Academic Writing Unit II

🎯 Stage 1 — Desired Results

Students will analyze the mechanics of academic discourse.
Students will apply critical thinking skills to purposefully construct coherent, cohesive, and emphatic arguments.

Students will independently use their learning to:

Model transparent and accessible communication practices within an engaging community of educators.
Synthesize and evaluate external literature to make informed, emphatic arguments that drive educational practice forward.
Actively revise and refine their own linguistic mechanics to ensure their professional discourse is precise and easily understood by a diverse audience.

Enduring Understandings (Students will understand that …)

Precise linguistic mechanics, such as accurate verb tenses and modal verbs, are essential tools that make an author’s reasoning transparent to the reader.
Effective source integration honors original perspectives while strategically amplifying the writer’s own emphatic argument.
Cohesion and flow are actively constructed through deliberate vocabulary choices, standard phrasing, and rhetorical strategies rather than happening by chance.

Essential Questions

How do specific rhetorical strategies, such as cause and effect or compare and contrast, shape the way a community understands an educational argument?
How can researchers transparently report others’ words and ideas while maintaining a strong, independent academic voice?
In what ways does eliminating vague or repetitive language actually strengthen the power of a written argument?

Students will know …

The appropriate verb tenses and the use of modal verbs specific to academic writing.
Standard phrases utilized in academic writing and the specific linking devices used to connect complex ideas.
The rhetorical concepts and structures behind showing cause and effect, as well as comparing and contrasting ideas.

Students will be able to …

Choose appropriate source material and effectively report other people’s words and ideas in writing.
Strengthen arguments to make writing more emphatic.
Avoid the repetition of the same language and eliminate vague or unnecessary words to refine expression.
Actively make written drafts more coherent and cohesive.
Apply critical thinking skills throughout the entire drafting process.

Goal: Curate and draft a comprehensive article review that critically evaluates an educational text using sophisticated linguistic mechanics and rhetorical strategies.
Role: Language Teacher Trainer and Academic Reviewer.
Audience: An engaging, professional community of peer educators and pre-service teachers.
Situation: To make the analysis of educational literature transparent and collaborative, you are sharing a critical evaluation of a recent academic article with your professional learning network. You must summarize the author’s claims and emphatically argue your own stance on its validity and usefulness for the classroom, seamlessly integrating the source material to support your critique.
Product/Performance: A finalized Article Review. In alignment with UDL, learners will map their arguments using flexible modalities during the prewriting phase (e.g., visual organizers or audio-recorded brainstorming). Drafts will undergo peer-assessment in flexible groupings before the final written product is submitted.

Standards/Rubric (summary):

Purpose & audience: The review thoughtfully engages the community of educators, clearly summarizing the source text while providing a distinct, critical evaluation.
Organization & cohesion: Actively utilizes linking devices to connect ideas, ensuring a logical flow from summary to emphatic argumentation.
Detail & diction: Successfully eliminates vague language, utilizing standard academic phrases and specific rhetorical strategies (cause/effect, compare/contrast).
Language control (B2+): Demonstrates accurate application of academic verb tenses and modal verbs.
Process & integrity: Effectively and ethically reports the original author’s ideas, integrating the source material with strict adherence to APA formatting guidelines.

B. Other Evidence

Ongoing formative feedback cycles utilizing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) where students provide and receive audio memos or video annotations on each other’s rhetorical structure.
Short, collaborative exercises focusing on identifying and replacing repetitive or vague vocabulary in sample texts.
Reflection logs detailing the cognitive application and critical thinking strategies used during the drafting process.