Jonathan Bruning

DePiero

Hey Zack

According to the blog Psychology Today, about twenty percent of the worlds
population is bilingual. Many bilinguals actually grow up learning two languages, some cases
because they came from a different country but still speak the language at home and in other
cases out of interest. Many studies and scholarly articles have claimed that being bilingual
actually makes one more intelligent. This has become almost common knowledge and because of
that many news websites have actually written about their opinion and findings from their
readings. The New York Times, James Cummings, and Roger Deitz all have posted articles about
bilingual children, however Cummings article Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational
Development of Bilingual Children and Deitzs article The Hispanic Outlook in Higher
Education are more centered around the data and method to receive the data. Given an interest

Comment [1]: Keep your font consistent unless you

really don't want to.

in the topic, people will go out and search for articles that give them the information they want.

Comment [2]: Collect/analyze are more appropriate and

specific verbs.

For example if you wanted to research about breakthroughs in psychology youd probably want
to read a bunch of articles from psychology today, but if you want something more
comprehensive about a certain topic you would want to find a scholarly article that pertains to
your interest. Different areas of discipline are all going to have differing interpretation and

Comment [3]: I'm slowing down a bit -- keep that

momentum rolling, Bruning.

presentation of their data, however they contain moves that can be commonly seen throughout

Comment [4]: Read this aloud and see if you can spot
anything "up" with it.

many different genres such as scholarly articles or media siteshowever these moves are
tailored to the audience of the genrethat all aim to present new information.
You can distinguish a scholarly article pretty quickly if you know what you are looking

Comment [5]: This sentence was a little tough to get

through for me. Also, what "moves" will you analyzing?
The more of a map you give me from the start, the
easier I'll be able to follow along.

for; an abstract, a thesis, jargon, a conclusion, basically you just have to see these three things to

Comment [6]: Check your usage of semicolons here.

Google: UNC Writing Center + semicolons.

know that its going to be an article that was written by some researcher or scientist. The reason

Comment [7]: No "things" -- it's suuuuuper vague and

imprecise. Pick one of the many (and more specific)
beautiful nouns of the English language.

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

these articles are written is so that people can read them and have a credible source while
learning what the researchers found out without conducting the actual research. Usually these
scholarly articles are way too dense for the average person to read due to all the jargon and
complex ideas so they are most of the time condensed into a more understandable and digestible
article by the news stations. They always find an easier way to present you with the information
you want to know about without all the extra details about the experiment you do not want to
know about. Media sources such as the New York Times or The Washington Post always have

Comment [8]: Do you think these claims would be more

effective if you tied them to specific textual references?
Help me *see* this stuff.

Comment [9]: Careful of over-using "always"

some sort of article presenting the basics of a finding to the mainstream viewer. This is how I
found about the benefits of children growing up bilingual. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee wrote an article
on the New York Times website about Why Bilinguals are Smarter and he actually cites many
different studies and scholarly articles, which makes a lot of sense because thats basically all the
author is basing their article on. His article seems to be saying pretty reiterated information from
the scholarly articles I found.
A discipline is a branch of knowledge or teaching that tries to teach a certain way. Each
discipline has its own way at looking towards a topic. Cummings article is purely a educational

Comment [10]: Organization/structure q: is this the best

place for this? Seems to me like this is more
foundational than the previous paragraph.

research discipline, which affects what is said and how its analyzed by the researcher. Some
example of this education styled is shown when Cummings comments, Why does a home-

Comment [11]: Not sure what you mean with this

phrase.

school language switch result in high levels of functional bilingualism and academic

Comment [12]: Ahhh... just that extra letter ("d")

changed the meaning for me.

achievement in middle-class majority language children. This special commentary hints

towards the different thought process that is used from discipline to discipline. His stance is
rivaled by Deitzwho comes from the discipline of communicationwhen he argues,
Proponents of bilingual education point out that discrepancies in test scores (lower scores for
ethnic groups) are the result of the added burden of thinking and learning in an unfamiliar

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

language environment and of taking tests formulated to measure the English-speaking student.
Looking at this quote from the introduction illustrates how bilingual children are affected in
regards to their communication instead of education. Disciplines may cover many different
topics, but they ultimately differ in the analysis of the data.
An important similarity between both sourcesscholarly and mediais that they both
contained a conclusion of what the study means, which is undoubtedly important; however they

Comment [13]: I like how you're bringing up "stance" -stance is huge -- but I felt like the follow-up left a little
bit to be desired. What, exactly, *is* his/her stance,
and how (if at all) is it different than the other
discipline?
Comment [14]: So what data, exactly, is being
collected? And what might that suggest about what
they privilege in their research?

vary in the presentation. In a scholarly article they start with an abstract and then continue
throughout all their required steps until they finally have to come to a halt and state their
conclusion. In a news article they present you with the conclusion of the study and then work
their way up to an explanation of the impact the finding has on the academic world. They differ

Comment [15]: So what did they conclude? Is that

worth bringing up? Could that enhance your argument
in any way?

like this because of the purpose of their articles. New York Times purpose is to inform the
general audience about the findings, while Cummings and articles are to provide a question,
experiment, analysis, and conclusion that all create a new or more in-depth analysis of why
something is the way it is. This happens during Cummings paper when he argues, there is the
lack of any simple relationship between instructional time spent through the medium of a
language and achievement in that language. He presented his information and then gave an
analysis and reasoning as to what his findings meant and their impact upon the academic world.
However when you find your articles they might have a different perspective because of the
discipline of the article.
A common move of scholarly articles is tables to represent your data in an easy to
read and presentable fashion, a type of visual aid. Cummings is the only one to incorporate this
type of aid into this writing, out of this selection it is his signature move. The New York Times
author has his own moves too in his article, however his is the way he gives you the information.

Comment [16]: Worth explicitly defining or describing

what you mean by "moves" here?
Also, a structural/organizational q: you had a paragraph
earlier on devoted to "the conventions of the scholarly
article genre" (my words). Since this paragraph seems
to be broadly analyzing scholarly pieces-as-genre
again, is it worth using "moves" there? Or putting
those paragraphs back-to-back?
Comment [17]: This is really vague, Bruning. Name
it/them. Apply what you did in PB2B.

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

For example, the author comments, Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than
monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists
Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were
From this you can clearly see how instead of relying on his own data that he collected, he used
the data of previous experiments as his information. Finally from Reitz, he makes his move when
he claims, to educate the children of non-English speaking parents in their own native
language rather than in English. He basically makes his assertion clear, which in this case is a
move. He continues throughout the article to talk about education, which makes a lot of since
coming from an education discipline. The moves made in each disciplines articles are all going

Comment [18]: This isn't really convincing me -- his

"move" is an assertion? Aren't there many assertions
in the three pieces? I'm wondering: so what?

to be tailored to helping their argument.

All three articles use other scholarly articles as a reference, however the sort of evidence
that the media is missing is original data from trials. Both of the scholarly articles contain an
explanation of their collected data and actual data that they found and interpreted. Deitz starts off
by introducing evidence when he writes, As to the Rodriguez point of view, Dr. Edwards
asserts, Mr. Rodriguez has positioned himself, and unfortunately for others, a choice which is a
sad and an unnecessary one. Just like in Cummings essay where he explains, The only way to
discover how educational treatments interact with student inputs is by means of "planned
variation" research (Epstein, 1977), this is an example of him citing his source. This itself gives
the two genres different purposes in itself. For people who just want the basic rundown of the
data and what it means they are just going to look at the news article and be satisfied from that.
However some people actually want to see the article and the data that it comes from, and they
try to find the source of the data and their reasoning behind it.

Comment [19]: Nice observation

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

Scholarly articles are an important part of the educated world because they provide a
basis on which you can cite and actually base your essays, claims, and arguments on. They give a
report on cutting edge research that is going on all around us and give us new information,
however they fail on one major part, they lack the general audience. Most of the population
cannot even fathom understanding how important a breakthrough in nuclear science can be,
except when it is condensed down by a news site. When the New York Times tells you what the
impact of an important study like that, it is easier to understand what it means. The New York
Times however usually wont be accepted as a credible source for other scholarly articles, so that
can be a downfall for anyone looking for that. However the shortfalls of each source do not
affect eithers effectiveness, because both sources are aimed at two different audiences. News
articles are too basic for anyone to cite in their articles, and scholarly articles are too dense for
any average Joe to grasp. So with that taken into account, both articles do their job very
effectively.
Both sources give an amazing amount of information that I did not have before reading
either of them, however the main point is that while you can find much usefulness in both
sources, you ultimately use each for different aspects of your life. News sources are common
day-to-day readings and scholarly articles tend to be much thicker and only read by those who
need to benefit from that research. While you may need a scholarly article you must also find the
right discipline to choose from; if youre looking for adolescence bilingualism in respect to
education, you want to look for it by an educational researcher and not from a mathematical
source.

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

Works cited
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/49/2/222.full.pdf+html
http://search.proquest.com/llba/docview/58123779/17F9707B62E742C2PQ/1?accountid=14522
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
http://search.proquest.com/docview/219277721/D3652BBE11D049E5PQ/1?accountid=14522

Comment [20]: This is a super-shoddy Works Cited.

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

Writing 2 Feedback Matrix for WP1

Table of Textual Features
Did Not Meet
Expectations
Thesis Statement

Met Expectations

Exceeded
Expectations

X
X

Use of Textual Evidence

from Genres
Use of Course Readings

Analysis

Organization/Structure

X-

Attention to
Genre/Conventions and
Rhetorical Factors

X-

Sentence-level Clarity,
Mechanics, Flow

X-

Dr. Bruning,
Other Comments
Alright, my man, please check out my inserted comments -- I hope
they give you some in the moment feedback about what was
going through my mind while I was reading this. Also, here are
some suggestions for improving this WP2 for the portfolio:

Jonathan Bruning
DePiero

- I need more of an argument here. Move past describing and get

to evaluating -- try to pinpoint the so what? of this assignment as
much as possible.
-Include a lot more analysis of the kinds of data/evidence these
different sources are using and what kinds of RQs theyre asking.
Consider some of the big pictures questions here that get at
how do these different disciplines approach this topic from
different perspectives? What was the study about? What
questions did they ask? What data did they gather? How do the
ways in which these researchers went about studying this topic
differ from the other authors/researchers, and what does it suggest
in terms of the importance they're placing on their methods?
-Think about what kind of structure/organization would be best
suited for your argument. I never felt like I -- as a reader -- was on
a clear path
-Consider working in moves earlier on and adding in more of
them
-Work in the course readings. Use them to help you use the
language of the course and to develop your argument.
Z
7/10