Students as Sociolinguists: Getting Real Research from Freshman Writers

Abstract

The research component which is part of most freshman composition courses presents enormous tactical and strategic problems to both teacher and students, unless the enterprise is accepted as a run, practice for the time when students are ready to embark on a real research endeavor. Freshmen, after all, are newcomers to the university and are usually taking introductory-level courses. It seems unreasonable to expect them to conduct meaningful research so early in their academic careers. Most freshman students have had just enough experience with research papers in high school to know that they are fraught with a multitude of technical perils: in addition to the general writing problems of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics, research papers can also trip them up with issues of documentation, attribution, and plagiarism. The technical complexity of the form, in addition to the daunting job of finding one's way around a college library in short order, encourages riskreduction on all other fronts: students are likely to choose a safe topic, to structure the paper along extremely simple lines, and to espouse a water-tight opinion-unless, of course, it's possible to avoid opinion completely and write a purely knowledge-telling paper. Ambrose Bierce refers to this kind of drudge-work as moving tombstones from one graveyard to another, and readers as well as writers are dragged down by the lifeless enterprise that his metaphor so accurately reflects. Innovative writing teachers have proposed numerous ways of shaping a legitimate research situation for students (see, for instance, the Staffroom Interchange section of the May 1986 issue of College Composition and Communication). I have found that using sociolinguistics as the subject of a semester-long course leads to real and exciting research rather than technically correct but lifeless dummy runs.