Acquiring the Ability to “Code-switch:

A. General activities that promote code-switching

• Get students to write, publish, read, and discuss their own stories, experiences, and ideas in their own cultural rhetorics (e.g., web-based publishing, online dialogues with classmates)
• Ask students to transcribe a contrasting dialect (e.g., conducting interviews, gathering testimonials)
• Encourage students to imitate popular, widely read formats that they are likely to encounter and read on their own (e.g., popular magazine articles, websites)
• Have students write “companion texts” that summarize, interpret, and critique course texts (e.g., a reading log, a double-entry notebook)
• Ask students to write on an issue in contrasting genres and rhetorical situations (e.g., sermons and academic arguments--requiring explicitly different kinds of citation in order to establish the relevant ethos)
• Require students to collaborate intensively in small writing groups with students who have stronger skills in academic rhetorics (e.g., collaborative projects or peer reviews)

B.  Types of activities that emphasize revision

• Have students write paragraphs in different dictions, e.g., in an informal and formal manner, a home and public manner, an "among adults" and "among friends" manner.
• Get students to do reader-analysis to anticipate the language and sentence structure that different kinds of readers expect
• Provide plenty of opportunity for drafting and redrafting (and break the task of revision into smaller sections of a piece-- e.g., introductions, conclusions, two or three paragraphs of topic development, annotated bibliographies)
• Set up times for sharing "progress reports" with peer groups; each student comments on finding sources, determining focus, verifying format and organization, incorporating special features (graphics, tables, other visual aids), and so forth
• Identify what students have accomplished, and point out the strengths
• Review an assignment's instructions and encourage students to go through it, point by point, getting them to suggest where they feel they’ve accomplished the task as well as where they feel the need for further work
• Ask questions rather than give directives, so students can let you know their rationale for different writerly decisions
• Train students to respond to each other's writing--starting with a peer review sheet helps
• Concentrate on editing concerns (grammar, spelling, punctuation) later on in the drafting--once students have more control over organization and format, logic, critical use of sources, topic development, etc.

C. Types of activities for working with sources

• After explaining an idea or concept to students, ask them to write a summary in their own words-- then ask them to compare it to what classmates have also written; they comment on how their summaries differ
• Ask students to read a key passage from their textbooks; one dictates an oral summary of it to a classmate, the other writes, and they both go back to the text to check for accuracy
• Tell students to bring a source to class-- or find one on the Internet-- and defend why they'll cite it for a project, specifying what parts they'll cite; classmates must challenge or approve its use, explaining why
• Provide students with a successful example of a written project, and get them to identify what parts are the writer's original insights and what parts come from sources
• Assign written interviews that require students to seek out a variety of resource people among their own classmates as well as their community
• Pair students and tell them to use each other as "recorders" to take notes on how they each paraphrase a source; the recorders then check how accurately their partner's paraphrases compare to the source
• Get students in groups of three to conduct an Internet search where each collects three sources; each evaluates the usefulness and reliability of another group member's sources; they then write up their findings as a collaborated source-report
• Have pairs of students locate a website that depicts some course-related topic, and ask them to redesign a part of it for people who belong to a culturally different group of readers
• Assign student groups to work on a disciplinary journal, a textbook, or a profession-related publication, getting them to summarize the articles for their classmates as readers; another group evaluates their efforts

D. Sample collaborative projects that help build on student's own experiences

• Plan for student groups to design and publish their own study guides, manuals, supplemental course texts, etc.
• Have students set up and conduct their own trial or criminal investigation of some issue of controversy connected to course materials and topics
• Get students to propose, draft up, coordinate some "virtual" improvement project in city planning, building renovation, or the like--responding to some problematic condition that exists in the area
• Ask students to investigate steps necessary to respond to-- or prevent-- some large scale emergency and establish a protocol
• Get students to study a local situation that calls for a treaty or accord among contending groups, and require them to study as well as draft up documents that would support a resolution
• Have students study some social or civic organization that provides an important service and do an analysis of its internal structure and community impact
• Give students the opportunity to study a regional environmental concern that requires investigation, analysis, and response
• Get students to look into the process of planning a large community or cultural event, and produce the documents that would be necessary to organize it
• Have students do a community survey of health-care facilities, evaluating what is available and proposing what may be needed, according to the apparent resources of the immediate population
• Assign students to write a class book on their town or city, where they each collect stories that reflect achievements, attractions, problems, etc.-- with groups in charge of different topical sections
• Get students to create their own "virtual" business, along with product and marketing analysis, plan of financial backing, policy manuals, progress reports, inventories, etc.--that they must then present to the rest of the class
• Require each student to design a personal website (extended curriculum vita), based on the kinds of sites they might find in business or at an institution such as NIU
• Have students design a Who's Who of friends or role models, complete with profiles, stories, photos, and other memorabilia
• Set a family history project that goes back at least three generations and requires several interviews
• Get students to script and film (or stage) a "mock-umentary" on some community or school issue that has affected them