-share practice activities (50 minutes): after going over the examples with students, have students analyze their own draft and identify the most common sentence structure issue that they have. Have them also identify 1 or 2 examples of this. Then have students pair up with a partner and help each other revise their sentences. Finally, have students share an original flawed sentence with its correction.
Homework:
- Students are told to come prepared with the most finalized version of their website for conferences in the next session.
- In preparation for the following assignment and the first lecture of the next unit, students should listen broadcast from producer, Mark Ronson, who discusses remixing in popular music. Students can use the handout found in the course site to guide them through this listening assignment and to prepare them for the lecture and discussion on this topic in the next session.
Note: there is an interview version of this broadcast that is shorter than the video. Students should be directed to this interview instead of the broadcast. To access the interview, students should click on the blue play button at the top of the webpage, shown in the screen grab below. This is intended as a supplement to the lecture on synthesis and researching in the next lesson. Students should be directed to draw connections between synthesis in music and scholarly research. Specifics on what this means will be included in a description of the following lesson.(See below.)