Titcha Ho’s Teaching Transitions

This activity on transitions should be introduced during the revision process or after the exploratory draft to teach transitional words. The class discussion should focus on how ideas are connected within a paragraph and between different paragraphs. The multimodal aspect of the assignment can be applied to other grammatical concepts. I ask students to create grammar and punctuation usage posters using Canva.com. After the poster creation process, students present their posters to the class. 

Activity: Teaching Transitions 

Before this activity, students read a chapter on using transitions from the book They Say, I Say. I have also provided a handout in the Resource section on Blackboard, from the University of North Carolina’s Writing Center. As a result, the students should have some level of familiarity with transitions, both in using transitional words and repeating keywords to ensure that their writing is easy to follow. After the initial discussion, I am asking students to create posters/infographics depicting transition usage.

 This is an example from past students: Kanako, Hiroki, Jenny, and Jiaolingzi.

Transitions and Paraphrasing

In this “Tying It All Together” activity, students read three sample rhetorical analysis essays of former students on Perusall. After that, they are required to create three annotations per essay by writing comments in the margins to explain how the student writers used transitional words and keyword repetition to ensure flow and cohesion. After everyone has finished creating three annotations per essay, they will respond to one classmate’s annotation per essay.

The teacher will then upvote insightful annotations and use the comments to start a class discussion. This activity aims to promote metacognition, text comprehension, and social annotation. Typically, basic writing students cannot see themselves producing texts similar to what they see in the samples, even though all the sample texts come from ESL students, since this group of students state they are not “good writers” and cannot “write like that.” 

Therefore, an explicit class discussion about successful moves in using transitions and keyword repetition should help students see that they can also apply these moves in their own writing. This activity should make learning transitional words more explicit than providing students with a transitional word chart.

Examples of transitions and their meaning
Chart source: The Writing Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
Sample of student annotations
Picture from the activity with students’ annotations.