What are the techniques in selecting and organizing information for Brainstorming techniques

My dearest student, this lesson is your first step in your Reading and Writing Skills journey where you will come to encounter the different techniques that will help you effectively organize information. Expect that in this, and other lessons, critical thinking is what will be used most; spoonfeeding is not and never a norm in Senior High School. You will do most of the tasks in making sense of the lessons, especially this one.

As you go through this module, you will be using the different techniques in selecting and organizing information through various activities. This module refreshes your understanding of reading and how schema helps you better understand the texts you read. As a concept, reading is the process of translating letters and other symbols into meaningful information for understanding and use in everyday life (Cidro et. al., 2016). Readers like you use schemas in order to translate and understand the text. This, among others, is what I expect you to master from this module! Good luck!

INTRODUCTION

EXPERIENCE CHART. You must have read books or any other reading materials, or you must have heard stories of experiences from relatives or friends about living and working abroad. Briefly write these experiences in the boxes provided below and answer the questions that follow.

In your notebook, answer and discuss each question.

1. 1. Is it hard to live in a foreign land? Why do you say so?
   2. Would you choose to live and work abroad? Why? Why not?

MOTIVATION

VOCABULARY ASSESSMENT. Decode the meaning of the italicized and boldfaced word in each sentence. Use any of the four types of context clues: synonym, antonym, examples, or explanation. Write your answer in the booklet that comes with this module.

1. 1. The three sides of the many pennants were decorated with glitters at sequins and from afar, they looked like glittering flags of South Amelia, countries. 
   2. The first few days of working abroad bring a sense of nostalgia where people feel a longing for their family and friends back home.
   3. The foreigner’s joke was a little platitudinous, corny, and old. 
   4. The company always chooses competent, knowledgeable, and efficient employees over the ineffectual ones. 

A nondescript painting he bought somewhere in Africa consists of an old canvas with dull colors and unexciting strokes.

DELIVERY

In the preceding activity, you were able to unlock the meaning of the boldfaced words by using context clues. Which of the four types of context clues did you use to be able to define the italicized words in the sentences? Write your answer in your notebook. 

ACTIVITY. In your booklet, create a concept map based on the given scenario. In your lecture notebook, answer the questions that follow.

COVID-19 IS GONE! Luckily, you won an all-expense-paid trip to Japan sponsored by the Japanese Embassy in Manila.  As a tourist, you will need to plan what you will be doing in Japan for a month or equivalent to four weeks. However, it is the winter season when you arrive in Japan.

Pick out the concept of most appropriate activities and arrange them with the use of a concept map, which should have only four branches, one branch to correspond to a week’s activities. Do not do more than four since you are not allowed to extend your stay. You can have as many details under each branch. Enjoy Planning!

Using the information in your concept map, answer the following questions:

1. 1. How did you feel when you learned the news of your Japan all-expenses-paid trip? Why? 
   2. What have you found out about Japan? Cite the sources of your research. 
   3. What activities will you be doing for each of the four weeks? Elaborate on these. 
   4. If you were to bring someone with you on that one-month trip, who would it be and why

Accomplishing the task above requires a schema. Schema is your prior knowledge on a subject that you used to comprehend and learn from the text (Rumelhart, 1980). The activity above may not be a reading activity, but you were still able to use your schema. The mere knowledge of where to go to in Japan or what to do in a vacation is a manifestation that you have prior knowledge (schema). But what really is the use or purpose of schema?

Schema theory assumes that written text does not carry meaning by itself. Instead, a text-only provides directions for readers as to how they should retrieve or construct meaning from their own previously acquired knowledge (An, 2013). You will know more about it in the succeeding activities.

PRACTICE

In the previous activity, you were able to build your prior knowledge about Japan by connecting new information back to it. A concept map is a visual organization and representation of knowledge. It shows concepts and ideas and the relationships among them. With the use of this graphic organizer, you are able able to weed out irrelevant ideas. It helps you clarify the structure of your ideas which will be of great help as you transcend into writing a text. In the same activity, you were also able to get to know schema and how it helps you in mapping out ideas. This part of the module will explain more about the types of schema.

ACTIVITY. Look at the students in the pictures below. They are from the USA and Singapore respectively. Have you ever thought of becoming an exchange student? What do you think are the qualities to be chosen as an exchange student?

Please complete the paragraph below by filling in the appropriate words from the brainstorming list about scholarship. Words should only be used once.

Scholarship programs and international grants give local students the opportunity to study _______________ and learn from the experience of mingling with other races. However, before becoming exchange students, they will have to undergo the rigid _______________  process, which includes  _______________  of their documents and _______________  that gauge their fitness and capability. Having succeeded this application _______________ exchange students feel the joy and fulfilment as they formally fulfill the exchange students _______________ in that foreign country. They undergo new experiences through varied _______________ and co-curricular activities. Dining in restaurants that serve authentic _______________ or plain food preparations in their apartment or host homes also bring something new to the taste buds. These exchange students also learn words and for some to have the skill to engage in basic _______________. The different modes of transportation, which may not be found in their home country, provide exchange students excitement and _______________. When they go back home, they are expected to share their experiences to their family, friends, and schoolmates. Being an exchange student is indeed a beautiful experience.

What helped you answer the cloze test above? Do you know that you might have used the different schemas in accomplishing the above activity? Get to know the three schemas.

Perhaps, you were able to accomplish it by looking at the grammatical or contextual clues, the structure, or you are just plainly familiar with the text. Regardless of which of the aforesaid techniques you used, they are all a manifestation of your prior knowledge. Today, we will delve more onto the types of schema.

Content Schema

Content schema refers to “background knowledge of the content area of the text” (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1983). It contains conceptual knowledge or information about what usually happens within a certain topic, and how these happenings relate to each other to form a coherent whole.  It is an open-ended set of typical events and entities for a specific occasion. For example, the schema for going to a restaurant would include information about services, menus, ordering dishes, paying the bill (giving a tip), and so on. In the cloze test you answered yesterday, your schema for becoming an exchange student might include rigid application and screening process. Content schema is largely culture-specific. Therefore, the cultural schema is usually categorized as a content schema.

Formal Schema

A formal schema refers to “background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical organizational structures of different types of texts” (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1983). In other words, formal schema refers to the knowledge of the ways in which different genres are presented, with reference to Richards et al. (2000), they point out that schema or macrostructure refers to file underlying structure which accounts for the organization of a text or discourse.

The above definitions might have confused you. To simplify things, just ponder on these questions: What makes you think that a poem is a poem and not a short story? What makes you say that what you are reading is a published research, not a textbook or a novel? Simple, it’s because of the structure. Formal schema allows you to categorically say that this is a poem and that is a thesis because it simply is your knowledge as to how the elements of these texts are structured.

In your notebook, with respect to formal schema, explain how poems are structured.

Linguistic Schema

Linguistic schema refers to the knowledge about vocabulary and grammar. It plays a basic role in a comprehensive understanding of the text. Eskey (1988), claims that “good readers are both decoders and interpreters of texts, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less important as their reading skill develops”. This is because that “Language is a major problem in second language reading and that even educated guessing at meaning is no substitute for accurate decoding” (Eskey,1988). In other words, successful comprehension of any text is impossible without effective decoding skills. If I used highfalutin words, for which you have a limited knowledge of, in the brainstorming list, would you be able to correctly answer the cloze test?

Consider yourself an exchange student. Decide if the general experiences of exchange students are simple or a hassle for you. Write your answer in the booklet. If you consider it a hassle, read newspaper articles, magazines, reliable online sources, books, and other printed sources about how these hassles can be resolved. Then, be ready to answer questions that I might ask through a call. 

1. 1. Doing household chores by yourself, e.g., cleaning the apartment, doing the laundry, washing dishes, running errands, cooking, etc.
   2. Budgeting expenses for school requirements, food, transportation, leisure activities. 
   3. Adjusting to the weather, e.g., winter season. 
   4. Adjusting your palate to the food. 
   5.  Keeping pace with their educational system and the grading system.
   6. Speaking in English frequently or learning the language of the country. 
   7. Understanding the mode of transportation and the technology that goes with it. 
   8. Relating with citizens by studying their hobbies, likes and dislikes, and other nuances of life. 
   9. Homesickness. 
   10. Keeping self-confident in the midst of people of another race. ​

Which experience do you consider as simplest and most hassle? Elaborate your answer in your notebook.

ENRICHMENT

Our schemas are brought about by our environment. Our knowledge on the rudiments of language are credited to our parents and early teachers. Our knowledge and fascination with literature, be it of Shakespeare’s or Karl Marx’s, are also influenced by other people. We learn from other people. In this juncture, you are to write an essay about how are you going to show gratefulness to the people who have, in one way or another, contributed to your intellectual growth. Your essay must not be more than 4 paragraphs nor be less than 2 paragraphs with each having at least 5 sentences. But before that, I want you to come up with a topic outline to guide you as how are you going to hierarchically arrange your ideas for your essay. Through this, you will be guided as to what are you going to talk about. It is called a topic outline as it identifies all the mini-topics that your paper will comprise, and shows how they relate.

How to write a topic outline?

Writing an outline is not that hard as it appears to be. I adopted the simplified steps espoused by Georgia Institute of Technology and added some comments to it.

1. 1. Place your thesis statement at the beginning. A thesis statement is the main argument of your text.
   2. List the major points that support your thesis. Label them in Roman Numerals (I, II, III, etc.).
   3. List supporting ideas or arguments for each major point. Label them in capital letters (A, B, C, etc.).
   4. If applicable, continue to sub-divide each supporting idea until your outline is fully developed. Label them 1, 2, 3, etc., and then a, b, c, etc.

In connection with the preceding activities, you have a bit of an idea as to how it is like to live or work abroad. In this section, you will identify why people, Filipinos in particular, choose to work or migrate to other countries. Please rank the reasons that you have thought of using the inverted pyramid below with the most common reason on the top and the least at the bottom.

Why do you think is the psychology behind the reasons you have ranked above? Write your answer in your notebook.

On a long bond paper, create a storyboard depicting the life of Filipinos abroad. There should be at least six events in your storyboard.

Finalize your drawings and make sure that each depiction is clear in description and if possible, vivid in colors. Subsequently, come up with a story based on the events in your storyboard. Write your story in the booklet provided for.

EVALUATION

You have been chosen class researcher who will present a work comparing and contrasting the life of Filipinos in the Philippines and those living in other countries. Once information has been gathered, place them in the Venn diagram which shall be drawn in your booklet. The Venn diagram works this way: on the area at the middle formed by these two overlapping circles, you will write common things about life in the Philippines and abroad; for each of the two remaining areas, write things about life exclusive to the Philippines and life abroad. Keep your lines open and be ready for I might call you on this regard.

CLOSURE

You, as a reader uses prior knowledge to understand a text. This prior knowledge, as identified in this module, is called schema. It has three types, namely content schema or background knowledge of the topic or text; formal schema or the knowledge on the syntax and rhetorical organization of the text; and linguistic schema or the knowledge in decoding the meanings of words to understand the text. All these three schemas are significant in the all-inclusive understanding of the topic as these give you a sense of what you already know versus what you have learned from what you read. ​Schemas are effective most when you use different techniques in organizing information. This involves brainstorming list, graphic organizers, and outline.

Thank you for diligently accomplishing this module. Keep up the momentum for more learning journeys ahead!

What is brainstorming in selecting and organizing information?

Why are the techniques in organizing information important?

Why is selecting and organizing information in the reading and writing process important?

What are three ways to organize ideas in writing?