Two Annes, Many Annes: A Writer’s Reflection on Reading Anne of Green Gables and The Diary of a Young Girl

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl are books that many read when they are young. This essay is a reflection on how reading and studying these two books influenced my writing life and process. It compares the authors’ approaches to life-writing and revision, giving a brief comparison of each, and analyzes how this type of exploration offers a deeper understanding of how these authors approached their writing as well as how their work could be used as mentor texts for other writers.

StoryVisualizer by LEGO Education

The purpose of this chapter is to provide teachers with an example of how the modern students' life (Legos and graphic novels) can be used creatively to engage children in digital storytelling around STEM topics. Specifically, the authors explore the use of graphic novels, or longer visual narratives, to serve as mentor texts for students in creating shorter comics-based digital stories. They begin with a section on integration of STEM and literacy, followed by a description of how digital literacies and digital storytelling can be used in service of such integration, with particular attention on the visual medium of graphic novels as a medium for connecting these practices in the classroom. Finally, they demonstrate how Lego Story Visualizer can be employed to meet our goals of integration and digital storytelling and to connect academic learning to children's world and daily cultural practices.

Mentor Texts: Models to Improve False Beginners’ Writing Skills

This research was to find out the effects of mentor texts on students’ ability to write a descriptive paragraph. Changes in the content and organization of their paragraphs were examined closely. As many as 35 students majoring in nursing who were enrolled in an English class participated in this research. In the class, the students learned to write a descriptive paragraph using some mentor texts which served to help them learn identifying and writing a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. The texts also provided them with models to make a paragraph have unity and coherence. The data were collected from the student’ paragraphs produced before and after the learning process and the paragraph they wrote in the delayed posttest. A survey was also distributed at the end of their English class to collect their responses on the use of mentor texts in their learning process. The findings of this research indicated that mentor texts indeed had positive effects on the students’ ability to write a descriptive paragraph. Their awareness to include a topic sentence, details, unity, a concluding sentence, and transition signals in their paragraph was found to significantly develop. In addition, mentor texts enhanced the students’ confidence, interest, and motivation in writing.

Neutralizing Trade-off Effect between Accuracy and Fluency in EFL Writing by Mentor Text Modeling: Cognitive Complexity in Focus

The present study sought to explore the efficacy of a brand-new approach to teaching writing called mentor text modeling in neutralizing trade-off effect between accuracy and fluency in writing tasks with different levels of cognitive complexity. To this end, a total of 60 (30 male and 30 female) Iranian EFL learners were randomly selected and assigned to three groups of comparison, each containing 20 (10 male and 10 female) learners. Employing a pretest/posttest experimental design, learners of the three groups received instruction on advanced writing during an 11-week course. At the commencement of the course, the learners’ fluency and accuracy in writing were gaged through three writing tasks with high, moderate, and low levels of cognitive complexity. Having been exposed to the same instructional input, the learners of each group underwent writing instructions based on one of three approaches to teaching writing, namely, mentor text modeling, product-based approach, and process-based approach. At the end of the study course, the learners’ writing performance was assessed on three tasks parallel to the pretest measures. Results of running correlation analysis indicated that contrary to the two traditional approaches to teaching writing, mentor text modeling was capable of improving accuracy and fluency simultaneously and, as a result, was found to be effective in neutralizing the trade-off effect between accuracy and fluency in writing tasks with high, moderate, and low cognitive complexity levels. The study’s finding may urge EFL teachers to include mentor texts while teaching writing to realize a balanced improvement in EFL learners’ writing competence.