Choice and Variety in Developing Writers John Lovas De Anza College

First, I’d like to construct my impression of what I’ll call “current traditional” practice in many Basic Writing classrooms.  Because students have been placed in courses below the level of First year Composition, they are usually seen as lacking in “writing skills” and often as uncomfortable with language learning in any form.  The usual response to this view of the student is to “simplify” the tasks in order to help the students develop the skills they don’t have and to not challenge them too greatly for fear of undermining already weak confidence.  My impression is that two common forms of simplifcation are these:  (1) at the rhetorical level, to identify a template or algorithm (introduction, body, conclusion; 5-paragraph essay; thesis-support) that the student must learn and then practice that same writing model over and over; (2) at the grammatical level, to identify the “major” errors (or “most common” errors), typically fragments, run-on sentences, comma splices, subject-verb agreement, and “teach” those errors.  A lot of pedagogy is directed at finding ways to get students engaged in practicing the rhetorical algorithm and the sentence-level error recognition.

What I will propose here avoids organizing the basic writing course around either of those patterns.  And I will challenge the idea of practicing the same “simplified” approach over and over on both theoretical and pedagogical grounds.

 On the theoretical level, the repeated practice model essentially draws on behaviorist learning theory:  that if you practice a task over and over, you will gain mastery.  I think if you are trying to drive a golf ball or shoot a free throw in basketball, that learning model has a lot of efficacy.  But over the last 40 years, we’ve learned a lot about how children develop language and it isn’t through imitation and practice.  Children learn language from unstructured “messy” input which they then construct into the grammar rules of their language, a natural process below the level of conscious learning.  My experience suggests adult students in basic writing classes do best when the work builds on the assumption they already have a good grasp of language.

On the pedagogical level, the repeated practice model makes it difficult to maintain student interest.  You keep drilling the same patterns or errors again and again.  You may find ways to make it a game, but about the only way to gain interest is through the selection of topics and readings—and if you have students from diverse backgrounds, that can be a very difficult process.

What do I propose?  Organize the reading and writing tasks around the principles of student choice and variety in both reading and writing.  Choice is very important in developing interest in reading.  Students who are already reluctant readers are rarely open to reading instructor-chosen texts or instructor-chosen topics.  Some students don’t even know how to make such choices. Let me illustrate one practice that has met with a lot of success in a course two levels below First-year Composition.  I ask students to subscribe to the local daily newspaper (they have special student subscription rates).  Then I give them this mnemonic taxonomy:  news you choose, news you can lose, news you cruise, news you can use.  To start, each student needs to find three articles from a given issue that interest them (Choose).  They clip them and bring them to class.  There, I show them Sq3R reading techniques and have them write rudimentary summaries.  After a few days of this practice (and sometimes I have them pair with a classmate who has made similar choices), I ask them to bring in three articles they ordinarily would never read (Lose).  Here, I might have them identify words they don’t know and look them up. And I’ll have some class discussion about reasons they would not usually read this material.  The first few times I did this I was quite surprised:  in these particular classes, the two most popular topics were technology and education, followed by business.  Least popular was sports.  In general, I found most students willing to do the work required of reading and writing about it when they had a lot to say about the choice of material.

The variety argument applies most to the writing tasks.  My experience suggests that the more often students take on different writing tasks and have to think through purpose and audience for each different task, the more they develop a genuine grasp of  composition.  While my goals in these classes still lead to producing a well-supported academic essay, I don’t start there.  I don’t even utter the word “thesis”—usually it’s a student who first uses the word in class.  Rather I ask them to do a wide range of reading/searching/writing tasks, ones involving recollection, observation and information gathering.  One might be to use the phone book to plan a visit from a friend (budget $1500).  Another might be to write a valentine poem to someone they are close to.  Another might be to keep a log for a week, a journal for another week.  In short, I have them write both for self and for others for a range of purposes.  While not every student engages with every task, I find that by mid-course almost every student has found a writing task that caught their interest.

Somewhere past the mid-point of the course, I introduce more formal summary writing tasks and give them a series of profiles about very different people.  Here they practice paraphrase and quotation from limited sources.  Once they have done about eight of these summaries, I have them choose four or five to make the basis of an essay, in which they construct a theme or thesis and then draw a conclusion.  The result is a 3 to 4 page paper that reflects the ability to summarize, abstract, and organize.  And every paper is different.

Let me add a contextual note:  the last time I used this approach in a basic writing course (Fall 2002), I was the only person of Northern European heritage in the room. Over half the students were bilingual.

I don't write discussion questions for my students anymore because it's their work to ask questions.  But I will suggest some aspects of this topic that some of you might want to discuss:

• I don't mention process approaches in developmental courses in my posting.  Do you use them?  Has "process" become algorithmic in composition courses?

• I teach in a two-year college where I'm free to select my own texts and develop my own approaches within the general framework of a departmental course outline (which has been negotiated among all faculty and approved at a departmental meeting and the college-wide curriculum committee).  If you are supervised by a writing program administrator, what range of freedom do you have to develop your own materials and approaches?

• Most basic writing courses are designed to prepare students for the demands of the required first-year composition courses.  They are usuallyrationalized as preparing for academic writing.  Is that goal too narrow?  Are there other uses of writing all students should develop somecomfort with?

References

Teaching Basic Writing

If you have a question or a problem about a specific book or product, please fill out our Product Feedback Form.
For further information about this site contact english@mcgraw-hill.com