Week 6

I got drawn into this idea of wanting to know what high school students are taught in English courses. Would it help me as a college teacher to know what the students were taught before me so I could build on that or alter it, depending. I asked my sister who is a sophomore in high school what she has learned about coherence. At first I didn't think she would know what the word was, but to my surprise she did and she had just finished a unit on coherence. She explained it as how she needs to make connections so the teacher can follow her paper and always know where she is going and what she is talking about. The ways the students are suppose to accomplish this is be using connective words or phrases, repetition and synonyms. For homework they were given paragraphs that were missing connective words or phrases and they were to insert them to make the paragraph easy to understand. Is this standard of all high schools? I was actually surprised because I don't remember learning about coherence until college. Is it beneficial to see what the students have learned about coherence, if anything, and build upon that. I guess what I am really interested in is the difference between high school senior English teachers and FY college instructors. How are high school teachers preparing their students for college and how much catch-up do we as instructors do to fill in the gaps the HS teachers left out? Are there some articles or research on this topic?

From class discussion it seems that many students have no clue when it comes to topic of coherence or cohesion. Fleckenstein's activity seemed the most successful when looking at what activities were in the articles. I think that showing the students how important topic sentences are to a paragraph or how the importance of details. I know that it is most effective to use student examples in the classroom, so I was thinking that when working one on one with the students I would use my different colors for different ideas, but when in the classroom I was Fleckenstein's activity to introduce the class to the idea of coherence and cohesion. I also liked the idea of taking a student paragraph and cutting it up and then having the students put themselves in the right order. It seemed to make the classroom more student centered and not lecture based which is something I want to strive for.