Talk:Appropriate Meaning-Making Strategies/ Forms for Critical analysis for understanding Text and Novels/@comment-28518194-20160523024154

In my experience, students struggle to write when they do not connect with the topic that they are supposed to be writing on. There is at least one student in each class I teach who is not writing and when I ask that student why they are not writing, that person tells me “I don’t know what to write about.” After questioning them on why they are having trouble with the topic and it turns out to be that they cannot think of anything from their own experience that matches what they need to write about. A student cannot write a paper on their favorite ice cream flavor if they never tried ice cream, for example. Students write what they know and use background knowledge to accomplish this. Not every student is going to have the same experiences and we as teachers need to recognize this when forming our topics for writing and have alternatives for students who do not have the background knowledge. Teachers also need to use different strategies to get students to think about what they know so that they can write. I find KWL to be helpful in this instance.