UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Theory and Pedagogy for Instructors:     Teaching and Learning Writing to Readings

"Theory" Home Page

            All "Theory for Instructors" pages such as this are introductory essays for instructors learning to apply theory to pedagogy.  This page discusses the problems and possibilities of asking students to write responses to expository texts in composition courses. 

Should Readings Be Assigned in Composition Courses?

            When I entered eleventh grade, I decided to take Spanish I.  I'd already had two years of Latin, no more of it was available, and I thought Spanish might make an interesting elective.  Our teacher, who I will call Mr. Trimmer, was new, young, and fresh out of college.  As the days progressed, the other students--most of whom were ninth and tenth graders--and I discovered that Mr. Trimmer was a nice guy with a great smile who could speak Spanish with a rapid-fire delivery.  We also learned he was, as a teacher, a pushover.  He started the course by giving us five or ten vocabulary words to learn each day and testing us on them at the beginning of class.  Soon he found many of the students had not done their homework, so he started testing us at the end of class.  When results still were bad, he kept testing us less and less and giving us ever fewer words.  Our class found all kinds of ways to derail him: begging, pleading, and whining were popular, simple resistance (by the less academically inclined) helped, and even I contributed by discovering he was a good storyteller with some fascinating stories of travel and then asking him to tell them to us in class.  By the time the year was done, we had only one ten-word vocabulary test every Friday.  Generally, I and most of the others who were still even bothering to study would memorize the words the night before, review them in study hall within a few hours of the test, and then forget them almost completely within a week or two.  I can remember nothing I learned that whole year.  Though it may appear from an instructional viewpoint that Mr. Trimmer's biggest error was in not requiring sufficient work, his real sin from a learning standpoint was that we did not practice sufficiently.  That is why I retained nothing.

            I sometimes fear that we are committing an academic sin similar to Mr. Trimmer's when we use excessive readings when teaching composition.  Just last year, I had a number of conversations with a frustrated colleague who was team teaching an ESL course with a handsome, tall, energetic, and wholly convincing young instructor.  My colleague's teaching style and that of the young, charming instructor were rather different.  My colleague taught using practice and repetition, while the charmer taught by assigning readings in English and then, when students came to class confused, led lengthy discussions among the students that they found fascinating.  The students walked away from each class dazzled and excited by what they had learned in class.  This reminds me of a time in a literature course when I decided to see how easily I might dazzle my own students.  I prepared a twenty-minute lecture on a novel they had read, using a variety of sources and different interpretive methods.  In language they could easily understand, I showed them different interpretations of important passages in the book, and even in their faces I could see at the time that they were spellbound by all my knowledge and how I explained the novel to them.  Later, evaluations confirmed just how dazzled they had been by my performance.  

            However, I now never teach that way.  Rather, I require students to gradually build their own interpretations by asking them questions.  In fact, they sometimes grow frustrated that I won't interpret the texts for them.  I then explain that it is my job not to tell them what to think, but rather to teach them how to ore deeplye xplore the materials on their own.  For this, I tell them, they must develop good critical reading and thinking skills.  If they do that much, I tell them, and make an honest effort at doing the work and trying different ideas, I will respect their interpretations.

            As my colleague who was team teaching with Mr. Charmer pointed out with legitimate frustration, Mr. Charmer's lessons no more helped the students with their own reading skills than did my performance that bedazzled my own students.  The next day, my colleague said, the students would again come to her and Mr. Charmer's class having had great difficulty with the reading.  In both mid-term and final tests of their reading abilities in English, she was not surprised--but Mr. Charmer was stunned--to learn that almost half of the class was unable to pass the test at the minimum cutoff grade that the two of them had together established.  Mr. Charmer's suggested solution was to lower the cutoff drastically.  The two of them compromised and lowered it somewhat.  In this conflict I see not only my Spanish teacher, Mr. Trimmer's, error of insufficient practice, but also the equally deadly error with which I had experimented and then dropped in my literature classes: lecture and class discussion in which the instructor basically teaches the text cannot replace the competencies of learning to read and to think on one's own.  

            A related problem in teaching writing using readings is transferability.  What skills should we teach students to use in writing about their readings?  The English department of one of the first colleges at which I taught called its composition sequence "English I" and "English II."  This was because most of the department members really were teaching writing-intensive introduction to literature.  Most students came out of the sequence knowing the elements of literature and how to write literary analyses and theses.  In my third year there, I was the writing center director, and because of that and my sympathies for writing across the curriculum, I gained the trust of a number of campus instructors concerning writing.  I was asked repeatedly why students did not seem to know how to write even after they had had their composition courses.  I had to explain--as abundant anecdotal evidence and even some official research has informed us increasingly during recent decades--that students were learning how to write about literature and that the average student cannot easily transfer that kind of writing to another discipline.  In spite of this problem--one that has been well known for decades--as many as 10% of all colleges and universities allow analysis-of-literature courses to serve as required first-year composition courses, and another 10% or more allow writing about literature.  In addition, perhaps another third require writing about expository readings in comp courses.  Many such courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students who have had little training in teaching composition and often are more interested in teaching literature.  Though there is little direct research to indicate it, anecdotal evidence would indicate that the discipline of composition still has a significant problem with transferability of composition skills.

            The next question I was asked often was, "Then why are we giving English two courses to teach students general writing?"  It is, perhaps, the most ethically just and difficult curricular question to pose to English (or other) departments in charge of writing.  Those who teach composition--which is one of the biggest generators in almost any college of income, student numbers, and required credits--are given such power precisely because the rest of the college believes honestly and, perhaps, a bit naively, that we will teach everyone how to write for all courses.  Of course, the answer is much more complex than many administrators and instructors in other disciplines realize: transferability is a difficult issue in all writing pedagogies, reading and writing are closely intertwined, writing really requires development through all of a student's years and her curriculum, and basic mechanical skills--grammar, punctuation, etc.--are neither easily taught nor simply remembered.  

            Many composition instructors believe that readings should have little or no place in the teaching of composition.  Others argue that asking students to respond to expository or literary texts not only helps them develop their reading and critical-thinking skills, but also that their practice in such reading becomes a precursor or development of their skills in research writing.  

            However if we insist on including the reading of texts in college composition courses, why is it that we do not actually teach our students how to read at a college level?  Some instructors argue that we don't need to teach reading skills.  This belief, which we might call the reading-by-osmosis theory, argues that better reading skills are absorbed indirectly as students write about texts.  Certainly this is true to some extent.  However, there is mounting empirical evidence that many students, perhaps even a majority, do not transfer skills easily, if at all, unless their specific focus in their lessons is exactly--not indirectly--on what they are supposed to learn.  In other words, if you want to teach history to students, you do not feed them a meal like the Romans ate, for what they will remember is the experience of eating, not the historical relationships of Roman culture, history, and politics with their food.  And if you want to teach students writing, you do not--as the process movement proved to everyone in the 1970s-'90s--simply expose students to good writing, as had been the practice in previous decades.  The same likely is true of reading.  A majority of college students--especially now that our society is encouraging open admittance and nearly half of the populace is attending college in some form--does not learn to read well at a college level simply by being exposed to good texts and classroom discussion of them.  If you want most of your first-year college students to learn to read well, you probably need to teach them specific college-reading skills.  

            The culturally and educationally conservative or traditional position on this issue is that students should not be taught to read at a college level if they do not already enter college with this skill.  Unfortunately, this is a type of default setting in the thinking of many otherwise forward-thinking instructors, who normally believe that teaching students how to write and how to study are appropriate lessons for college courses.  Unfortunately, many such instructors believe that such instruction should be ghettoized in remedial courses.  Increasingly, though, some teachers of first-year courses are developing learning-centered modules in their courses that include basics of how to write and how to study, based on the rather realistic assumption that many students have lacks in these areas.  Instructors would do well to consider such modules that teach college reading skills, too.  

            This is especially true for instructors in composition courses in which there is a conscious goal of fostering better reading and better writing about texts.  There are several reasons why this should be so.  First, the reading-as-osmosis theory flies in the face of one of the underlying assumptions of most composition pedagogies: that there exists a rough democracy in the learning capacities of students who are capable of finishing a composition course.  That is, such students are capable of learning, if at times more slowly or less perfectly, the primary skills of writing.  Second, college reading is one of many college-level skills that students do not learn until they are in college, and if such skills can be taught specifically and concretely, students will learn them sooner and more thoroughly.  Third, students receive plenty of practice in reading in most college courses, whereas colleges expect composition courses to focus on the teaching of and practice in writing.  For this reason, any composition course that focuses on reading needs to be sure it develops a special connection between reading and writing.  Fourth, composition courses in which students spend significant portions of time reading thereby allow less time for students to learn and practice writing, so their reading time needs to be especially productive.  Fifth, lecturing to students and having an in-class discussion of a text's contents may model good critical thinking, but they do not directly teach the majority of the students to find these contents for themselves in improved ways unless the students also must perform the applications themselves on other texts.   

          Some composition theorists argue, in fact,  that composition courses should have little or no reading in them. That is a reasonable position, and one held by some luminaries in the field.  Most instructors still deeply committed to expressivism believe, for example, that students should write primarily from their own freewritten rough drafts to fuller finished drafts embodying their own experiences, feelings, thoughts, and other expressions.  And many WAC (writing across the curriculum) theorists believe that students generally are so busy learning the patterns of academic-, discipline-, or work-related writing that there is little time for them to spend reading, as well: that reading, in short, is what other academic disciplines do--that we in composition should stick to what we're good at, which is writing.

            However, the use of reading having been deconstructed, it is possible to reconstruct it using concrete phenomena.  It is reasonable to argue, for example (especially from the WAC position) that another underlying assumption in most composition pedagogies is the fundamental assumption that composition is supposed to to prepare students for writing in other disciplines.  This is, in fact, a bedrock of composition's mission as most administrators and non-English faculty members would state it.  It is to most people on a campus the reason why composition exists.  Given this mission, and given the fact that writing in different disciplines requires a variety of written patterns, it is reasonable to instruct students how to write basic forms of these differing disciplinary papers.  And because some of these disciplinary papers are in response to disciplinary texts, it is reasonable to require at least short readings of students so that they have something to which to respond.  In this way, then, there is reasonable justification for short texts that take little time of students and that they can understand reasonably well.

            On the other hand, to require longer readings with the justification that students then learn how to read better is not in itself as easily established as an appropriate method of teaching composition.  Having the few learn better reading by osmosis is a poor substitute for having the many spend significant additional time in writing.      

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION: additional ideas to add:

from top-level theory-ideas:

WRITELIT:

Diana Hacker, author of some of the most important grammar handbooks in composition, says, "Years ago, many of us spent class time . . . discussing and 'appreciatng' bellelettristic essays.  This lecture/discussion/literary appreciation approach didn't work.  Our students wrote badly.  It took the process movement to wake us up.  . . . I began to spend much more time . . . coaching students as they worked with their own texts.  And I began including good student writing as models. . . .  Similar transformations were taking place all over the country.  Student writing improved dramatically. . . .   Today, we continue to spend less time lecturing and more time helping students work with their own texts" (297).  

According to Hacker, "In the past, many of us assigned papers, collected them, graded them, and told students to learn from their mistakes.  Today we undersand that most learning occurs during the process of writing. . . .  Students aren't particularly open to advice once a paper has been graded.  As Mina Shaughnessy has pointed out, writers reach closure once their work has been published or" (/298) "graded" (299).

Mariolina Salvatori (sp?) about different ways of arguing about literature

See Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 101-124, I believe (see my note on the inside front cover): he has a system of identifying themes which, in combination with his concept of engaging students in dialogue, would work well in working with literature.

WRITEREAD:

See all the stuff above in "WriteLit."

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R. Michael Gold, "How the Freshman Essay Anthology Subverts the Aims of the Traditional Composition Course," Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Vol. 18, No. 4. 261-5.

"An anthology of professional essays in the composition course can impede rather than facilitate mastery of basic writing skills.  Intellectually advanced essays divert attention form the study of composition and rhetoric and obscure course objectives.  ...all too often the fundamentals of writing are eclipsed by the intensity and challeng of the specimen essays. (261)

"The composition teacher's main obligation, as specified in the typical catalog coruse description--and assumed by colleagues in other departments--is to enhance fundamental skills in written communication.  (262)

In short: our primary responsibility is to teach the principles and prescriptions of composition and rhetoric; however, the intellectual de-" (262) "mands of the anthologized essay distract us from this central pedagogical obligation." (263)

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[This material by Willingham is also copied to phenomenology in a file of its own.]

Daniel T. Willingham, an associate professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia: 
"Students Remember . . . What They Think About." American Educator Summer 2003, 37-41.  (American Federation of Teachers)  Also available at www.aft.org/american_educator/winter2002/CogSci.html.  

"Why do well-integrated, coherent lessons often come back to us in a less meaningful, fragmented form?  . . . Cognitive science has shown that what ends up in a learner's memory is not simply the material presented--it is the product of what the learner thought about when he or she encountered the material (37).  

"[T]here is one factor that trumps most others in determining what is remembered: what you think about when you encounter the material" (38).   

"Other experiments show that even if one thinks about meaning, the particular aspect of the meaning that one considers will be stored in memory, and other aspects of meaning will not" (39).  

"Always try to anticipate what students will be thinking when they are doing the assignment" (40)

"There is little doubt that students remember material they generate themselves. . . .  However, given that memory follows thought, one thing is clear: Students will remember incorrect 'discoveries' [self-generated knowledge] just as well as correct ones" (40).  

"Design reading assignments that require students to actively process the text.  ...[U]sing any strategy that encourages the processing of meaning is almost always better than not using one" (41).

"Research tells us that deep, connected knowledge can be encouraged by getting students to think about the interrelation of the various pieces of knowledge that they have acquired.  Cognitive science has not progressed to the point that it can issue prescriptions of exactly how that can be achieved--that job is very much in the hands of experienced teachers.  But in considering how to encourage students to acquire meaningful knowledge, teachers will do well to keep the 'memory is as thinking does' principle in mind" (41).

[all the Rose quotes I have:]

From Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose, New York : Penguin, 1990.  (Rose is at UCLA.)

Analysis has a set of assumptions to be revealed:
“There was a kind of implied directive to the request to analyze. . . .  Students are not usually told that such analytic investigation is always carried out with a set of assumptions, and these assumptions are crucial determinants of how you proceed in your examination, what you find, and you explain your discovery to others” (140).

Students need to “be let into the club’:
“My students needed to be immersed in talking, reading, and writing, they needed to further develop their ability to think critically, and they needed to gain confidence in themselves as systematic inquirers.  They had to be let into the academic club.  The fact that they misspelled words or wrote fragments or dropped verb endings would not erect insurmountable barriers to the benefits (142)

they would gain from such immersion” (143).

Courses should be taught by showing students how to think in their disciplines:
“Students like Andrea are caught in a terrible bind.  They come (190)

to the university with limited experience in applying knowledge, puzzling over solutions, solving problems.  May of the lower-division courses they encounter—their ‘general education’ or ‘breadth’ requirements—will involve little writing or speaking or application, will rely on so-called objective tests that, with limited exception, stress the recall of material rather than the reasoned elaboration of it.  But the gatekeeper courses—the courses that determine entrance to a major—they up the intellectual ante.  Courses like Andrea’s bete noire, Chemistry 11-A, are placed like land mines in the uneven terrain of the freshman year.  The special nature of their demands is not made the focus of attention that it should be; that is, the courses are not taught explicitly and self-consciously as courses on how to think as a chemist or a psychologist or a literary critic.  And there are few opportunities for students to develop such ability before they enroll in those courses.  The faculty, for the most part, do not provide freshmen with instruction on how to use knowledge creatively—and then penalize them when they cannot do so” (191).

Students need places and times to develop the strategies & “secret talk” of college learning:
“Students . . . need more opportunities to develop the writing strategies that are an intimate part of academic inquiry and what has come (193)

to be called critical literacy—comparing, synthesizing, analyzing. . . .  They need opportunities to talk about what they’re learning: to test their ideas, reveal their assumptions, talk through the places where new knowledge clashes with ingrained belief.  . . . They need the occasion to rise above the fragmented learning the lower-division curriculum encourages, a place within a course or outside it to hear about and reflect on the way a particular discipline conducts its inquiry. . . .  And they need to let in on the secret talk, on the shared concepts and catchphrases of Western liberal learning” (194).

Also, here are a few quotes about the “Millie” test incident & Jerome Brunner in my heuristics essay:

Mike Rose situates this problem succinctly in Lives on the Boundary when he tells the story of Millie, “whose test scores placed her . . . very low just about anywhere . . .” (218).  Rose tries to show Millie how to handle a set of multiple-choice test questions.  Each of Millie’s questions asks her to give the meaning of the underlined prefix of a word: for example, for “unhappy,” her choices are “very, glad, sad, not” (217).  Many students in Millie’s class have, like Millie herself, failed this set of questions (218).  Rose explains to Millie in every way he can how to see the underlined prefix, and still she makes her choices based on the entire word.  Finally, in frustration and almost as an afterthought, Rose does “something the publishers of the test tell you not to do:” he circles the underlined prefix of one of the words in the questions (219).  Millie immediately chooses the correct answer.  Then, just as he is ready to stop his session with her, Millie circles the next underlined prefix on her own (220).  And she answers the question correctly.  She proceeds to circle several more prefixes and to choose the correct answers, and on the last one, she does so without needing to physically make a circle: she now can “see” what she is supposed to.  Rose concludes, “Cognitive psychologists talk about task representation, the way a particular problem is depicted or reproduced in the mind.  Something shifted in Millie’s conception of her task, and it had a powerful effect on her performance.”  In the terms of critical thinking, Rose gave Millie a heuristic, simple in conception yet devastating in its area of impact.  He taught Millie to think like an academic. 

According to Rose, Jerome Bruner states in The Process of Education, “Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (142).