Audience Awareness

In the article, "Developing Audience Awareness In Writing," Jose´ Brandao Carvalho publishes a study testing a teaching method involving what's called procedural facilitation. Procedural facilitation is designed to help students develop a better sense of audience awareness through focusing on text revision.

In the experiment, which was conducted on both fifth and ninth graders in Portugal, there was an experimental group being taught using procedural facilitation, and a control group which were not taught using the method. Students in the experimental group were asked to "evaluate and to modify the
text they were writing whenever they considered it was necessary" (275).

To measure the effectiveness of the teaching method, Carvalho evaluated both the control and experimental groups by means of a pre-test and post-test. The test results indicated progress in terms of audience awareness in the group that was taught using the procedural facilitation method, and no progress in the group that received no specially designed education.

The results show that procedural facilitation can be an effective teaching strategy that promotes audience awareness, as it "enables the identification of the writers' main difficulties and problems and the definition of the best strategies for tackling them" (281).

Swales

Move 1

The lives of our children are bound to vary greatly from those of our parents, and because of the omnipresence of an evolving technological society, there are limitations to the power we have over influencing them. In seeking the best interests of our children, we must consider the distance between our era and theirs, and make decisions to guide them while complying with the technology that will always play an active role in their lives. Currently, a key component of this technology is the internet. The internet is the most widely used medium – this may seem obvious now, but until relatively recently, people by no means anticipated its preponderance.

Move 2

In the 1960s, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that media not only supply the stuff of thought, they also shape the process of thought (Carr). So, because we and those before us have absorbed information by lowering our noses into books, and the children of today lack that experience and absorb mainly by browsing the internet, there are bound to be critical differences between us and our kids regarding the way our brains process thought – in other words, differences in the way we learn. The purpose of my literature review is to continue the ongoing conversation discussing the examination of the ways internet use affects the way children learn. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that internet use results in a decrease in capacity for concentration.

Move 3

I will be arguing that this decrease in thought capacity is not an inevitable change that the children of this generation must suffer. I will argue that parents and educators need to encourage (sometimes forcefully) their kids to read actual books so they don’t become victims of the internet’s destructiveness. I will begin by first examining the lives of students affected by internet use, then the lives of adults, and then I will move on to discuss the quantitative data and its effects on my overall research. I will end by tying all of the research together and arguing my position based upon my collaborative findings.

Progress

I need to continue to explore the conversation around my topic, but I now feel like I have a focus, which is the changes that occur in the brain resulting from internet use. Up to this point it has been a struggle to find much research, and I believe this is because I was only skimming the surface of a deep ocean with many pockets of ideas. However, now that I am focused, I feel confident in my abilities to find the research I am looking for, and then to join the conversation myself.