The
Your Words/Their Words Strategy
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Step 1: Introduction
of the Your Words/Their Words Strategy The Your Words/Their Words
strategy is a prewriting strategy that provides students with a way
of referring to texts they are reading to get information for their
writing. The strategy bridges the gap between reading and writing
by helping writers to incorporate ideas from their reading into their
writing. We've used the strategy with writers from fourth grade through
college.
Step
2: Modeling the Your Words/Their Words Strategy The main idea in teaching
the Your Words/Their Words strategy is to show students how to think
of their writing as creating a series of alternating but related blocks
of text. Students learn to solve the problem of making reference to
sources by alternating their own words with the words of other writers
by paraphrasing and quoting from their reading and research.
Step
3: Scaffolding the Your Words/Their Words Strategy Collecting information
from sources doesn't present much of a problem for students. Writing
coherently about that information, however, is often difficult. Through
one-on-one conferencing using the Your Words/Their Words strategy
teachers can help students to make meaningful connections between
their sources of information and their own ideas. Control over writing
in this case comes from visualizing a pattern of relatedness between
reading and writing. |