JBW Abstracts: Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 2008

Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy:  Mapping the Interplay of Curricular and Extracurricular Literate Activities

Kevin Roozen

ABSTRACT:  In an effort to live up to Elaine Richardson’s dictum that educators and researchers must address “the total linguistic, cultural, and historical background of the learner” (19), basic writing scholarship has addressed a wealth of competencies that basic writers bring with them to the university. The literate lives they lead beyond the academy, however, have received relatively little attention in terms of theory, research, and practice. In an article that draws upon text collection, interviews, and participant observations from a longitudinal ethnographic case study of one basic writer’s non-school and school literate activities, I examine the synergies between this student’s extracurricular journalism, poetry, and stand-up comedy and his literate activity for two undergraduate courses. Arguing that the writer’s school tasks are profoundly shaped by an extensive network of non-school practices, artifacts, and activities, I contend that we need to situate the full range of basic writers’ literate engagements into our research and teaching. 

KEYWORDS: basic writer; extracurricular writing; sociohistoric theory; literate development

Technologies for Transcending a Focus on Error: Blogs and Democratic Aspirations in First-Year Composition

Cheryl C. Smith

ABSTRACT: How are the internet and its online spaces for open exchange changing reading and writing practices, and how can we capitalize on these changes in composition instruction?  This article traces the author’s experiment with blogging in her first-year writing class and considers how and why blogs help students negotiate the unfamiliar demands of college writing and enter into a more democratic arena for learning where their voices and arguments gain fuller, freer expression.  In particular, the article proposes that the space of the blog, which is familiar to many students, opens up possibilities for risk-taking and interactivity that teach important lessons about the role of error and audience response in the composing process.  As students rethink and revise their initial ideas, working off one another’s comments, they develop more authority as critics with valued opinions and voice and let go of some of their fear about making mistakes that can prevent inexperienced writers from discovering and communicating their best arguments.  By embracing the inventive and often messy space of blogs in composition instruction, students and teachers alike can evolve a new view of what it means to learn to write—and write effectively—in academic settings.

KEYWORDS: blog; first-year writing; democracy and education; error

Assessment of Generation 1.5 Learners for Placement into College Writing Courses

Kristen di Gennaro

ABSTRACT:  Higher education settings in the United States typically include several types of writing assessments. Since tests determining students’ placement into writing courses are often high-stakes, it is imperative for those who make placement decisions to be knowledgeable of the different types of learners entering higher education in order to make appropriate placement recommendations. This article investigates the existence of different types of second language learners in the U.S., with particular emphasis on the population currently identified as Generation 1.5. After describing several defining characteristics, I draw on results of studies identifying how these learners are different from other L2 learners. I use this exploration to highlight findings that can inform writing program administrators interested in adopting assessment procedures leading to fairer and more accurate placement of L2 students. Such findings could serve as a foundation for a writing placement framework that takes into consideration different types of learners based on their writing performance as well as cultural and educational backgrounds.  

KEYWORDS: Generation 1.5; placement testing; second language learners; writing assessment

Material Realities in the Basic Writing Classroom: Intersections of Discovery for Young Women Reading Persepolis 2

Susan Naomi Bernstein

ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on how young women students in a first-year, first-quarter basic reading and writing course wrote about their connections to the process of identity development as portrayed in the graphic novel Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi.  While the circumstances of becoming a student in a required university-sanctioned remedial course in an urban Midwestern university differed greatly from Marjane’s privileged education at a French lycée in Vienna, these women, not unlike Marjane, dealt with struggles against marginality and invisibility in a bureaucratic and unfamiliar environment.  Exploring the correspondences of coming-of-age for both my students and the novel’s main character, Marjane, I demonstrate the use of the graphic novel as a means for renegotiating students’ agency and identity beyond fixed categories of gender, race, and class, as well as institutional definitions of the basic writer.

KEYWORDS: intersectionality; young women; basic writing; feminist pedagogical practices; graphic novels

Feedback on Feedback:  Exploring Student Responses to Teachers’ Written Commentary

Maria Ornella Treglia

ABSTRACT: How students respond to teacher-written commentary has been an under-researched topic, and the existing literature in L2 studies is contradictory.  The present study analyzes the critical and positive commentary, mitigated and unmitigated, written by two community-college, first-year composition teachers on two drafts of two writing assignments done by 14 L1 and L2 students and addresses the students’ reactions to these comments.

Qualitative data was collected through interviews with the two teachers and their 14 student participants.  Students indicated that they equally understand and revise following mitigated and directive comments.  However, they found most helpful the commentary that provided some acknowledgment of their writing, offered specific suggestions, and gave them choices.  In addition, many of the students felt discouraged by directives that didn’t convey trust in their abilities to revise.  The findings are compared with those of similar studies, and conclusions are drawn about implications for instructors of first-year composition classes. 

KEYWORDS:  teacher-written commentary; feedback; student response; mitigated and directive comments

JBW Abstracts: Vol. 27, No. 2, Fall 2008

Roberta; or, the Ambiguities: Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment at a Two-Year College in North Georgia

Spencer Salas

ABSTRACT: This ethnographic narrative employs a neo-Vygotskian perspective (Holland et al.) to examine how, in the setting of a remedial ESL program at a public two-year college in North Georgia, the subject position of an ESL basic writing instructor was mediated by her understandings of and engagement with the multiple and interactive contexts of her professional activity. Despite a wide variety of tensions that complicated the instructor’s understandings of who she was professionally, Roberta was able to position herself in ways that allowed her to make sense of her professional choices. However, her construction of gatekeeping as advocacy brought with it an emotional toll at the end of each semester when some students passed and some students failed—shaking the sense of her tough-love pedagogical stance. Representations of basic writing professionals are critiqued to argue the need for more nuanced research for and with basic writing faculty in the activist college composition literature.

KEYWORDS: two-year college; teachers’ mental lives; basic writing; ESL students; Generation 1.5; postsecondary remediation

Service Learning in a Basic Writing Class:  A Best Case Scenario

Nancy Pine

ABSTRACT: This article explores the particular challenges and possibilities of service learning pedagogy for basic writers.  Because a number of scholars of service learning and basic writing (Adler-Kassner, Arca, and Kraemer) are concerned primarily with developing underprepared students’ academic literacies, I investigated how the students in a service learning basic writing class situated their service experience—represented that “text” rhetorically—in their major academic research essay for the course.   The article draws on one student’s experience of making connections among the “rich mix” of course texts, including personal experience, as a best case.  From this example, I argue for strategies of service learning pedagogy that could better help basic writers achieve their goals for academic writing.

KEYWORDS:  service learning; personal narrative; academic literacies; ethnography

The Role of Talk in Small Writing Groups: Building Declarative and Procedural Knowledge for Basic Writers

Sonja Launspach

ABSTRACT:  Through the use of a case study, this article explores the role of talk in underprepared students’ acquisition of academic discourse. Conversation analysis as a linguistic framework is used to examine the interactions of students participating in a small writing group. Tracing the progress of one student’s paper, I explore how students’ participation  in small writing groups allows them, in Faerch and Kasper’s terms, to build  declarative knowledge and  negotiate strategies they can apply to their procedural knowledge of writing. The small writing groups, led by a teaching assistant, provide underprepared students with exposure to the practices and values of the academic discourse community. A systematic look at how students’ talk is structured and what topics they focus on offers important insights to instructors into aspects of student writers’ learning processes and suggests additional pedagogical approaches.

KEYWORDS: academic discourse; declarative knowledge; procedural knowledge; writing groups; communities of practice

Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State

Sugie Goen-Salter

ABSTRACT: For more than two decades the California State University (CSU) has been trying unsuccessfully to “reduce the need for remediation” on its campuses, primarily through initiatives aimed at high schools. This article examines a basic writing reform project, San Francisco State’s Integrated Reading/Writing Program, in the context of the CSU’s history of remediation. The success of this project, in light of the CSU’s remedial past, provides the grounds to advocate for higher education as the appropriate location for basic writing and reading and to advocate, in turn, for the resources necessary to theorize, develop and sustain a rich variety of approaches to basic writing instruction. The analysis in this article also suggests the need for more graduate programs and faculty development initiatives to help prepare a new generation of basic writing teachers and scholars to meet the needs of the next new generation of basic writing students.

KEYWORDS: basic writing; reading-writing connection; remediation; institutional history; educational reform

A New World: Redefining the Legacy of Min-Zhan Lu

Brian Ray

ABSTRACT: This article discusses exchanges between a number of scholars during the 1990s centering on Min-Zhan Lu’s controversial essay “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?” In some ways, “Conflict and Struggle” blazed a trail for later work in “hybrid” or “mixed” forms of academic writing while at the same time igniting debate over Mina Shaughnessy’s legacy. Rather than take sides, the author considers what perspectives and considerations were left out of this years-long standoff and attempts to reconcile this issue in BW theory through relevant but less talked-about work in linguistics. The concept of linguistic charity, an area of growing interest in composition studies, offers a particularly refreshing new direction for discussion regarding the ambiguous and often controversial role of Standard English in our pedagogies.

KEYWORDS: Mina Shaughnessy; Min-Zhan Lu; linguistic charity; essentialism; grammatical instruction; Standard English