Vanessa Vaile's List: writing

• British journal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education involving the use of something called interactive cover sheets. First-year students in an outdoor studies degree program took a two-semester, six module course which required preparation of a number of written assignments. After preparing their papers, students attached an interactive cover sheet on which they raised questions about the paper they had just completed, thereby identifying the specific areas for feedback.
• The goal was to overcome the one-way communication that occurs when teachers write comments on student papers
• Students also tell stories about feedback received on their papers
• Does this idea of having students frame questions about their papers and writing offer a solution? The faculty who tried the approach found that students struggled mightily with the task
• It’s pretty easy to understand why students would find this task challenging. Most (especially beginning students) have little or no experience assessing their own work and then to have to frame a question that would elicit feedback helpful to improving your next paper—that’s a pretty complicated task. But it’s such a good one.
• that’s a really useful skill
• I wonder if there might be some ways to reframe the task that would make it easier initially. Maybe students need guidelines early on: Identify the part of the paper you had the most trouble with and ask a question about it. Identify the part of the paper you think turned out best and explain why you feel good about it
• a potentially promising idea with the dual benefits of developing a great self-assessment skill and directing feedback
• The 5 questions that I ask are: 1) What are you trying to say here (what's the thesis/main point)? 2) Why is what you are trying to say important? 3) What is working in the piece and why? 4) What is not working in the piece and why? 5) What questions do you have for me?
• If students feel that they are graded on the writers that they currently are rather than the writer that they are trying to be, many will be hesitant to open an honest dialogue.
• dialogical cover sheet dates back to the expressivist movement in composition studies in the 1980s. I first came across it through Peter Elbow's writing
• scaffolding the feedback process by offering students the opportunity to identify aspects of the paper or parts of the paper they would like their instructor to respond to is empowering pedagogy
• The challenge is making the cover sheet simple enough

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• The shortest definition is that it is the study of  signs
• 'signs' in everyday life
• semiotics can include the study of all these and  more
• signs can also be drawings, paintings and photographs
• it also includes words, sounds and 'body language' they may reasonably  wonder what all these things have in common
• starting off in the linguistics section
• a science which studies the role of signs as part of  social life
• nature of signs and the laws governing them
• The laws which  semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus  be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge.  (Saussure
• key figures in the early development of semiotics were the American philosopher   Charles Sanders Peirce  (sic, pronounced 'purse') (1839-1914) and later   Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who developed a behaviourist semiotics.  Leading modern semiotic theorists include   Roland Barthes (1915-1980),   Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992),   Yuri Lotman (1922-1993),   Christian Metz (1931-1993),   Umberto Eco (b 1932) and   Julia Kristeva
• difficult to disentangle European semiotics from   structuralism
• Structuralism is an analytical method which has been employed by many semioticians and which is based  on Saussure's linguistic model. Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization  of sign systems as 'languages'
• search for 'deep structures' underlying the 'surface features'
• contemporary social semiotics has moved  beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts within a  self-contained system, seeking to explore the use of signs in specific social situations
• a major approach to cultural studies
• Barthes declared  that 'semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and  limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of  all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment:  these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification'
• Although semiotics may be less central now within  cultural and media studies  (at least in its earlier, more structuralist form), it remains essential for  anyone in the field to understand it.
• the term 'semiotics' is more likely to be used  as an umbrella term to embrace the whole field
• One of the  broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that 'semiotics is concerned with  everything that can be taken as a sign'  (

• For C W Morris (deriving this threefold classification from Peirce), semiotics embraced  semantics, along with the other traditional branches of linguistics:  

       

   
  • semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for; 
  • syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs;  
  • pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters  (Morris 1938, 6-7).
• often employed in the analysis of texts
• text usually refers to a message  which has been recorded in some way
• A text is an assemblage of signs (such as words, images, sounds  and/or gestures) constructed (and interpreted) with reference to the  conventions associated with a    genre and in a particular medium of communication.
• Saussure made what is now a famous distinction between langue  (language) and parole (speech).
• Applying the notion to semiotic systems in general rather than simply to  language, the distinction is one between between code and message,  structure and event or system and usage
• system constrains rather than completely determines usage
• structuralist dichotomy between usage and system has been criticized for its  rigidity
• most contemporary semioticians have sought to reprioritize historicity and social context.  Language is seldom treated as a static, closed and stable system which is inherited from  preceding generations but as constantly changing
• semiotics has undergone a shift of its  theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign  systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization -  and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs and  meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed  or transgressed in social practice.
• two main emphases of current, or poststructuralist,  semiotic theory
• One is a semiotics focused on the subjective aspects  of signification and strongly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis
• The other is a semiotics concerned to stress  the social aspect of signification, its practical, aesthetic, or  ideological use in interpersonal communication
• This text outlines some of the key concepts in semiotics, together with relevant critiques,  beginning with the most fundamental concept of the sign itself.
• reality is a system of signs
• Meaning is not  'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or  conventions of which we are normally unaware
• semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs

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