At the San Francisco State campus of the California State University (CSU) where I teach, nearly half the entering class of first year students place into developmental level English courses based on their score on a systemwide English Placement Test. We know, from data accumulated from over 20 years of EPT administrations, that it is their performance on the reading section the test that disproportionately accounts for their placement in developmental level English classes. At virtually all CSU campuses, this means students enroll in a writing course to address their difficulties with reading. On my campus, we have, up until 5 years ago, tried to address this problem by offering a one-unit reading course concurrent with a 3-unit BW course. But the results of this “solution” continued to frustrate us and have led us toward efforts to develop a fully integrated reading/writing (IRW) program.
Meanwhile, the “perpetual crisis” (Shor) that basic writing seems to find itself in has most recently manifested in legislative acts (e.g., California and New York) that strictly curtail BW instruction or eliminate it altogether. The Institute for Higher Education Policy warned that with over 80% of today's sustainable jobs requiring education beyond high school and 65% requiring skills in advanced reading, writing and critical thinking, the social and economic consequences of not providing remedial instruction are “high” and abandoning these programs is “unwise public policy."
Not surprisingly, students already least represented in higher education shoulder the brunt of these consequences. On my campus, for example, these students (some 3,000 per year) almost exclusively speak native languages or dialects other than standard English, half are immigrants, 89% are ethnic minorities, slightly over half are the first in their families to go to college, and a third grew up in families where the primary breadwinner has less than the equivalent of a high school education.
At San Francisco State, we see a link between efforts to cut BW programs and the intractable notion that reading and writing are distinct and separate processes, with reading being considered the more elementary of the two (McCormick; Nelson and Calfee). Postsecondary institutions have stubbornly enacted policies based on the belief that learning to read should have been accomplished by third grade, and learning to write by twelfth. Accordingly, any postsecondary instruction in reading and writing is de-facto remedial, and thus, vulnerable to political and educational forces aimed at its removal.
That's the bad news. The good news is that BW's perpetual crisis is attended by an equally persistent search for new and better ways to secure access to higher education, and to meet the literacy needs of all students once they arrive at college. In the past few years, I have become convinced that IRW is the most radical educational action we can take to defend equal educational opportunity.
The Reading-Writing Connection
There is a demonstrated connection between learning to write and learning to read. Better writers do end to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers (Stotsky). And we know that particular kinds of reading experiences (e.g., Salvatori's “introspective reading”) have a stimulating and generative effect on writing, and, as Zamel notes, the corollary is also true: particular writing experiences teach us to be more effective readers.
McCormick warns, however, that when reading and writing are taught as separate subjects, these beneficial effects are all but lost. Since reading instruction has historically had NO place in the postsecondary curriculum (and writing instruction an increasingly vanishing place) we can only wonder how these students are to successfully negotiate the literacy tasks that await them in college. And, while some of the research findings on the reading-writing connection have informed instructional practice, instruction itself is still far from integrated. Examples are reading courses in which students write (writing-to-read) or writing courses in which students read (reading-to-write). In such models, educators are still identified as either reading teachers or writing teachers, they receive very different kinds of graduate education, publish in different journals, use different terminology, turf wars still rage, and attempts at integration are often resisted.
The Challenge of Integration: Possible Discussion Questions
The challenge, then, is to put IRW to the test. If the link between reading and writing is as crucial as the research suggests it is, then it follows that students would reap demonstrably greater benefits from an educational approach that integrates the two. So, how can we effectively practice an IRW pedagogy, using an integrated curriculum, to meet the needs of students typically referred to as basic “writers?” Here are some questions to get our conversation started:
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How have you, or the program you teach in, tried to integrate reading and writing? What's been successful? What's proven difficult? What impediments, if any, have you encountered?
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What types of assignments do you (or would you) include in an IRW course? How are these assignments “different” from ones you'd include in a non-integrated BW or developmental-level reading course? What does (would) an integrated curriculum look like?
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What pedagogical modifications have you (or would you) make to take an integrated approac h to an integrated curriculum ? What does (would) an integrated pedagogy look like?
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What changes need to be made to teacher education in order to fully integrate reading and writing?
Sources
Teaching Basic Writing Home Page
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