Teaching Invention: Leveraging the Power of Low-Stakes Writing

Translating Writing Tasks into a Language Students Understand: Leveraging the Power of Low-Stakes Writing argues for the central role authentic questioning can play as a generative step in the composition process. The article outlines key criteria in what exactly an authentic question is, how these can be communicated to students, and how students can learn to generate their own authentic questions without teacher intercession - i.e. compose their own self-generated close reading assignments - as a stage in the process of high-level, analytical discourse. The article details how students may ask questions of a text, but also provide answers to those questions and vet these inquiries through their peers in order to have a deeper understanding of how a source text works, its internal logic and governing ideas. In doing so, the article and its running examples explore one of the most visible yet unattended to dichotomies in the English classroom - Writing-to-Learn (WTL) and Writing-to-Show-Learning (WTSL) - and how to constructively navigate the borderlands that lie between for both teacher and student