-Reading "Writing Skills Training for American Students"

2020.5.24

From May 1 to May 10, I read this thick book: Writing Skills Training for American Students. Yes, it is a companion piece to American students' reading skills training. I have been busy every day since I started school for more than a month. Until now, I calmed down and forced myself to sort out the content and experience.

First of all, let's meet the author Jennifer Serravallo, a child literacy researcher and a best-selling author in The New York Times. She started her education career as a teacher in a public school in new york, then joined the reading and writing program of the College of Education of Columbia University as a course developer and senior researcher, and taught many undergraduate and postgraduate courses related to the education reform of children's literature in the college and Vasa College. At present, she is devoted to children's literacy education and research, and has written many bestsellers in related fields, including Reading Skills Training for American Students, USA.

Talking about the purpose of writing this book, the author said: This book aims to sort out some useful writing strategies that I like for you. They cover all aspects of writing and all text types, and are mainly suitable for students from kindergarten to grade eight. I want to help you in every way. I try to keep the language and examples concise. Of course, you can explain it in detail in your own language based on this book. The strategies in the book are so organized that even a busy teacher can do it in a short time.

What kind of logic is this book based on? Since writing is a skill, it can be improved through gradual training. Think about the view that we once held that "writing is not taught, but depends on talent", which virtually negates the guiding value of teachers and makes writing guidance passive and random.

This book mainly focuses on the goal of 65,438+00, explaining in detail various strategies to achieve the goal. These 65,438+00 goals are in the order of stages: skillfully writing with the help of pictures, improving writing participation, inspiring and collecting inspiration, highlighting key points and significance, reasonably arranging structure, elaborating in detail, using words accurately, correctly punctuation and grammar spelling, and improving writing level through cooperation with writing partners and groups. These goals are also the teaching goals generally set by writing teachers in primary and secondary schools in China. Reflection, what have we done to achieve these goals? Is it serialized and carefully and orderly as described in the author's book? The answer is obviously no, so both primary school teachers and junior high school Chinese teachers can get inspiration from the book.

Because primary school and junior high school mainly focus on narrative writing exercises, when reading, my three most concerned goals are: reasonable arrangement of structure, detailed elaboration, and improvement of writing level through cooperation with writing partners and groups. When reading a book, there will be many places with * * * sounds, and there will also be places that make me shine at the moment. I can't help but sigh that the author's deep research, fine design strategy and coherent system are completely different from our usual "one hammer in the east and one hammer in the west"

For example, how to arrange the structure reasonably? The author lists 40 strategies, which are worthy of our junior high school teachers' reference, such as writing behind first, drawing page layout, using repetitive structure, measuring the importance of the two parts, echoing from beginning to end and so on. When writing instructions at ordinary times, we will ask students to draw a writing outline or mind map with them. However, during the exam, students completely forgot this practice, and began to write with a little thought, which caused confusion and ambiguity in writing ideas, and wrote paragraph by paragraph purely for the sake of receiving words. Why? I think the first thing is that teachers talk too much. When instructing composition, teachers draw mind maps instead of students, but students have not received solid training, so they have not formed a habit.

We often say that narration or description should be vivid and vivid, so how to make it vivid? When expounding this goal, the author wrote two strategies: don't talk, describe: scene description. Do not tell, but describe: emotional description. Isn't that what we usually ask students to do? But why don't students do it in the examination room? In the final analysis, we didn't practice step by step, and practiced effectively to form students' writing skills.

Improve your writing by cooperating with your writing partners and groups. This is also a goal of my 10 writing training. I began to try my second composition in the spring of 20 1 1. The purpose is to improve students' writing level through the cooperation of writing partners. The effect may not be so significant. The reason may be that there are not many strategies used-the author listed 19 strategies at once, but I obviously didn't let students practice using so many strategies and methods; Secondly, the training is not solid enough, not step by step. You see, the author's teaching guidance for each strategy is periodic and procedural, which conforms to the teaching law. In order to illustrate this goal, this book introduces many strategies to add details to the article. Prompt teachers to design a six-week systematic curriculum and teaching guidance scheme, such as learning to write fictional narrative texts in 1 week, learning and practicing the strategy of "how story characters speak" and the strategy of "don't say, but describe: describe emotions". In the second week, on the basis of 1 week study, I further studied the strategy of "scenario description". In the third week, I learned the strategy of describing the external characteristics of characters ... In the sixth week, I used the strategy of learning to write intellectual articles by narrative methods. Before and after the strategy is closely related, there are foreshadowing before, testing after and using before.

Therefore, as the Preface to Recommended Books says, this is a scientific book, a systematic book and a practical book to cultivate writing ability. We might as well carry forward the "takenism" and combine the writing foundation and acceptance ability of the students we teach. We will certainly make this book play a greater reference value, make our writing teaching more scientific, systematic and practical, bid farewell to randomness, bid farewell to "a flash of light", systematize writing training, guide our writing teaching practice with theory, and make our writing teaching stand the test of theory at all times.

Of course, this book is a technical guide to writing teaching. The essence of writing is expression and the flow of thinking. Therefore, I think that thinking and language and how do we think are very enlightening to the writing teaching at the level of Tao. I also recommend it to you who read this article.