I am going to talk about an approach I have seen, though not used it yet, which is creating an online book club. The gist is quite straightforward: students should write their experiences after reading a text proposed by the teacher so that they can share them with other people, and also recall them afterwards.

One of the advantages to this approach, in my opinion, is that it allows the students to freely write about the piece of writing they read without all those questions about comprehension and stuff, providing them rather an opportunity to report how they perceived/connected to the text, as well as see each other’s viewpoints.

The writing process may follow the steps proposed by Cope this week: plan, draft, review, revise, and publish. Some ideas could be brainstormed in class, collectively, and students could select those they agree or provide new ones. After writing the first draft, students should peer review each other’s work and also comment what they thought of the other’s opinions, engaging discussions this way. 

Moreover, it is important that students use a platform that enables them to use multimodal resources, such as images, videos etc. - since there is a tendency to ignore this type of resources as students gets older (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) - that will help their peers and themselves illustrate/visualize better what they mean. And this should be encouraged by the teacher, as part of the criteria.

Example of an image used in a post. Taken from: https://karenbachini.com/cultura/resenha-eleanor-park-rainbow-rowell/

Talking about the criteria, it is important that the teacher provides a rubric with the steps students should “follow” while writing their texts, what is expected from them. For example:

And so, it goes on. The important thing is that students have in mind what they should provide in their productions, serving also as a guide to make them get accustomed to writing. After analyzing their peer's review, students should make the appropriate corrections and publish it on the platform; two platforms I have used are scholar and edmodo.

To sum up, I see this alternative as a good way to encourage writing and interpretation farther from the traditional grammar optics. As Cope said in the course this week, just as we learn to speak by listening, we can also learn to write by reading, and I think this activity is a good way to do it.

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https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-11/kress-and-van-leeuwen-on-images-and-writing

https://karenbachini.com/cultura/resenha-eleanor-park-rainbow-rowell/