| Simultaneous Media: Writing in 3-Dimensions | ||||
| Home |  Despite the myriad recent advances in technology, most teachers still follow the process approach to teaching composition made popular through the National Writing Project some thirty years ago. Students brainstorm, draft, peer edit, then turn in their papers for a grade. Obviously, there is much to recommend such an approach. However, as a teacher, even the writing process was not sufficient to reach many of my students, especially those students who seemed to struggle with fundamental aspects of vocabulary and syntax. For many students, writing is an arduous, frustrating process in which they are constrained by their current grasp of the language and their ability to build words into sentences, then sentences into paragraphs. From years of asking students to revise and reconceptualize their papers, I have come to understand that many students perceive that changing the word large to big or brave to courageous constitutes significant revision. For struggling writers, the process of revision seems even more unfathomable. Once when I asked a group of ninth graders to write a paragraph describing a pizza as accurately as possible, one earnest boy named Jake wrote, "It tastes great!" I called Jake up to my desk and asked him, "If I told you this pizza tasted great, would you know what kind of pizza it was?" "All pizza tastes great," he said. "But does it have pineapple on it or does it have pepperoni?" I asked. "I like sausage and mushrooms," he said. "Aha! See, I couldn’t tell you were thinking of a sausage and mushroom pizza it was unless you told me that with words," I said, convinced that I had finally broken through. For five minutes, I noticed Jake at his desk thinking and writing. Finally, he brought his paper up to my desk. "The pizza had sausage and mushrooms on it," is what Jake had written. Writing in Three Dimensions A traditional two-dimensional diagram for the teaching of writing, the one that most teachers use, requries that a student create text based upon the following inputs:
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The difficulty with such a two-dimensional
approach to teaching writing is that it relies upon talents that struggling writers have
somehow never managed to develop over the course of their academic careers. In today’s media-saturated environment, the attention cues of many students begin with the eye and simultaneously engage the ear. Although movies, music, video games, and TV are often perceived as antithetical to students’ intellectual development, aspects of these media could actually enhance learning. During our experiment, using images and sound during the writing process stimulated student interest in writing and revision. To change the traditional approach to writing so that students would draw upon some of their talents outside of the purely linguistic realm, we used simultaneous media. We call this kind of activity "writing in 3-D." Students who write in 3-D use three -- not two inputs: a. Knowledge of topic, ideas b. Mastery of syntax and vocabulary c. Multimedia stimuli Through exposure to multisensory and simultaneous media, students are often able to reconsider their uses of language in ways that purely linguistic appeals would never permit. To see an example of student work, please click on the link below. You must have Power Point on your computer in order to properly view it. An Example of How Simultaneous Media Enhances the Quality of Student Writing More details of this research will be available in a forthcoming feature article in Virginia English Bulletin. |
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