“My Summer Vacation”, “My Most Memorable Experience”, “What I want to be in X years”,… everybody had to write such texts in heir mother tongue and/or an foreign language. Everybody knows the conflict between, on the one hand, writing a “good” narrative story in order to improve the writing style and, on the one hand, protecting the own privat life from teachers and classmates on the other hand. As the motivation is the practise with the language, in my classes we were also allowed to invent something, but writing invented stuff in a text with the fixed title “my summer vacation” is (at least for me) much harder as if you were ask about a text with the title “what somebody experienced in his vacation”. So my German, English and Spanish teacher got to know everything… my family, my pets, my hobbies, my ideas of life, my hopes, my fears, my perception of myself. The question is why, and this question is asked by Anne E. Doyle in a paper from 1999. The problem is that narrative “became enshrined […] as a sort of base-line genre upon which other genres are built, and with which most students should be familiar long before college”. It is believed that narrative the most natural form of writing, as already children are beginning to narrate her day, aloud, to herself and to others. Reports, discussion, analysis,… are not as natural as narrative. Consequently, the production of an “authentically-voiced student writing” with “honest and authentic positions” are most easily to achieve by asking for stories of the student’s privat life. It can be assumed that, by writing about their own life, motivation/interest/an opinion about the written content is given in the student. “And so, despite its venerable age by the middle of this century, "My Summer Vacation" retained its place in the composition classroom”, even so it sometimes creates traps like “what would I like to be”… a question which can be quite confusing and terrifying in certain states of lives. "Dishing the personal narrative: Its present classroom ignominy, its classroom potential."
Anne E. Doyle Bridgewater Review 18.1 (1999): 20-23
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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