LAED 4450 Teaching Writing and Communications in Urban Grades 5-12
In this course, future teachers learn best practices for how to teach urban middle and high school students how to write and make oral presentations. Topics include: sentence and paragraph construction; genres of writing; how audience, purpose and situation guide writing and speeches; assessment and revision; engaging middle and high school writers; assisting English Language Learners; and technological tools for written and speech communications. Teacher candidates learn how to respond constructively to the writing and oral presentations of urban 5-12 learners.
Prerequisites
4 Undergraduate credits
Effective May 6, 2028 to present
Learning outcomes
General
- Understands and develops strategies for teaching and critiquing persuasive writing (letter to editor; editorial, essay, etc.) and text readability: subheads, white space, staging of information (given-new), sentences, nominalizations, graphics, appeal to prior knowledge, announcing of topic, etc.
- Understands current theories of composition instruction: formalistic, traditional textbook, composing process model, cognitive-processing, dialogic, social constructivist, and post structuralist; able to define strengths and weaknesses of differing models and implications for teaching.
- Understands elements of the rhetorical context: subject matter, purpose, audience, text structure, attitude
- Understands theories and research on the effects of teaching grammar; relationship between grammar instruction and writing quality; grammar and usage; sentence analysis; sentence-combining activities; readability; writing readable sentences; staging information; use of white space, graphics, subheads.