4/10 Emi

I am not sure if I ever had the experience of reviewing a paper that is totally different from my or and that is extraneous to me. Probably the maximum I’ve done is when I volunteered in the Travel Grants Committee and we had to rate abstract proposals based on general criteria like clarity and significance. To me, this was extremely difficult to do because some of the abstracts were so technical and complex that I could barely understand what they were trying to do or to demonstrate. This, in turn, complicated a lot the rating process and the inter-reliability scores.

As for the writing to learn approach, I would say that anything my students write for class correspond this category. So in the Spanish writing course, students write to both, learn the different types of essay (description, narration, exposition and argumentation) and more importantly, learn and improve their Spanish writing skills, so that they are better prepared to for future linguistics or literature courses in Spanish.

As for the learning to write approach, probably the most recent case I had was last week, when a student came to the writing center because she had to write a sociolinguistics research paper. It became a very interesting session because the student kept telling me that the instructions were very open and flexible, and not necessarily helpful. However, as I insisted to look at the instruction, it was very clear the different sections that the research paper needed to include (e.g. literature review, participants, methodology, etc.) , and the information that was relevant to each of the sections. For the student, however, it was the first time writing a research paper, so we spend about an hour going over the different section in a research paper, and brainstorming possible ideas that she could include based on her topic.


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