Motivation 2 Write

As the world and society begins to evolve, so does education. Our goal is to provide effective strategies for teachers and parents to look upon, in which would be the best strategy of motivation for their child or student. Writing continues to be an important aspect of their language and literacy domain, social and emotional domain, and everyday use.

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My Findings

After exploring a few articles on motivating ELL to write, I have found that Photo Elicitation, Poetry, and Technology have been successful in motivating students. This bring us back to integration of multi-modal learning. Therefore, multimodal offers many ways in which students can practice their writing skills in school and at home.

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ELL students may come from different backgrounds if they are immigrants, and they require the motivation to write about what they are experience in their new communities or in the cultures. When students are exposed to writing about themselves and their experiences they are motivated to engage and participate in future writing activities.

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“Image-based writing strategies challenge this invisibility and motivate ELL students to become aware of their own reasons to write.” -Zenkov, Ewaida, Bell, & Lynch (2012).

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Photo Elicitation Pedagogy Findings

Finding 1: Zenkov, Ewaida, Bell, & Lynch (2012), found that ELL studenst were motivated to participate in writing when they were sharing about their lives or photos that were taken by them. These discussions were done individually.

Therefore, photography being a way for students to have a fun interactive way, to them creat their stories and responses to the photos.

Finding 2: The students began to value the work they created and their peers put together. They were motivated by the reasons behind the photos. While they analyzed the photos they practiced interpretation. Working with peers allowed them to appreciate the work others presented and their purposes behind their photos. ELL students shared photos of issues or concerns they and in their communities and environments. Giving them the opportunity to share motivated them to continue to share their stories.

Finding 3: This activity seemed to intrigue our students because it created an even larger space for the incorporation of their lives and voices into the language arts curriculum.

The greatest aid to their motivation and academic success was developing an awareness of the factors that supported them in school, which was the focus of our photography and literacy project

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Photo Elicitation Pedagogy

Zenkov, Ewaida, Bell, & Lynch (2012), conducted a study were they integrated photo elicitation pedagogy for middle school students. There task was for them to take photos that would be describe these following questions:

What is the purpose of school?

What helps you to be successful in school?

What gets in the way of your school success?

They took over 3,000 photos and selected 50 of them. Then they participated in a discussion about the photos that they picked, their responses were recorded and transcribed, the students then drafted their transcriptions into reflections. This allowed them to practice their writing skills, such as editing and translation.

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Parents and educators need to understand the 7 stages of writing. These are the seven stages, and as students are developing their fine and gross motor skills. Students should always have a writing space available for them at home and in a classroom environment. In order to encourage and motivate their writing skills, having a variety of writing tools, and other materials to write on.

Modeling writing is helpful for the students to observe and watch one write. When they are writing it is important to point out the letter they are writing, and connect the sounds with the letters, this will help them connect sounds of letters, as they learn how to spell.

Reading to children and sharing words in the text helps them learn spelling skills.

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Poetry 2 Motivate ELL Students

Why is poetry and effective skills to be taught to ELL students?

Poetry offers a compact and highly expressive alternative to traditional and lengthy written texts. Introducing them to skills in grammar, structure, and word choice. They are able to read and write to decode the meaning and syntax vocabulary in English (Jones, 2010).

They will connect poetry to their personal experiences

Learning structure, rhyme, metaphors, new and acquired vocabulary, and a sense of relevance and purpose

ELL students, will learn the skills they need to understand English, by decoding words, and learning writing skills as they are introduced to poetry. Learning these skills through poetry will bring them confidence to read and write in English with a strengthened vocabulary, text structure, and prompting their writing in poetry with personal experiences. When sharing personal experiences it allows students to connect it to their writing, building their confidence will bring motivation to write in the future and continue developing their skills.

Jones, B. (2010). Motivating and supporting English language learners with the poems of William Carlos Williams. Middle School Journal, 42(1), 16-20.

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Teachers can share fun and engaging games when students are showing low motivation for writing.

ELL students towards learning writing skills and motivation to write-

The activities that this teacher shared with us are great group activities in which ELL students can learn new perspectives and responses from others. While engaging with others and being modeled by peers and teachers, the students learn connecting the letters and letter sounds to writing and reading. These are a few activities and strategies we as educators can practice with our students.

Emails (multimodal usage)-

As for the children/students to write emails: this is a great strategy parents can use too. Allowing them to use age appropriate writing multimodals, will give them a sense of belonging, responsibility, and confidence, communication skills, and writing skills.

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Strategy: Writing Prompts

When students are presented well put inspiring prompts, with clear writing instructions, expectations, and guidance; while giving the students a choice in their writing.

This is found to be effective to bring in engagement, confidence, connection and meaning to the students.

Robins (n.d.)

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“…the most effective ways to motivate students to write is by providing an opportunity to share their work with a real audience” -Kristy Robins

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Students who have higher writing skills are more motivated to write.

As educators and parents how do we support their achievement in writing?

(Graham et al., 2019)

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According to Graham (2019), Students who do not acquire the writing skills as their develop in their school learning have shown less interest to write. Teachers need to provide opportunities for these students to practice these skills in order to become competent writers.

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Writing Competence in Students

According to Alexanders (2003 as cited in Graham et al., 2019), the writing competence of students is a process in which there are changes in their knowledge, motivation, and strategic behavior.

The following changes include:

They have a stronger knowledge (More knowledgeable) as they practice and build a stronger text structure as well as a creating writing topics.

They have strategic procedures when writing (drafting, planning, editing, and revising), leading them to become competent writers.

Mastering these skills in their writing, creates competent writers and confidence in their writing, they are engaged to participate in writing activities at school. Therefore, teachers must create proper instruction to teach their students to master these skills.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., Fishman, E., Houston, J., Wijekumar, K., Lei, P. W., & Ray, A. B. (2019). Writing skills, knowledge, motivation, and strategic behavior predict students’ persuasive writing performance in the context of robust writing instruction. The Elementary School Journal, 119(3), 487-510

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"You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page" -Jodi Picoult

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This video explains what is multi-modal learning. Students can use -multi-modals as a resource to write in their classroom setting. This will ensure engagement and participation.

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Strategy: Using Multimodals in Classroom Setting

While using multimodals in a school setting the students benefit from low-level technologies. Within high school students they find techonology an engaging way for the them to write, and find more motivation when their writing is viewed peers online. 

When students are able to challenge themselves and experiment through multimodals, they have found that students are much more motivated to participate in writing for school assignments and have achieved in it. 

Teachers should:

Continue to use the traditional paper-based writing while transferring into the electronic-based writing. This will ensure for the students to continue to practice their skills in writing for level appropriate standards. With the integration of multimodals students will look forward to using them after they have drafted their assignments in traditional writing. 

When teachers are creating assignments for students, they must make sure they are introducing resources and techonlogy skills to help them engage and complete the assignments. Assignments with multimodal usage must be in school, for take home assignments students may not have access to techonology therefore, it would be unfair for them to practice these skills without resources. 

Darrington, B., & Dousay, T. (2015). Using multimodal writing to motivate struggling students to write. TechTrends, 59, 29-34.

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Personalize Learning for Students

Empowering a digital learner

Fostering student engagement

Developing agency and self-directed digital learning

Optimizing Assessments Using digital learning

Teacher Digital Learning Guide - Office of Educational Technology

This guide will inform you, as a teacher, as you plan for, implement, and assess technology used for teaching and learning.