SLC Blog: In Common. A stylized image of a diverse group of students in a lecture hall

The Student Learning Commons blog is your online writing and learning community


The SLC Multilingual Students’ Story Hub: A place to share your stories

Published by Julia Lane

By Dr. Timothy Mossman, SLC EAL Services Coordinator 

In this post, Dr. Timothy Mossman introduces and invites submissions to the new Multilingual Students' Story Hub. The Story Hub is a forum for multilingual students to share their stories about events or critical incidents that occurred while learning or using English. 

Reflecting on English as Additional Language Peer Educator Training

Published by Julia Lane

Guest blogger and English as Additional Language Peer Educator, Ashley K. writes this week about her experiences with EAL Peer training. In particular, she reflects on a lecture presented by Dr. Ena Lee, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education. Dr. Lee's talk focused on the "commonsense discourses" of English language learning, and how these "commonsense" ideas are often actually wrong. 

Ashley connects this talk with her experiences doing a "Pluriligual Identity" exercise and reflecting on her own connections with language learning, identity, and culture. 

 

Essential components of argumentative writing

Published by Julia Lane

Have an argumentative or thesis-based essay coming up for one of your classes? Check out this blog post to help you develop a thorough and well-supported argument! 

Thank you to Teeba Obaid, PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Education, for contributing this post to the blog!

CJSF interview -- Inclusive Writing resources highlight

""
Published by Julia Lane

On July 29th, Julia Lane (SLC Writing Services Associate) did an interview with Ciara Reid on CJSF. Check out the link in the post to listen to the interview and learn about the SLC's forthcoming Inclusive Writing resources. 

 
 

The parts of speech: The last 4

Published by Julia Lane

Welcome to second installment of our Grammar Camp series on the Parts of Speech. 

If you didn't catch it or want to review, check out last week's post, which covered nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs.

This week's post covers adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections

Thanks for Dr. Amanda Goldrick-Jones, SLC Writing Coordinator, for developing and sharing this content. 

The parts of speech: The first 4

Published by Julia Lane

In this Grammar Camp post, Dr. Amanda Goldrick-Jones, SLC Writing Coordinator, provides an overview of 4 basic parts of speech. There are 8 basic parts of speech, so stay tuned for next week's post about the last 4, and for two self-test quizzes for you to test out your newly acquired grammar know-how!

You can also jump to Part 2

Writing anxiety

Published by Julia Lane

Feeling anxious about writing your term papers this semester? You aren't alone! In fact, writing anxiety is experienced by writers across all genres and all stages of writing experience. This blog post explores the topic of writing anxiety and provides some practical suggestions for how to address the anxiety you may be experiencing. 

Note: this post focuses on "every day" writing anxiety and not clinical anxiety. If your anxiety is unmanageable, please get support from SFU Health and Counselling or from another health care professional. Your well-being matters! 

Reflective writing

Published by Julia Lane

This post explains the genre of reflective writing, which is often what you are expected to do if you have a (critical) journal or analytical response assignment in your class. 

This explanation of reflective writing starts from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's (2012) statement that such assignments "require that you demonstrate that you have thought about what it is you think" (p. 222). Graff and Birkenstein are focused on writing in the social sciences, but the idea that you have to think about what you think is broadly applicable to any reflective writing task. 

Got Assignments? Get the Assignment Calculator!

Published by Julia Lane

It's that time of semester when assignment deadlines can start to feel like they are piling up on you. And, it can be especially hard to get down to work when the sun is shining! 

Let the assignment calculator help you to break down your assignments into manageable steps. That's just good project management!