Using Visuals to Facilitate Organizational Writing in Secondary Education, Study notes of Logic

Download Using Visuals to Facilitate Organizational Writing in Secondary Education and more Study notes Logic in PDF only on Docsity! DOCUMENT RESUME ED 105 375 CS 001 685 AUTHOR Sinatra, Richard C. TITLE Teaching Writing Styles through Visual Compositions. PUB DATE May 75 NOTE 16p.;Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Reading Association (20th, New York City, May 13-16, 1975) EDRS PRICE MF-$0.76 HC-$1.58 PLUS POSTAGE DESCRIPTORS *Composition (Literary); *Reading Improvement; Secondary Education; *Student Writing Models; Teaching Methods; *Visual Stimuli; *Writing Exercises; Writing Skills ABSTRACT A method for stimulating and facilitating organizaticnal writing in the secondary school is described in this paper. Pictorial sequences are coordinated and arranged to typify the four major styles of writing: narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive. These sequences both portray a meaningful event in keeping with the writing style and help to elicit the co:responding organization of written discourse. A model is presented showing the pupil-teacher interaction in the visual-writing process. The model proposes that visual compositions can help generate the student's language and feelings to facilitate organizational writing of coherent paragraphs and, at the same time, to improve certain reading skills of sequence and organization. Teaching strategy guidelines L'Iggest this student involvement in the visual-writing techniques before teaching lessons in style and organization. (Author/TO) U S DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION IWS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRO DUCCD EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGIN ATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRE SENT OFFICIAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY Richard C. Sinatra, Readit:g Coordinator K - 12, Manhw3sei; Public Scbools Manhasset, H.Y. 11030 1,12Mb1(,". TO fi vi VATEPIAI <, .' Richard C. Sinatra Z"' k AGREEMENT, "v Vt,,s'i or EOV'' t p, OUTS,OE Etc( -TEM PERMISSIC.. Teaching Writing Styles Through Visual Compositions for presentation at the 1975 IRA Convention Session topic: Reading Improvement in the Junior High School Time: 9:00-10:00 a.m. Date: Thursday, May 15 4. Teaching Writing Styles... logic, semantics, rhetoric, and literary form continuously through practiceNAs first or second person. Ideally this sequence would correspond both to his own intellectual and emotional growth... The strudare of the subject must be meshed with the structure of the student. A major failure of edu- cation has been to consider the logic of one almost to the exclusion of the psychologic of the other. If the elements of discourse are the transmitter, the receiver, and the message, it is the preoccupation with the teaching of the understanding and interpretation of the latter that becomes an overriding concern of the language arts curriculum. The use of visuals to engage students in the activities of discourse - reflecting, writing, and read- ing - could pYovide a bridge, a common message bond, be- tween the student writer and the class group receptors. The Use of Visuals to Facilitate Discourse Sources have commented on the implementation of vis- uals to stimulate language usage and expansion in the school setting. Advice to teachers of English (); pocket books for student use (7), (8), (14); and a filmstrip program (L5) have suggested the use of pictures and visual sequences to generate oral and written expression. A visual strategy plan provided concrete suggestions for the secondary teach- er to assist students in the improvement of paragraph organ- ization (13), More recently, in an article tracing the his- tory of the Visual Literacy movement, Debes,and Williams (3) described current programs for younger children in which visual /verbal connections were made to facilitate reading and writing skills. 5. Teaching Writing Styles... How could the teacher logically prepare to use the power of visuals to not only stimulate students' language facility but also to get to the deeper concerns of unity, coherence, and transition in paragraph organizat ion? One way to do this would be to restructure the analogous rela tionship suggested earlier in this paper retarding the par- ticipants in the communication process. The teacher would become the visual composer to facilitate students' function- al usage of thinking, writing, and reading of categories of discourse. The "what to teach" of language surface struc- ture would be a product of "how" the student processed his thinking and writing facility in relation ta the visual com- position. Written composition would be a projection of visual organization; transcribing, as a product of thought. This teacher/pupil interaction would accordingly be represented: THE VISUAL COMPOSER 4 THE VIEWER = THE WRITER = THE READER (Teacher) (Student) (Student) (Student) The transposition of order implies that a reading proficiency of categories of discourse could become an out- come and a by-product of writing involvement. This sug- gestion is invariant to the commonly accepted notion of the logical sequence of skills progression in the language arts curriculum, that is, that facility with reading should precede facility with writing. Yet, through the process of writing as an outgrowth of mental organization stimulated by visual composition, students could be let to understand 6. Teaching Writing Styles writers' techniques of paragraph organization. This could then generalize to an understanding of the organization of discourse in the content area subjects. The Four Categories of Discourse The four traditional categories of discourse - nar- ration, description, exposition, and argumensation - could provide the global backdrop for visual composition as they do for written composition. Teachers could turn to many excellent sources to investigate more fully the thougtt pro- cessing involved in composing and reading each of the four categories. Some student texts are conveniently organized according to these four styles (2), (4). Another is ar- ranged into major lessons on reading and writing descrip- tive, narrative, and expository paragraphs (0). A theor- etical framework for the growth of discourse outward from the child's ability to express himself to himself provides a conceptual point-of-view (10), while a sequential cur- riculum made up of particular practices and assignments for children of differing grade levels provides a practicum (11). The secondary school student's analysis of organizational structure could be further sharpened with critical reading of selected passages by famous authors (12). A Model: Illustrating the Use of Visuals to Generate Writing A model is conceptualized in the shape of an hour glass (see Illustration 1.) to graphically illustrate the teacher-pupil interaction in the process of bridging from visual composition to literary composition. A key strategy 9. Teaching Writing Styles... four categories of discourse. For instance, if the teacher wishes to evoke a descriptive-type paragraph, a scene could be filmed where objects and/or people are located in visual proximity to each other. In this way a spatial organiza- tion would be implied and the relating of this spatial re- lationship will help organize the student's uriting. The student would be prompted to use transition words and phrases such as, "by the...,behind the,.., ac:ioss from the...1"etc. On the other hand, if the goal was to portray an expository type organization, a scene such as a group of girls bakin6 a cake or another group replacing parts on a car could be shot. The major point is not to film just the finished cake or the renovated car, but to shoot each step in the process of the sequential action so that the student would be led into this type of organization. The student would then be cued to use transition words such as, "next..., after that..., finally,"etc., that lend coherence to an expository paragraph. The visual composer must look out into ttie world for visual compositions that can be captured or that have been captured on photograph. A visual composition is, in essence, a sequence of pictures that infers a unified mean- ing. The visual composition will unravel threads of meaning step-by-step before students' eyes. Almost any life exper- ience can become context for the visual message. The actual text, the written message, will be supplied by the student writer. 10. Teaching Writing Styles... 2. Formulating the Dominant Impression: The teacher will show the visual composition to a captivated student audience whose eyes are directed towards one focal point. Once the first visual is shown, each student's mental processing begins. He starts to predict meaning from forthcoming visuals, sam- ples cues from visuals in focus to verify and confirm mean- ing, and attempts to recall meaning from cues of previously shown visuals that associate with on-going meaning. UnliI'.e television or the movies where the speaker's or narrator's language is "in context" with the visualized scene, this strategy asks the student to supply his language and reactions to visual sequ.ences that come from the world about him. Since all students are unique in their internalized facility with language and in their attitudes toward certain topics, this involvement could generate differing levels of meaning in written discourse, i.e. literal, interpretive, critical, and or creative. The range could run from a straight literal description of what was viewed to a creative written work that was touched off by an inferred meaning of the visual message. Whatever level the student achieves, it becomes im- portant for the sake of unity, organization, and clarity that he formulates his dominant impression of the meaning he feels. This necessitates at least two showings of the entire vis- ual sequence. After the first showing, which was to esta- blish the meaning of the whole, this dominant impression should form. This suggest more input than just arriving at the main idea. Not only should the student be influenced 11. Teaching Writing Styles... by tne concrete meaning and asked to explicat" the central idea of that sequence, but also he should be asked to react to that meaning. In this way he will arrive at a point- of-view that will organize both his affect and his language on that topic. This desired outcome takes t/aining for those pupils who have difficulty getting beyond the literal level of meaning. 3. Jotting Down: However, whatever level of meaning the student generates in the dominant impression sentence, this point-of-view becomes the unifying element of the written composition. For instance, after viewing the cake baking se- quence, - Gloria literally writes, "The three girls baked a cake for the class party", while Sarah sitting alongside, writes on a more interpretive and creative level, "Baking a cake can be a messy but tasty business." Each girl having internal- ized meaning at different levels must select visual cues during the second viewing that relate to their own unifying impression. "Context clues" that relate to this dominant impres- sion are abstracted from each visual frame in the sequence. These clues must also 'relate to ideas suggested by visuals before and after the one that is serving as the stimulus for writing so that a smoothness of paragraph sequence is achieved. As each student jots down ideas and suggestions from partic- ular frames, he should also use those transitional words and phrases that will help lend continued coherence and smoothness in the relationships described in the paragraph. 14. Teaching Writing Styles... REFERENCES 1. Bay, Stuart and William Thorn. Visual Persuasion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and 15ValT5VIE77777 1974. 2. Baer, Louise and Harriet Haug. Success Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. CO., 19(0. 3. Debes, John and Clarence Williams. "The Power of Visuals," Instructor, December 1974, 31-38. 4. Gehlmann, John and Philip Eisman. Say What You Mean,Book Two:The Paragraph. New York: Odyssey Press,lnc., 19657 5. Goodman, Kenneth. "Reading Diagnosis Today...An Intimate Analysis of the Reader," in Time Frame. New York: Nassa'i BOCES, Research and Development Division, Vol. 3, No.2, Spring 1974, 13-15. 6. Heintz, Ann Christine. Persuasion. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970. 7. Leavitt, Hart Day. The Writer's Eye. New York: Bantam Pathfinder Edition, 3rd Printing, 1969. 8. Leavitt, Hart Day and David Sohn. Stop, Lookl and Write. New York: Bantam Pathfinder Edition, 12tn Printing, 7.969. 9. McCart, William. Reading/Writing Workshco 9. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1-9t b. 10. Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968. 11. Moffett, James. A Student Centered Language Arts Curriculum, Grades K-13: A Handbook for Teachers. Batton: Houghton Mifflin co., 1973. 12. Pauk, Walter. Perceiving Structure; A Skill at a Time Series. Proviaa7777775=5711Pub., 1975. 13. Sinatra, Richard. paper presented at the 26th Annual New York State Communications Convocation, November 6-9, 1973.ERIC, EDRS, P.O. Drawer 0, Bethesda, Md. 14. Sohn, David. Pictures for Writing. New York: Bantam Pathfinder Edition, 1969. 15. Sohn, Davi& Come to Your Senses: A Prorzarn in Writin Awareness. New York: Scholastic nook ery ces, r 15. Teaching Writing Styles... 16. Smith, E. Brooks, Kenneth Goodman, and Robert Meredith. Lan uage and Thinking in the Elementar School. New Yor: Ho c, hinenar an Wins on, Inc., L I, Chapter 9. 17. Smith, Frank. Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1971. 18. West, William. "Parallels in Visual and Verbal Composition", in Proceedings of the First National Conference on Visual Literacy, ed. Clarence Williams and John Debes. New York: Pittman Pub. Co., 1970, 270-273.