Materials for Investigation

Notes from Writing Workshop

Conferencing was the time where I spoke with students one-on-one about their writing. Through conferencing, I examined student's writing during it's production, monitored attitudes and apparent motivation, noticed areas students are showing improvement and other areas that could use some more focus. I interacted with the students and asked them questions. This not only showed them I care about their writing and see them as authors, I also learned valuable information about their opinions on a topic they had chosen, their outlook on the writing they were engaged in, and found specific areas they felt they were struggling or succeeding. I then decided on what to teach the students for our short conference. After a short conference lesson, I wrote down a summary of the conference with information about my initial impressions, interactions with the students, and what I taught them. From these records, I examined patterns of a student and the whole class engaging in Writing Workshop over time.

Equally important was to record what happened during sharing time. In sharing time, students had an audience for their work and got the chance to communicate their writing to others. Students showed they understand their own writing by reading it. Listeners got the chance to comprehend what their peers had created. Miscommunication was common during sharing time, but the negotiation for meaning was a valuable part of the communication process. If a writer found their message was unclear, they sometimes tried to repair the error and determine why it occurred to work towards improving on it in the future. Notes from sharing time provided more insight into how students use writing to communicate.

Through the notes from conferencing and sharing time, I better identified student progress, successes, and areas that need improvement. This information helps plan more effective lessons that address student needs. For this project, the information from the notes I kept during conferencing help me answer my research question, "How do EFL kindergarten students engage in Writing Workshop?".

Student Interview

Conferencing and sharing during Writing Workshop was focused on the what students are writing in the moment and usually did not address their overall opinions of writing or Writing Workshop. To gather student opinions on more broad topics like their feelings towards writing, writing outside the classroom, the progress they feel they have made, and they perceive writing in their future, I developed some interview questions. I chose to do an interview due to my students being beginner level ELLs with limited reading and writing abilities. The interview format allowed me to clarify the meaning of questions so students could provide meaningful responses. The interviews were administered after 6 weeks of participation in our Writing Workshop.

Student Work Analysis

While Writing Workshop is an approach to teach process writing, the product students create is still an important consideration. I collected student generated work over the course of six weeks. On average, we were able to engage in Writing Workshop three times per week. Following recommendations to collect and organize student work in individual writing folders proved to be a valuable tool for assessment and for collecting information for this project (Calkins, 2011; Graves, 1985; Hertz & Heydenberl, 1997). Students and I felt proud when we saw how much written work accumulated over the course of only a few weeks. We also were able to see visible differences in current writing and the writing at the beginning of the Writing Workshop by keeping work in chronological order. Reviewing student work allowed me to check on student progress in areas we worked to develop in conferences and mini lessons and identify new areas for later.