 Last spring our professional development person was Dr. Mayer from York University and following her presentation on principles and practices of planning language and literacy programming for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, I had a number of requests about expanding on this topic and asking her to provide information on written literacy. She agreed and this is the presentation on writing literacy. It'll go for an hour and 15 minutes and we will have 15 minutes for questions. Please write your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the page. Sorry, I was asking a question and stating it at the same time. And then I'll read them out to Dr. Mayer during the questions section. So to introduce Dr. Mayer she is a professor at the faculty of education at York University in Toronto and she works in the graduate program in education, linguistics and critical disability studies and is the co-academic coordinator in the teacher preparation program in the education of deaf and hard of hearing students. Dr. Mayer has probably more than an hour and 15 minutes worth of material to present. So I think I'm just going to hand the mic over to her. There you go. Thank you, Sarah. I'm very pleased to be invited back through the airwaves to continue our conversation about literacy development and deaf and hard of hearing students. As you mentioned our focus today is going to be on teaching writing to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Just for everyone listening in I kind of have to say next slide because I can't press the button on my own so if we can go to the next slide. Interestingly when we think about literacy we most often think right away about reading and less about writing. And yet there are two sides of the same coin that to be a fully literate individual you really have to have proficiency in both reading and writing. But we tend to spend far less time on reading on pardon me on writing than reading even though I would argue writing is just as important and perhaps more so. Next slide please. If you think about the power of writing and the chicken and egg argument if you think about the fact that everything you read has to be written first so you know between us reading and writing researchers I kind of say the writing research has at the edge because you have to write what's going to be read. But the and the power of writing or the power of print as opposed to the power of spoken or signed language is that you can communicate across space and time. You can read things that someone wrote a long time ago. You can communicate with some with folks at a distance through print. It's also a way that we can record information and provide a permanent record. The way that spoken and signed language is really can't in the same way. From a cognitive perspective writing allows you to to reflect on what you've written. I can imagine all of you have had the experience of you write something down and you read it over and as you write your way through it you come to understand more about the topic as you write your way through what you're thinking and finally print or writing is so important because it works in concert or connection with other representation systems. You can sort of envision in a textbook beside a graph or a drawing if there's not a written explanation you're not sometimes sure what it is you're looking at and certainly it works in concert with all of the new technologies we have now. If you think about phones and texting and who do we see now that doesn't have a phone in their hand and is typing away. So in a funny kind of a way print has become even more powerful than ever in the current context of communicating through all the technologies that we have. Next slide. Interestingly though and perhaps this is why we spend more attention on reading than writing is that writing really is seen not just by me but as a lot of people who've written about it and I'm quoting Singer and Bashir here that this is one of the most demanding complex cognitive activities that most of us ever undertake. If we were actually looking at each other now in the same room and I asked you how many of you read for pleasure. My guess is many of you would have your hands in the air. But if I asked you how many of you write for pleasure. I guess I would imagine far less hands are in the air. Most of us don't see writing as fun even though I've just said it's very powerful and necessary. We don't see it as fun. It's difficult as one of my deaf student writers said when I read the English I only need to figure out what's already there. When I write I have to make the English. It's that challenge of the blank page. And to quote if I want to quote myself as a teacher not only is writing harder than reading for our students. I think teaching writing is harder than teaching reading. So one of the things I hope we're going to get out of today is some thoughts about how we can kind of crack that difficult educational nut in teaching writing. Next slide please. Here's some reasons why writing is particularly demanding. And this is one we're going to come back to. So it's just a little thought I want to plant into your minds at the beginning of this presentation. You can't write something you can't say. And by say I don't mean speech. I don't mean that you don't have good spoken language. What I'm going to come back to here is you can't write down something that you can't already produce in your through the air language in English. In a sense, if you think about what you do when you write, you're really dictating to yourself. So if you step back away and think about what writing really is, that you are composing in your head, you're talking to yourself. And as you talk to yourself, you write down what it is that you're saying to yourself in your head. You're dictating to yourself. And if you're writing in English, that dictation in your head needs to be in English. And the further challenge that makes writing such a difficult communicative activity is that you're doing this communication when the interlocutor or the person that you're communicating with is not in front of you. In spoken and signed language, you have the benefit of all of those auditory, visual, and gestural cues that come with face-to-face language. So your facial expression that shows you're asking a question, the tone of your voice that indicates you're being sarcastic. So when you say something like, ooh, nice dress, do we really mean it's a nice dress? Not so much. And if you look at the interpreter's face, now as I'm doing right now, you can see the expression on her face also helped convey the fact that the words nice dress took on a different meaning than if you just wrote down the words nice dress. So think about this for a second. If you're writing that in a story, nice dress, she said. Well, how do you get across the point that actually she doesn't mean it's a nice dress? Well, you have to do more with your language. You have to say nice dress, she said sarcastically. So you can see how written language puts more demands on your language repertoire than spoken or signed language do, because the interlocutor is absent. Those visual and auditory and gestural cues aren't there as you communicate across space and time. Next slide, please. Historically, although all students have challenges with writing, every student finds writing more difficult than reading. Historically, deaf writers found it even more difficult than many typically hearing children did or do. And the literature indicates that our deaf and hard of hearing writers have had challenges with almost all aspects of learning to write, including compositional structure, coherence, syntax, and grammar, spelling. Those of you who've been around for a while will recognize what I'm talking about in the following examples. Next slide. Here you'll see Jane, an eight-year-old deaf student, writing, I go to outside. I go waiting soon, start school bus. People lined door, walked in the school bus, and sit down. The bus driver traveled far to the zoo, wait soon, then stop. Next slide. And even as students move into the college years, historically, they still have faced those challenges with getting ideas on the page in correct English. Snakes and fishmen are not similar, but snake and fishmen are in competition. They tried to catch the fishes. Snakes tongue can drink the blood as smell. For those of you who've taught deaf and hard of hearing students, you know that this isn't often a case that the student doesn't know what they want to say, but they're challenged in getting their ideas across in English so that they can say it in a way that you fully understand what is meant. Next slide. In this piece, Robert writes, two smarts men have the equipment to the depth of ocean with bowl head and heavy outfit. Impossible to go there, but it is successful. If you think about what Robert means when he says bowl head and he's signing it, you can imagine when he signs it, all he can come up with is bowl head instead of the word helmet. So you can see that the challenges with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and structure persist from the eight year old deaf and hard of hearing writer to the college level writer historically. This is kind of what the research indicates. Next slide. And how we tried to address this as teachers and guilty as charged, I worked with these programs that we tried to teach writing to address these challenges in very scripted kind of structured ways. And one of the programs that I know I used and perhaps some of you used as well was the apple tree program. I think it's still around. Well, we tried to teach children how to write by giving them formulas. So through 10 basic language structures as apple tree does. And in the next slide, you'll see an example of a page from the apple tree program that you can see where kids are really writing very formulaic patterns in response to questions. And the idea was that if we did enough of this drill that the students would build a repertoire of English up so that they'd be able to convey what they wanted to say through print. There's not a lot of research evidence to show that we were very successful in this approach to teaching writing. Next slide. So the plan for our webinar today, and it's a tall order. So we'll have a go at it and see how far we get is to consider a model for teaching writing that's based on what we know about teaching writing to hearing learners. So that deaf students don't learn to write differently. In other words, the process is the same, but we need to support them perhaps more or in a differentiated way. We're going to look at some effective strategies and resources that we can think about. One caveat in such a brief amount of time, we're not gonna be able to have an in-depth focus on the really early years. That's a talk for another day, this sort of three to six year old crowd. Nor are we gonna spend a huge amount of time on learning to spell. And also there's one, I put this in red because this is a huge issue. We need to assume a threshold level of competence in the language to be written. Do you remember a couple of slides ago, I said writing is predicated on dictating to yourself in your head. And you have to be able to produce in your through the air language what you're going to put on the page. And those have to be the same language. So in other words, you're not going to be able to teach a student to write no matter how old they are if they don't have at least some threshold level of competence in English, if they want to write English now. Next slide please. If we want to now going back to, what is it we know about writing and the writing process? What is it we're actually asking children to do when we write? I want to appeal to the model of writing that's really most widely accepted in the literature for any, when you talk about teaching writing or learning to write with any student. And that's the work of Burrider and Scardimalia. And just, I'll just pause here for a minute and say that Sarah has a resources hand out for you. I should have said this at the beginning. I'm sorry, it's always weird to do these presentations when I'm not seeing you. It's a little bit like writing. I'm communicating without my interlocutors in front of me that Sarah has a handout so that any of the references I make, you'll be able to find those in the handout and you're going to see in some upcoming slides links to resources and materials. All of those are on the handout that Sarah can make available so you don't have to scribble madly. I should have said that before. So if you're interested in Burrider and Scardimalia's work it will be referenced in some of the chapters and things that are on your resources page. How Burrider and Scardimalia framed the task of writing was to think about two spaces, the content space and the rhetorical space. Now the content space is that stuff that's kicking around in your head. So imagine you want to write something, whatever it is, whether it's as straightforward as a shopping list or as complicated as a persuasive essay on the pipeline. Whatever the content is, it's kicking around in your head with all of the knowledge concepts and ideas you have. But the challenge of writing is you want to take that content that's now in your content space in your head and you need to bring it to the page. So how do you put that, what you mean down to the page, the bottom up stuff? How do I say what I mean? How do I find the words, the sentences? How do I spell them? How do I put those ideas together so that I capture what I mean in the print on the page? So that's the first part of writing. But the part that often students don't understand or haven't thought about is it doesn't end there. It's not a one step endeavor that you move the content to the page and once it's on the page, you need to go and look at it and a good writer then reads what they have written to see if it actually says what they meant. Now, that seems so straightforward but we all know how difficult that is. You have ideas in your head, you try and get them down on the page and then you read it over and you think, wait, that's not quite it. That's not exactly saying what I intended to say. And that next step that going back from the rhetorical space back to the content space is that notion of you have to read like a writer. You have to read as if you don't already know what it says. I know that can sound a bit confusing but if you think of what the challenge is that students often have, is they know what they want to say, they plunk something down and they just say, well, that's it, I'm done. I've said it. Not realizing that someone else reading it doesn't have all of the knowledge that's in their head and they haven't captured it all on the page. So this recursive process of generating a text then revising it and going around is really what the writing process is all about. And to do that requires you not just to have content knowledge, which often our students have but it also requires you to be able to organize that content using the language that you have to write it down in. So that's that challenge of if you don't have enough English no matter how many great ideas you have, you're not gonna be able to get them down on the page. Next slide please. So in other words, when we think about teaching writing we need to think about writing as a process not something formulaic like the apple tree program. And this applies to all writers if they're going to be effective. It's not a linear process, it's recursive. It's a loop and it's one that involves planning, generating the text, then revising that text, many often multiple times and then you put that writing to some kind of use. Next slide please. So the model of teaching writing that I bet most of you are familiar with and there are different ways in which this is described in the literature. I like the term writer's workshop. Some people talk about process writing. There are many ways in which this model can be described but it's all of these processes are ways that they think about writing as this loop, this recursive process as opposed to a linear structure. So what I want to do is make an argument for writer's workshop, which I'm sure you're familiar with but to talk about ways in which we can use that in the context of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Next slide please. So in a writer's workshop approach, we want to value not just the product, not so that it's spelled correctly and written beautifully but as a process that allows for revision and editing. A key element is we want to emphasize communicating for authentic purposes with a balanced focus on both meaning and form, not just that it's spelled correctly and looks nice but that you're actually saying something that matters. It also allows students to be at various stages of the process at one time. So if you're working with a class, not everybody has to be doing everything at once. That being said, I think most of you or at least some of you today probably work as itinerant teachers and that if you're working individually or with a group or across a range of ages or settings, writer's workshop can be implemented. It's a very flexible approach. Next slide please. This is just another way to graph some of the elements of writer's workshop that are gonna become clear when I'm gonna play a little video for you that I'll tell you about in a second but every writer's workshop in thinking about it has to touch on these five things. There has to be first an opportunity to write. One of the things that the research literature shows is in the teaching of language arts, we actually spend very, very little time having children write, yet we expect them as they go through school to use writing as the way in which they demonstrate what they know. So there's a bit of a conflict there in that they haven't really been given enough time to learn how to write before we expect them to use it as a tool for learning and to demonstrate learning. And in a good writer's workshop, there's opportunities to share the writing, to conference, and I'm gonna talk about what those are in a second, as well as to be able to talk about where they are in the process. And there's also a space in writer's workshop for directed instruction that we call the mini lesson. More on all of this in a second will become clearer when you see the video clip. Next slide, please. What I'm going to show you, because I did try and teach writing through the very formulae scripted approach and was very unhappy with the results that I got with the students that I was working with. And so quite a few years ago now, and when you see the video clip, it will become very apparent when you see the hearing technologies we were using. I was able to work with a teacher, the deaf school was twinned with the school, the hearing school, and I integrated with the first and second grade classroom. There were 30 hearing kids and my five to seven deaf students, we ran this program for four years. There were two teachers in those days, we didn't have any interpreters in the classroom, so I had to sign for myself. And we had no educational assistance, there were not so many of us compared to how many kids we had, but what we decided to do was, every day for 90 minutes, four days a week, we ran Writers Workshop in this integrated program. And what you'll see in the video that's gonna come up in a second are this notion of status of the class, like what are you all doing? Do you know what you're doing when you walk into the Writers Workshop? Time for writing and conferencing, more on that in a minute, sharing time that we call the author's chair and a space for many lessons. And one of the key elements of a Writers Workshop was the ongoing publishing of students work. Next slide, please. So when the students would come into the class at the beginning of our 90 minute session, there were sign up sheets and the students would sign up for either their turn in the author's chair or that they wanted to conference with myself or my teacher partner or they wanted to conference with one of their peers. So it was a way that the kids got organized when they came into the classroom because all of the children were doing different things at different times. Next slide. This is what the sign up sheets looked like. There was nothing too fancy about them. I would like to share a piece of writing with the class and the students would put their name on the list and we would go down the list and then you can maybe make out the fact we would date, put a date beside the time when the student had shared a piece of writing with either us or in the author's chair. Next slide. And the first thing that happened when we came into the class after the students kind of got set up to what they were about that particular day, we would spend the first big chunk of time of the 90 minutes, probably 45 minutes that we called writing time and the students, some of them were at this point creating a first draft. They might be illustrating a book. They might be revising. This was also the time when we did one-on-one conferencing. Next slide. One-on-one conferencing happened sometimes with among the peers. So these are two deaf students, one of them had completed a piece of writing that he read to his friend in the class and his friend commented on the piece of writing. Next slide. And we also had teacher conferences and these are critical. And if you're an itinerant teacher, you wouldn't be worrying about this group organization. This would just be what you would be doing one-on-one with students. But my experience had been we focused so heavily on form that we often missed out the meaning of what students were writing about. And so this is a student's first draft. This is a six-year-old deaf student and you can see her draft there. That's without any correction that what she produced on her own. In the conference, what I asked her to do was I would turn it over and I'd say before we read this, can you tell me what your story is about? So she explained to again, focus first on meaning because obviously you can see by this sample the student is challenged with English. So I asked her to tell me what it was about. So she signed to me that this was a story about her dad in the car and her dad was angry at someone, at a man, and the license number of the car was the license number she has there MCY994. So what she basically, then we turned over the paper and she said what this says is dad was in the car, dad was mad at the man, the license was MCY994. So after she told me what it was about, in the conferencing, I asked her to expand on the information, why was dad angry? What happened before? Give me more detail about what happened in this event. You haven't said enough for me to understand what it is you're trying to say. So remember the content space and the rhetorical space? She knows more about this topic than she's been able to put down on the page. So what you're trying to do in the conference for meaning is to say what more do you know that you haven't included here? Because often students don't realize if you don't write it down, the reader of your writing doesn't know that you want to say it. So if you look at the next slide, you will see when we had her next conference, you can see how she's expanded it. Even though the English is still not strong, she has managed to expand her writing based on our conference. So now she says, my dad was near the store, dad was mad at the man because he smashed the car. The license number is MCY994. The policeman gave the man two tickets. So you can see that this is a much improved piece of writing in terms of content, even though we have a fair ways to go still with working on form. The good news is in 2018 or 19, we have students who are less challenged with English so they mightn't have quite as much difficulty getting this in standard English as this student did. But I think the notion of expanding for meaning applies in the same way. Next slide, please. Here's another example, just to quickly show you, you can see the line between the two pieces. The student first wrote a story about Happy Valentine's Day and you can see in her second draft how she's expanded it. She's added more information, added a drawing. So what we found in this approach was that after individual conferencing with the students, we were always able to get them to write more and they were keen to do it. Next slide, please. A key element of writer's workshop for us is author's chair. Now, in an itinerant setting, the author's chair might just be the student reading the piece to the teacher, but author's chair is a place for two reasons. One, to celebrate work that was already done. So if a student had brought a piece to fruition, had gone through a couple of drafts and now we've got to a final form and they've illustrated it and made a book and they're going to share the book they made, the celebration of completed work was part of author's chair. But a key aspect of author's chair is also getting feedback on what you've written so that you can improve your writing. And if you think about this, when you're gonna watch a video of a deaf student reading to the class from author's chair, you're going to see how the other students weigh in to give the author ideas of what to add, but not only is the author getting information, the students are as well, as they have to listen to a piece of text and reflect on it and see what's missing. So it benefits not only the author, but also the listeners. Next slide, please. This is the class watching the student read from the author's chair. Next slide, please. And we would always end every session of writer's workshop with a mini lesson, which was a structured lesson around punctuation, grammar, spelling, we had a word wall. It was the more structured piece of our writer's workshop and it came from what the students showed us they needed or it came from the curriculum. Next slide, please. What you're going to see in the video coming up is kind of what writer's workshop looked like. It's captioned a few places, the captions aren't, they might be slightly off, but for the most part is captioned quite clearly. This piece, you're going to see picture of me, my younger years, conferencing with one of the students, a one-on-one conference with Raheel and he is telling me about playing outside, playing basketball. And this is the piece of writing that we're working on and you can see some of the editing that he and I were doing on that piece through the conference. And you'll see how the conference worked. And what you'll see is how I asked him to focus first on why he's writing and what's important and what's his story about before we worry about the English and the spelling and the grammar. Next slide, please. Then you're also going to see a young girl. She's six, profoundly deaf and you'll see she's wearing an FM system, the FM system of the day, but actually it doesn't even have any batteries in it. She did not benefit at all from amplification but she was a very good user of sign-supported English. And you will, when you watch her, you will see how she signs and you'll see her mouthing a lot. And this is the story that she reads out loud, well, out loud, she signs out loud. The story is called My Bad Baby and you can see that there's a star in the middle of the story that she'll talk about. We taught the children, we didn't allow erasers in writer's workshop because all the kids did was erase. So we said, if you have something to add or you've made a mistake, you cross things out, you put in carrots, the little Vs that go up to add a word. And here we said, if you want to add, you can put a star and then that's the bit that goes in there. So she'll be talking about that when she reads your story out loud. Next slide, please. So what you're going to see now, we're going to play the example of writer's workshop. Again, this is from a few years ago, well, she more years ago now than I care to admit. But what I would argue is even though this happened a while ago, this approach to teaching writing is relevant and still applicable. And what you will see is how it can work with deaf and hard of hearing students. All right. How's the client, Melissa? How are you? Right here, that is wonderful. And it's a total of too much. It's a lot of interest for me. And for each of you, I'll have your attention. Yeah, first, the first page. I'll use this one. No, what do you do with it? I don't do anything. I'm just going to use this one. I'm just going to use this one. I'm just going to use this one. And you got eight baskets into the group. Right. You all run around and then you got eight baskets into the group. Who got the most baskets? Who got the most? You did, yourself. Congratulations. And you wrote about that in your story. Can you read your story for me, please? So we got the most baskets. Sunday, baby brother was in his walker and walked in the bedroom downstairs and pulled the beautiful flowers. And my mom said to him, no, don't shoot, pull the flowers. Perfect. My baby brother, my baby brother thought the flowers were something to eat. I'm not finished. But the baby still pulled, and my mom slapped him, slapped him on the hand. And he started to cry. Then he stopped crying. And yes, I plan to publish the story. Janet, do you have any pictures for this? Which part do you think are the flowers? Do you plan to publish this? Yes, remember I told you on the back. Yes, I plan to publish it. I've already said that. Raheel, did you number the page? No, the idea. Because it was true story and it was a wonderful idea. This mosses. Does your baby do other bad things? This is the one thing pulling the flowers. Most of the time? Yeah, most of the time. Erica. Christopher. P-H-R-I-S-T-O-F-P-H-E-R. Megan. Are you going to add anything out, Tim? No, see I already added. The part with the stars, I finished adding it. Are you going to publish it now? Yes. Remember I said that. Sylvia? A half month. Because I had a star. They were artificial. I'm curious about the star in your story. Why did you have the star in your story? Because there wasn't enough room for adding. So you used the star to add something in? It means that there was not enough room to write. One more question. I don't know. Thank you, Karina. I just wanted to mention something that Megan and I talked about. Yesterday. She called me over because she was writing her story about the Easter egg. She said that she had changed a lot of things in the story. She had used lines when she wanted to leave something out. What did you say about using the lines, Megan? You used the lines to be a little bit faster when you were writing. Sorry, Reg? That's right. So I'm glad that people are remembering that we talk more people remember on their first draft. That they can use lines instead of their erasers. Or characters. Or characters. And what did Karina use in her? Okay. I hope that's given you some sense of what our writer's workshop looked like and a way in which particularly in the author's chair and the conferencing that that interaction supports the development of content. If you're interested in looking at a couple of examples of places where you can see more descriptions of different ways in which writer's workshop could be implemented. Here are two links. One at Reading Rockets and one at the Ontario Ministry of Education that you can have a look at. Next slide, please. Just in the sense of implementing writer's workshop. I'm going to kind of quickly in the interest of time go through. Well, I picked 10 sort of principles because, you know, 10 seems like a good starting point given the 10 commandments. So nice kind of balance number, sort of 10 things to think about when you're implementing writer's workshop, whether or not it's within an individual situation or a classroom. Next slide, please. The first thing is really basic. You have to make time for writing in the school day, or as part of the child's program. As I mentioned before, research shows writing gets the short end of the literacy stick, and often students spend very, very little time in writing that's not either copying or spelling or very directed. The second in implementing it is you really need to establish routines for how the class is managed so that students know what's expected of them. That's more applicable if you're working in a group, obviously. The other element in our busy teaching lives is that you can actually address all aspects of the writing curriculum within a process writing approach. So, you know, keeping your eye on whatever the mandated curriculum is, the things that need to be taught can be embedded in a process approach. And the fourth implementation kind of principle that I think is probably one of the most important, if you want to motivate kids to write, because often kids aren't typically motivated, especially if they've had an experience of seeing writing as really drudgery and filling in the blanks and being right or wrong is a notion of using writing for authentic purposes. Next slide, please. As Gay Sue Penel says, you need to start with meaning first and then focus on form, not the other way around. And I'm not here to say that form doesn't matter. Syntax, grammar, spelling, English matters. But unless kids are motivated to write in the first place, they have nothing to use English for. And so it's this tension between form and function, but always, if you keep an eye on function first, then form has a role to play. It's not English for its own sake. It's English to get a certain job done in print. So if we look at, in the next slide, those of you, oh, I forgot about this. I forgot just to lighten the mood when you're sitting watching webinar. It just always feels so weird to me when I can't see your faces. This reminds me of the way in which I taught, was taught writing in which we filled the page, often with ideas that weren't particularly interesting to us. As Agnes says, my summer vacation, this summer did not turn out as I had planned. I accomplished absolutely nothing that was noteworthy or remarkable. A theme I would love to continue well into the last paragraph of this composition. It reminds me a little bit of the way I used to teach writing when kids would journal every day, not for any particular purpose, but they had to fill in the journal and talk about what they did on the weekend or what they did yesterday kind of endlessly, but in some sense without much purpose. So what I want to argue for is thinking about that differently. And if you look at the next slide, you'll see a framework from holiday that when I presented to you before I introduced this framework. So I won't spend time on it here other than to say, just as spoken and signed language function, written language also functions to accomplish things. We don't write just for the sake of writing, for the most part, we write to get a job done. And those jobs or those authentic purposes cover the range from the instrumental function using writing to get what you want to request something, to regulate behavior, think about signs and advertisements. They regulate behavior. They want you to do something based on the text you read. The interactional function. We use writing to communicate with others. Think about email and texting. And we go down the list. And if you go to the last two functions, the heuristic and informative, we use writing for all of these things in school all of the time to describe, compare, discuss, predict. Those are all the words that we see when we teach written language or when we use written language to assess information in all of the subject areas like history and geography. The best way for me to explain this, especially later in the day on a Thursday, is to show you examples of, these are students, some deaf, some hearing, and I'll tell you which, showing how they used written language to communicate. Next slide, please. You're going to see a lot of invented spelling here. This is a hearing child writing. Ms. Moskis, what time will I bring in my dinosaur to show you my dinosaur? Next slide. Dear Ms. Moskis, I want, and can you read this one? Really hard, really hard work. Please and thank you, signed Ryan. Next slide. Think about the regulatory do as I say function. Please put these in a safe place. By Megan for Ms. Moskis. Next slide. This is a deaf student writing to his parents because he wants something. Dear Mr., this is his dad. Dear, dear to my dad. A big hello. I'm not happy with you because you said, no, I can't go on the subway to school. I am not happy because my friends go on the TTC. That's the subway to school. I am 13 years old. I can't ride in the school bus like a baby. I like the subway because my friends talk with me and are on the school bus. We are not allowed to talk to other people. Do you understand? I hope you will understand. Well, I am not happy with you. And my mother to TTC. The school will give tickets every day. He's wanting something. He wants to manage their behavior. And he's using print to do it. Next slide. This is a deaf student. Dear Connie, I forgot to tell you about, did you know that my mother have five children? Next slide. Dear Connie, Janet asked me to go to your room to ask you two questions. I did, but you were not there. So I'm leaving this note for you. You remember we went to Quebec City? What was the famous church built four or five times? And what happened to them? Next slide. This is using journaling, I think, in a really useful way. This was a journal that went between mom and dad, the teacher and the student. And the student writes, I learned practice sewing with paper. I'm trying to understand how. We were laughed at Gorsen because Gordon were expression faced with kids. I was in joy with Gordon's story as fairy tale. I was learning how to change his body. Woman's name Kim. We learned girls and boys body changes. Who Gordon? This is actor who guy was deaf was came my school. And then mom replies, I see you learn lots of things. It was sure it was surely exciting to see. A deaf man in person. Love mom. The point of this is think about what's going on here in terms of both reading and writing and getting information across. And in this particular instance, really powerful because mom, mom didn't sign and spoke. Mandarin at home and mom in the child is mostly a signer. And even with the bumpy English was still able to convey information to her mom. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to convey information to her mom. Next slide. And this is just, students would write me letters often because they knew that I saw writing is valuable. The PS here just made me chuckle. I will give Mrs. Barry's husband letter to you okay. I will give foot one a photo to you. I love you so much and see you anywhere. Again, pointing out that if there's enough English or threshold level, you can get your message across. Even if there are some bumps, it's just the more English you have, the easier it is to do. Next slide. This is getting into using written language to make apologies, to think through something. So this is don't swear. I think swearing is a very bad habit if anybody does it. So if somebody does it, it's a good idea to stop because swearing is a very foolish thing to do. I don't like swearing, but by my foolishness, I said it two times. Once I didn't mean it, and once I just felt like saying it. Next slide. Deaf dinosaurs. This came from doing a pattern book where we talked about exciting dinosaurs, ferocious dinosaurs, meat-eating dinosaurs, and we also had deaf dinosaurs. Next slide. This is the imaginative function. Dear Miss Muffet, today you were sitting on a tuffet and I just wanted to sit beside you. I'm sorry I ate your curds in way. I will bring you another bowl. I wasn't trying to scare you away. If you see me again, don't be afraid. From the spider. Next slide. Why kids bully? Why do kids bully is a difficult question to answer? What's the point of it? And in what enjoyments do they get out of it? They're taking the risk of discovery and the re-amplifications if you're caught. People have tried to answer those kinds of questions for years. Well now I'm going to give it a try. And the last slide, or of these examples, is by a deaf student who in his book reports writes, I thought the story had a brilliant beginning which really hooks you, but the ending was a bit of a disappointment. Tension was built rather well with each note being placed into the language. So I'm going to give it a try. I hope you can see in these examples the range of the kinds of writing we can do. So in the next slide, if you think about, let's just go on past the examples. Next slide, please. If we think about considering Paladins functions of written language and you really think about teaching here, we need to think much more about how the types of writing genres that we have tie into each of these functions for both beginning and novice writers and developing in more advanced writers. And if we were together right now, what I'd like you to think about is how you can make connections to other subject areas and the curriculum by thinking about Paladins functions of written language and how they tie into the genres we're required to teach and how you can use writing across all of them remembering that the earlier genres like the I want function are much easier to write than the later functions like the heuristic. If you saw how those examples developed over time giving a direction like don't do something or writing a shopping list, which is an example of the I want function, you are writing down what you want to buy are much easier than writing an essay. This is a really useful way to think about how you introduce different types of writing systematically from easier to more difficult and also ways to tie them to the curriculum that provide opportunities for writing that are much richer than perhaps some of the ways in which we have had deaf students write in the past. Next slide please. This is just an example of some of the genres that fit into the different functions of language that Halliday described. Next slide. Another place for resources here would be to go to the MOOC center. Now in the MOOC center they make a daily language calendar for through the air language in your classroom or with your students you can also have a daily writing calendar. So what's a writing activity that's short and quick but some purpose for which you put written language on a daily basis that is purposeful for students. So not just through the air ideas every day but ideas for using writing for real purposes on a daily basis. So kids begin to see writing as a tool for communication, not simply as something that they need to do to fill the page. Next slide. When in a writer's workshop it's important to be thoughtful about the choice of topic. I think that goes without saying that most teachers think about that children are keen to write about what they're interested in. We didn't find we had trouble getting kids to write when we allowed them to explore the topics that were of interest to them. It's an opportunity to integrate writing done in other subjects in the writer's workshop, particularly with older students. If they have to write a book report or a science experiment or an essay in one of their other academic subject areas they could be doing that work in the writer's workshop in that class with you so that it serves the purpose. They need to get that done and you can work with them in the framework of the writer's workshop and always creating opportunities for sharing and publishing of work and as well ensuring a balance between the writing of narrative and expository text. To say a little bit more about that on the next slide, typically if you think about narratives it's where we start by narratives it's sort of the what happens the end then stories we start with writing because it's the more natural transition from spoken to written language we write down what we say so in the next example you'll see a student writing this is a hearing student writing a story about one day little Evie went outside to play she saw her mother and then they went on the swings and then they went to play on the slide they had a fun time you'll see the end then and then and then in the next example this is done by a deaf student who writes and she is writing a narrative about a wordless book called the chicken thief and then they were at the top and the fox and the chicken went to sleep again and then he got a boat and the people got on them and then they got out of the water so you can see the similarities between the narrative of the hearing and deaf writers here this is where we start the next slide you'll see that school lives in the land of expository text what typically happens is we spend a lot of time in the younger years having students write narratives in the writer's workshop or in writing class and not so much time on expository text even though that's where most of school happens school is writing expository text much more often than narratives if you stop to think about the writing in your life or school it's rarely a narrative most often an exposition and these are harder to write they use less familiar language and they're more dependent on making logical causal arguments and they're just harder to put together than a narrative so some examples of that would be here in the next few slides this one this is a second grade writing about dinosaurs and this teacher was already pushing the students to write expository text as well as narratives and you can see the difference in structure between this and the end-end story when he writes dinosaurs are very big animals and they lived a long time ago these are some kinds of dinosaurs tyrannosaurus rex pterodactyl brontosaurus and stegosaurus and you can follow along and see how that story progresses and if you look at the next slide this is a deaf student who writes about the play of amidaeus and actually this is a pretty impressive piece of writing where this student writes about comparing amidaeus to the play to many historical records such as the bible the seven deadly sins and how one particular sin applies to amidaeus this is this is a dense expository text it's not that we don't value both types of texts it's just expository texts are where school lives and one of the things we need to do in teaching writing is expose students to these kinds of texts sooner rather than later next slide the last two things in the implementation of writer's workshop would be to provide explicit modeling at all stages of the process and that's by it was interesting when we did writer's workshop that the kids sometimes didn't even realize that when you actually are doing writing you have to stop and think about what you're going to do first what's the plan? what are you going to write about? how might you start? modeling some of that allowed we would put a blank page in front of us we would say okay before I start what kind of things do I want to include? what might my title be? so we would model out loud some of the things that we wanted the students to start doing as strategies when they wrote themselves and as well including some direct explicit instruction can also be part of writer's workshop so in the next section just before we finish I want to just give you a few strategies and a bit more less of a broad overview and more specific strategies that you might support you in implementing if you buy a notion of writing as process and a writer's workshop approach some of the strategies that you can implement within that approach so in a notion of planning in that first stage of the writer's workshop in the next slide you'll see the first idea we might want to talk about is brainstorming some kids get stuck on coming up with a topic some ways to support that are things like writer's notebooks word walls, semantic webs conceptual maps that sort of when you sit around and you brainstorm a topic and getting some ideas down in point form before you start on the next slide another good idea that kind of piggybacks onto the notion of semantic webs or conceptual maps are one of my favorite tools for doing writing planning which are graphic organizers I'm sure that's a term that you're really familiar with but they are a wonderful tool for providing a scaffold for organizing the content they provide a visual framework to put ideas down for either a narrative or expository text and the interesting thing about using them is that you can use them back to front and front to back in other words you can use them to create a text but what we don't often do that can be really useful for writers is to have them use them to analyze a text so we'll talk about that as we look at a few examples coming up so in these graphic organizers on the next few slides you'll see that how the narrative text looks so much more simple than the expository text where the narrative text is a beginning a middle and an end that goes in a nice sequence and in the next slides you'll see how the expository text is much more complex looks like a spider web it's not linear everything has to relate to everything else and so it's much more difficult to organize what you want to say and make sense in an expository piece of writing than it is in a narrative and in the next slide you can see how you could use one of these graphic organizers not only to plan before you write but also if you look at how much is embedded in this graphic organizer you can see how it allows you to plot characters and settings so if you had a student reading a piece of writing they could then look at that piece of writing and plot what they had read in a graphic organizer next slide you can see here an example of a deaf student who made a story plan about a story to do with Captain Underpants and he's got thought bubbles that go in his story plan of how he's going to produce this narrative and in the next example you can see a student who used a graphic organizer he's also deaf to create a compare and contrast where he was looking at what was the same and different about the Elephant Man in the end of the 1800s and how both of them experienced discrimination in the same ways and in different ways and he came up with this essay that he entitled in the next slide you'll see the essay that he wrote that's called Different Between Same and in the interest of time he was able to read it but he was able to use the graphic organizer to get the information onto the page it helped him come up with a plan next slide some of the resources that you'll see in your handout for graphic organizers are there don't waste your time making your own there are so many good ones out there and they're so generic you can use them from the most beginning writers to very advanced writers and I use them with my students at the university at the doctoral level to help organize chapters in their doctoral thesis next slide in generating the text there's a few strategies to put out so this is the point at which now you've got a plan now you have to get something down the page on the page what can support students well some examples would be in the next slide reading aloud helps students generate text and I know this maybe seems wrong but if you think about it for a second we often ask students to generate a text that they've never heard go back and think about narrative and expository and think about by the time we ask a child to write their first narrative they've already heard dozens of them by the time we ask them when we ask them to write their first essay or book report they've probably never read one so they have no model in their heads of what that type of text sounds like so reading aloud from a range of genre can be an excellent way to support text generation next slide engaging in literate discourse is also very very supportive of helping students generate text by asking them to have conversations before they write using the kinds of language that we're going to expect them to write down remember what I said about you can't write anything you can't already say so we often ask students for example to provide an explanation or retell with supporting details in writing before they've been able to do that in or through the air language next slide I'm going to skip over these examples I will make them available for you just so that we have enough time for our Q&A so could we go past this slide and the next slide dictation I wanted to make sure to get to because it is really one of the best text generation activities for kids who are really struggling because if you do think about writing as dictating to yourself one way to get there is to use dictation as a strategy so even for older students who struggle I often have them dictate and I scribe because that takes the challenge of the generation of the actually the holding the pencil typing and the spelling and all of that away from the student and puts it onto the teacher so that student dictates and the teacher scribes then you once that starts to happen the student sees okay what I say is what gets written down then student and teacher can alternate dictating and scribing I do a sentence you do a sentence then an interesting thing to do it occurred to me one day is really valuable to see where a student's challenges are can you dictate you dictate and they scribe why that's useful is even though you're generating the English what some students have a challenge with is holding in their head what you've said and writing it down so think about this for a second if they can't write down what you said they're going to have trouble writing down what they're saying to themselves in their head could be indicating an auditory memory issue a real challenge with with getting things down on paper the actual physical piece the spelling it can give you some insights in where the challenges are so that ultimately when a student dictates and the student scribes is that notion of dictating to themselves in their head the one thing that goes back to something I said very early on you can't dictate an ASL in your head and write in English that isn't dictation that's translation and that is one of the most complex cognitive activities one engages in is translation and then to overlay that on another complex activity like writing is just a huge ask it's not one that most of us can do and I'm not sure why would expect students who are deaf to be able to do it next slide close activities are another great idea for text generation where you want to focus on the small bits of language that our students can have trouble with whether it's the morphology such as endings or prefixes and suffixes and one can do that either in through the air language or through print where you leave blanks and have the students fill them in so if you go back to the dictation activity what sometimes would happen when the students would dictate to me they would leave out words or they leave off endings when I scribed it I would leave those out and put blanks in and then I would go back with the student and we'd read it together and say okay now read it do you see what's missing can you figure out what you haven't put in and interestingly often the students could fill it in once we re-read it and they recognize that they hadn't put in the ED and missed out an and and if they couldn't do it themselves I would supply it and that's how we started to work on building up the English and an awareness of those little bits of morphology that our students often omit next slide please and this is just an example of a mad lib as one example of a close activity that is great for writing development next slide I'm not going to play this link but I'm happy to send it to Sarah providing text for a wordless book is another great way for text generation because the ideas are already there in the pictures and the student generates only the language in the content space becomes easier because the content is provided next slide pattern books are another great text generation activity because there's a pattern to glom on to the students have a scaffold for supporting the writing so again it takes some cognitive load away so text generation becomes easier and for anyone familiar with brown bear brown bear you'll recognize skeleton with blood skeleton with blood what do you see I see ET looking at me Frankenstein Frankenstein what do you see I see a bat looking at me next slide I'm not going to say much here about spelling other than really quickly we can't possibly teach deaf students all of the words in the English language through memorization just not possible we all know kids can learn about a hundred or so sight words and use them over and over again and that's great but unless they learn how to decode and encode by relying on some phonological skills they're going to be pretty limited in their ability to spell the words that they know so if you look at the next slide you can see just even in the basic word list how it would not be possible to memorize all those words in terms of how to spell them next slide and the challenge of a sight word approach as you those of us who've been teaching deaf and hard of hearing students know labeling and having students remember is not the way to go so the approach that I would suggest as we can see in the next slide is to go encourage invented spelling so you've already seen quite a number of examples of invented spelling but just even at the very beginning of this piece if you can guess who this student is writing to it looks like Dear Mr. Baugh it's actually Dear Mr. B.A B-E-Y-E-A is how it's spelled but in invented spelling you're writing down what you hear next slide and deaf students can do this now with their hearing technology so this is a deaf student writing I'm thinking where did they come from I see people and look how they have been spelled T-H-A this is just what a hearing child would do and so in it's possible to use invented spelling with deaf and hard of hearing students as a way to support text generation next slide and we know all the research on hearing children tells us that children who can engage in invented spelling this is a positive step and they're going to be the kids who end up being better readers and writers it's just the most positive and one of the strongest and most consistent predictors next slide visual phonics is a way that one can support encoding obviously we don't have time to go far down that road but people often only apply visual phonics to decoding we would also suggest it can be a strategy for encoding as well to support invented spelling unlike in the next slide you'll see fingerspelling does not provide the same role fingerspelling is already the graph themes it's not going to support invented spelling in the way that visual phonics or even cute speech would do and lastly just before we close I want to give a few thoughts on one of the most challenging bits in the next slide that we're going to focus on is revising the text the bit that most students and most of us struggle with is now we've got something down on the page what can we do to make it better sadly or most frustratingly it's probably where there are the least number of strategies in the and yet this is one of the most important aspects of the process the best one of the most important one is on the next slide which is basically reading aloud what you've written because when you read aloud to yourself what you've written that's the way in which you read it to know whether you've said what you meant sounds so simple but so challenging and students don't necessarily know how to do that automatically as I said very early on in this presentation they don't recognize they haven't said what they meant and then they don't know what to do about it even if they do know that there's a problem so one of the ways in which teachers can help is to actually read texts aloud to the student reading aloud to the teacher into the class or even reading aloud and recording what they've read and then listening to themselves read it that's the purpose of author's chair to read your text aloud to see if you've said what you meant have you left out critical information that so that the reader doesn't understand what your story is about reading aloud is an absolutely critical aspect of revising next slide unlike teaching rules is probably one of the less efficient ways for revising there's nothing wrong with learning some rules and we can easily talk about them but as we know it can be very difficult to apply the rule that we've been taught we can all probably think about French where we've all learned a lot of rules about French but we really don't know how to apply them next slide as Markman and Dieter say you can describe the rules but that's not the same thing as applying the rules in in action next slide even something as simple as rules for plurals which we often that's often where people start oh look one cat many cats add s even something as simple as plurals have these many exceptions next slide or there's been a lot of research recently when people talk about teaching deaf children in morphological approaches just look at the complexity of the morphology it's not as straightforward as it looks so any kind of direct teaching of these things becomes really difficult especially if you're thinking about very young children and by very young I mean you know up to 8, 9, 10 years old describing a rule just doesn't make very much sense and applying it makes even less sense next slide as in this peanuts cartoon you should probably start a new paragraph here and then maybe capitalize this word what else would you like to know show me where you sprinkle in the little curvy marks commas whatever even punctuation which you think would be straightforward isn't so if you look at the next example of the butterfly and what my student wrote what I said when I taught this I said you put the quotation marks around what is said look where her quotation marks are she did exactly what I said and that didn't work out so well so this is the challenge of teaching revising by rules it seems like it should work and it probably is less efficient than we would like it to be next slide using meta language however can be helpful teaching kids to talk about their writing using words like word and sentence and noun and paragraph not defining them but using them while they're engaged in the activity can be useful even talking about the process I can see one of my students sitting there and he was stuck and I said what's the problem and he said oh I've just got writer's block today to be able to talk about what you're doing helps you engage in the process next slide and this just made me chuckle because isn't it funny that verb is a noun makes you think about how that's all hard to explain and probably one of my favorite cartoons that I'll end with in the next slide which is only funny if you actually know something about English grammar why am I leaving you because you're a possessive pronoun and you've always been a possessive pronoun we all know how difficult pronouns are for deaf and hard of hearing students but teaching them pronoun rules and making charts isn't probably the more effective way particularly with younger students to teach pronouns there's a space for this but it's almost after the students are using them that you can explain what they're doing rather than imagining by giving them the chart they're going to know what to do next slide and just to finish off references are useful and particularly for older students but they're never going to be the total answer to text generation but they're a good support okay you two we're going to improve your vocabulary every day I want you to each learn two new words and be able to use them in a sentence here I bought you what thesaurus these are what it's a book that died a million years ago so in the next slide you'll see some resources that can be useful in the classroom if students are taught to use them wordwalls, dictionaries a really nice reference book for deaf students from Gallaudet University called the Gallaudet Writers Handbook that I've had students purchase at the end of elementary school and use all the way through high school that can be really supportive when they need to find some information in a hurry and I think we're close to the last oh that this is a couple of other resources you can look at I'm not going to spend time talking about these they're all in your handouts and I think that's I'm sorry because I can't see my slides ahead it's hard to tell I think that's the last slide and I'm sorry to have gone over time it's really hard to judge when you're doing one of these webinars so I'm happy to stay online for an extra few minutes if there are more questions than we have time for so we're just going to ask for questions right now thank you so much Connie that was amazing and I also I've learned some new vocabulary words but I probably will never use them I promise you and my colleagues but I really really enjoy the examples of writing examples from the students that was just both entertaining and enlightening so I'm waiting for a few minutes to see if there's any questions regarding the content I found it very self-explanatory but no questions not have an extended period of time we do have to end at five okay that's not well Sarah if there if people and it's fine if not and fine if is I'm happy to send any of the information on the resources page or if there is any specific question or anything that wasn't clear you want to send those to me be email I'm happy to do a written answer not a problem the information needs to just digest for a few days and see how it goes thank you so much for your time and the communications that we've had over the last little while I've been I've enjoyed the conversation I this has been recorded and although there has been a number of people attending today we will send it out to the PLC in near future as well so I appreciate your time Connie and enjoy your evening okay you too Sarah thanks so much bye