10 | P a g e
Task 2
Assessing Writing Strategy
Taking into consideration the 21
st
century literacy skills needs, I find text participant assessments being more applicable
compared to the rest of the writing strategies. The strategy focuses on the ways that students create meaning from what has been
read. This strategy needs a student to draw upon his or her understanding and experiences, make a comparison of these experiences
with those in the text, formulate inferential meanings, and comprehend that texts are created to make meaning. I find this strategy
useful in achieving the modern literacy needs because it gives the students an opportunity to create meaning from the texts presented
to them in the class. Through this, the strategy fosters creativity. Teachers are required to encourage children to actively take part in
deriving meanings from texts. This can be achieved through motivating the students to recall events in the story and to develop
connections to their own lives and what they are writing. The teachers are supposed to create interests in creating the level of
connections students make across texts, experiences and their own personal background understanding (Cohen & Wiener, 2003).
Through using Personal reading lists and response logs and other work samples teachers can identify the areas of weaknesses
different students’ experience. Thus, he or she can formulate strategies that can be addressed at giving special attention to such
students. Book sharing gives a platform for evaluating understanding and the students’ writing interests and attitudes. Following
reading a book, the teacher can arrange the students in groups and instruct them to write short texts related to a story they just read.
This enables the evaluation of understanding of the students through cloze activities. There exist many ways a student can make a
visible thinking concerning a given story and their connections through writing. Teachers can request students to reflect on work
samples and to share these reflections in a written form with the colleagues or other teachers. Thus, the utilization of this strategy in
the classroom will be significant in assisting students achieve the literacy skills and especially the writing skills needed for the
construction of meaningful sentences.