What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?

Abstract

I wish to propose an hypothesis for researching an answer to this question. For the time being, let me suggest that are those who are least well prepared for college. They may be defined in absolute terms, by features of their writing, or in relative terms, by their placement in a given school's freshman composition sequence, but, either way, their salient characteristic is their outlandishness-their appearance to many teachers and to themselves as the students who are most alien in the college community. Currently there are three major ways to describe what happens to these outlanders when they enter college. Each approach tends to focus on one element of basic writers' complex experience. While each approach can give us a valuable partial view of basic writers' experience, I am seeking a more comprehensive approach to frame my research hypothesis. One of these three current approaches says that basic writers entering college precipitate a clash among dialects. The basic writers are those students who experience the greatest distance between their home dialects and Standard English, the preferred dialect in school. These students feel that if only they could learn to write grammatically, their problems would be solved. Some teachers agree, saying we should help-or require-these students to learn Standard English. This solution is institutionalized in the composition course requirements at most colleges. Once entangled in these requirements, however, basic writers may wish they could avoid the demands of Standard altogether-after all, it's only a matter of how they're saying it, not what they say, they feel. Scholars such as James Sledd have argued that the solution is to stop demanding that all school work be conducted in Standard English, and to give these students the option of either learning Standard English, if they so desire, or writing and speaking in school in their home dialects. We know that all dialects of English, whether Standard or non-Standard, are capable of conveying complex thought. Given this consensus, students and