en191s11: 2/6/11

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Homework for next Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011

1. Create a post with your own seven questions as well as seven of the core questions
Core Questions
1. Do you think it will be easy to find a job after college?
2. What was the hardest thing about transitioning to the U.S.? (Culture shock)
3. Why did you decide to come to SCSU instead of studying or working in your own country?
4. What is your opinion of the American diet? Kill it. Delicious greasy pizza.
5. How does the climate in your home country compare to here?
6. What are some cultural differences between your country and here?
7 Who takes care of the finances in your family?
8 At what age do men and women spend private time and at what age do they consider marriage?
9. What are your personal experiences with racism since coming to the US?
10. What were your preconceptions about the US before coming here and how have they changed?

2. Create a set of objectives for your interview process. What do you want to achieve, learn, encounter?
Create a post with the label "Interview objectives for _____ (your name)"

Objectives and questions for the interviews

When writing your questions, please be sure
• not to lead (manipulating the questions; "And how do you like it here in the great US of A", or "You must certainly think..."
• to allow the interviewee to ask questions of you
• to wind down the conversation slowly (you could ask whether your interviewee would like to add thoughts and ideas that you did not ask for, you could invite them to ask you questions, etc.)
• to thank your interviewee for the time and effort invested on your behalf

Each interview will have four components:

1. A country report (1-2 pages) about the country or region that your interviewee calls home

2. A process description: How did you prepare, conduct, record and transcribe the interview?

3. A transcript of the interview (you may adjust words and sentences, make mild editing choices where sentences are incomplete on the tape, etc)

4. A personal review what you thought about that interview, what was new and exciting, or what disappointed you. Here you compare what happened to your objectives, and draw conclusions.

Q&A with respect to interviews:
How many interviews with international students do I have to conduct and record?
Answer: 3
Do I have to transcribe all three?
Answer: You may deselect the weakest one and only transcribe the two best interviews.
What do I post if I de-selct one interview?
Answer: You post the country report, the description of the preparation process, your objectives, and the explanation why you chose not to transcribe this interview. Then you post all of that minus the transcript.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Synthesizing, categorizing, eliminating

Source for collecting categories and core questions
Group 1 speaker: categories and core questions
Group 2 speaker: categories and core questions
Group 3 speaker: categories and core questions
Group 4 speaker: categories and core questions
Group 5 speaker: categories and core questions
Group 6 speaker: categories and core questions

Monday, February 7, 2011

The outline: blueprint to success

You saw in class which qualities are needed in an outline that will guide your writing and argument well. While some students suggested that an outline has to be "short", we saw that short outlines did not provide enough guidance for the writing process. So while it is true that and outline must not have any superfluous elements, it has to be thorough and well thought out. The last outline we saw seemed to do that.
For this week, you have to think of 20 questions you want to ask an international student. This is the brain storming phase, and we will have to sort and group the themes and ideas. Put on your thinking cap which categories the questions belong into (e.g. family, country, politics, school, dating, whatever).
Be prepared to step forward and present your grammar topic on Tuesday.

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Resources

English 191 section 18
Spring 2011
Tuesdays MC 207

17:00-20:20

Dr. Roland Specht-Jarvis, LH 116
Tue+Wed 10:30-12 and by appointment M-F
rhspechtjarvis@gmail.com

All your blogs and entries are due at noon of the day we meet: Tuesday (unless otherwise indicated).

Recommended book:

The Bedford Handbook, 7th ed, Diana Hacker, Bedford/St. Martin, Boston, New York 2009

General considerations: Please be sure to

...always write a thematic statement before you start on a writing project. (This paper is about...)

...always cross-reference information or web-data. Have at least three different sources for whatever you want to use.

...always cite your sources. You find it on the web, you cite it. Citations from the web are easy: url plus date visited

If you use text verbatim, put it in quotes and cite the source. Paraphrasing does not allow using source text unchanged. It means you report on what you read. You need to cite what/whom you are paraphrasing, of course.

Hacker on-line exercises

if the page does not load, go to http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/bedhandbook7enew/and click Free and Open Web Site "go to site", then Grammar exercises and results, then hit the cancel button and you are there.

The Write Place at SCSU

U of Ottawa Writing Centre

-----------------Actual case: plagiarism -----------------
German Defense secretary...

___________Interviews__________________

Challenges and benefits1 2 .

Preparations and considerations

Outlines- example food
Outline interview 1 2 (doc)

Sample interview 1

Sample interview 2

Final paper on Malaysia

Sample prep report

Phases of an interview

Elements of each interview that must show up on your blog:

1. Describe the preparations.

How did you approach people?

When, where, and how did you conduct and record the interview?

Whom did you interview?

2. Describe the interview. What did surprise you?

3. Report on country/region and culture.

4. Transcribe the interview.

At least two interviews need to be transcribed. That allows for one report without the transcription. Still, we need to know the preparations, approach, interview process, etc. of that interview (1-3 above). Please be sure to choose interviewees from one country or region.

Class edited version of interview questions

5

6

Syllabus

Welcome to your English Composition class!

We will be meeting in the Miller Center

and enjoy access to the world-wide web during class time in Room 207. When using

internet resources, please remain critical about what you find. We will conduct the class

with a handbook that I recommend to buy: The Bedford Handbook, 7th edition,

Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston and New York, 2006-2009. You can buy the softcover

0-312-59504-2 version or the hard cover 0-312-59505-0. The book is not mandatory.

Just highly recommended. You will have to invest in paper for printing, and other

resources you may need, including a dedicated USB memory stick for your work.

You are expected to maintain all files for this course on your home computer or

husky space and also on that memory stick. You will create your own blog on

blogger by google. It is free. All members of class will be asked to read and review

writing samples. Everything you do for class goes into the blog. We are saving trees.

The course objectives

Reading, writing, and critical reasoning based on different text types and situations related to Global Cultures & Communications. We will explore the creative as well as analytical side of writing, discourse, and structure together. You will write short and longer papers and learn to edit your writing, improve your arguments, and become more effective communicators using blogs. All the while you will learn about other countries and cultures and explore the otherness of non-US speech, text, discourse and argument.

The semester will be structured as follows:

Part I: Four meetings we will cover LEO and writing topics from the University of Ottawa Writing Center.

Part II Preparing for interviews with international students, conducting interviews, and writing interview and country reports. This will cover October until mid November.

Part III You personal Final Project. This could be an additional interview, a comparison of several interviews, a research paper, or anything else we agreed on. The day of finals

is December 16. Your final project is due that day in your blog.

-- Several drafts are needed until a paper or presentation reads well .

-- Writing and researching improves as you allow others to critique your

work, and make suggestions for your benefit.

-- If in doubt about a sentence, paragraph, or page of your text and its role for

the entire paper, just cut it out.

-- Less is usually more, if less was edited and revised intelligently.

-- Any text element in your paper that is not your own writing and expression,

needs to be referenced as the work or idea of others.

-- Use of technology cannot make up for lack of reflection and poor writing design.

-- You can only write about what you know; resist writing about things

you do not understand.

Blog

You are expected to keep a blog. Whenever you freewrite, list,

research, or keep records of books and urls used, use your journal. The blog is supposed to show evidence of how you went about tasks, which books and homepages you used, etc. Every time you search for a topic (e.g. www.google.com)

I require you to record the urls used and the date you visited that page.

Use a word-processing program or an editor simultaneously with the browser to keep records. Print the pages after you saved it to your personal disk, USB storage card, or Husky account and paste it into your blog. If you forget or loose your journal you cannot work effectively in class that day. Immediately buy a new journal and reconstruct what was lost in the first one. A person without a correctly kept journal/blog cannot achieve better than a B – even if everything else is A+.

Grades will be based on:

Completeness and appearance of blog 30%

Post assignments, interviews 50%

Class participation, presentations 20%

Best paper (or post or interview) in class gives you a 10% bonus for the final grade. Missing a meeting without talking with me ahead of time costs you 5% on the final grade. Missing more than 20% of total class time, by department policy, forces me to fail you in this class.