Freshman English Classes Research Articles

On composing ethnographically: Strategies for enacting authority in writing

(1991). On composing ethnographically: Strategies for enacting authority in writing. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 131-142.

A freshman english class talks about sex, risk taking, and aids

A freshman english class talks about sex, risk taking, and aids

Teaching Writing with Computer Aids

For teachers concerned with improving student writing, there have been two extremes in instructional strategy. Teachers who give ad hoc advice or who run their classes like writing workshops can individualize instruction and treat papers as unified wholes, but they repeat themselves often. (Or they can refer students to handbooks with a set of cryptic marking symbols-dev, agr, / /which students rarely decipher and check.) The second extreme involves class use of a textbook according to a fixed syllabus. This practice usually follows a developmental or chronological progression-from words to sentences to paragraphs to essays; or from prewriting to writing to editing. Yet recent empirical studies of writing show that composition is not a series of discrete, chronologically ordered tasks, but rather a complex of recursive, embedded activities (Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing, CCC, 32 [1981], 365-387). The systematized order of a textbook, then, may not meet the needs of any particular student. However, now teachers can use computer programs and word processing to combine the systematic coverage of a writing class with the individualization of a writing workshop. This paper reports on the educational philosophy and practice I have been developing to incorporate computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and word processing in a freshman English class. Students use Apple microcomputers with the word-processing program APPLEWRITER II along with other programs for CAI and text-feedback. However, the ideas for integrating computer aids into the composition class can be adapted for use with other systems (or have alternate forms, as noted in the references). Word processing can change the way students write and their attitudes toward writing. In fact, the protean malleability of text with word processing is ideally suited for tutoring students in writing improvement.' Writing is not like arithmetic with discrete, masterable component units. It is more like producing a sym-

Reading Comprehension as Predictor of Growth in Syntactic Maturity and Writing Quality in the First Two and One-Half Years of Undergraduate Study

A previous study at Miami University indicated that sentence-combining practice in the freshman English class for a semester ( N = 290) results in improvement in syntactic maturity and writing effectiveness but not in reading comprehension. The present reanalysis of the same data investigated the role of reading comprehension (measured by the Sequential Test of Educational Progress) as a predictor of growth in writing skills (measured by syntactic and qualitative criteria). The results showed no consistent multivariate relationships between reading and writing.

Composition Correctness Scores

A simple teacher-scored method can be used to determine the proportion of correct usage in freshman ESL compositions. The method correlated highly with impressionistic rankings of overall writing quality and discriminated among four very narrow-range levels of proficiency: intensive English, minimally accepted freshman ESL, lower-level ESL, and a parallel lower-level freshman English class (remedial) for native speakers. Within this narrow range of skills, the scoring method provided reliable discrimination for purposes of class assignment and measurement of in-class progress. Six teachers of varying experience in ESL and freshman composition achieved high correlations both as a group and individually among numerical and impressionistic rankings of 20 selected essays, all on expository themes. All scoring was individually determined without group consultation or group grading practice. The two career freshman composition teachers showed slightly lower correlations among all data than the four career ESL teachers, indicating that discussions of criteria might have improved consistency between these two professional groups. Correctness scores are easy to compute and appear to be psychologically convincing to those teachers who prefer an exact numerical score to impressionistic rating as a measure of 1) the seriousness of a given usage error, 2) progress in usage improvement, and 3) readiness to pass into a higher level class. One year's trial and theoretical implications for composition research are discussed.

Showing, Not Telling, at a Writing Workshop

HOW DOES A TEACHER OF WRITING ENCOURAGE COLLEAGUES in other disciplines to pay more attention to student writing? And, once encouraged, what specifically can teachers of history, biology, or business do in their classrooms to foster student writing? One approach, of course, is to tell them what they ought to be doing: Look! You should require those history students to keep journals. You can mail out broadsides, write editorials, and deliver seminars on the virtues of across the curriculum. If your colleagues have strong self-concepts and are not scared off by your enthusiasm, some will actually try what you suggest. But telling teachers how to use writing in their classes is very close to telling them that you know a better way to teach their subjects. Very touchy business. A more politic way, it seems to me, is to show other teachers some writing techniques and exercises that work but allow them to pick and choose among them, making up their own minds about what is useful and what not. Showing, not telling, is a principle often taught in freshman English classes; readers can make up their own minds about the narrative's importance. So too is this idea effective at writing across the curriculum workshops. Most teachers in disciplines other than English understand well that writing, like reading and mathematics, cannot be the sole province of teachers in any one discipline. As Dan Fader and James Britton have argued before me, writing is an interdisciplinary learning activity with a place in every classroom. But not all teachers know how to integrate writing instruction easily into their pedagogy, nor are they comfortable teaching it outright. Each teacher is already a professional, practicing writer in his or her own field, yet few have ever been trained to teach writing to others. There is a wealth of knowledge about writing in the pool of teachers who do not teach writing or who think they do not know how to teach writing. Who knows better than the geographer whether or not first person narration is acceptable in professional geography publications? Who knows better than the physics teacher whether or not to use passive construction in laboratory reports? Furthermore, most teachers have a fairly solid grasp, themselves, of the elements of style according to Strunk and White or Turabian; it matters little that they cannot label a particular

Nineteenth-Century Women for Twentieth-Century Teenagers: A Review of Recent Biographies of George Sand and Mary Shelley

Nineteenth-Century Women for Twentieth-Century Teenagers:A Review of Recent Biographies of George Sand and Mary Shelley Carol Albanese-Bay (bio) Adolescents enjoy biographies. This is not a casual remark. Having recently assigned "any approved library book" as extracurricular reading to my Basic Competency freshman English class, I was surprised to observe the large percentage of biography fans. These academically unsophisticated students would rather read the lives of such literary figures as Edgar Allan Poe than some of the most hip, street-wise junior novels on the market. Why? (I queried too.) Because they just like to read about "real people." Two recent biographies written specifically for adolescents in search of "real people" are Tamara Hovey's A Mind of Her Own: A Life of the Writer George Sand, Harper & Row, 1977; and Janet Harris's The Woman Who Created Frankenstein: A Portrait of Mary Shelley, Harper & Row, 1979. While both lives have as their subjects extraordinary nineteenth-century women writers, only Shelley has the appeal of a well-known work to recommend her to adolescents. Yet beyond prediction, since all is in practice rather than promise, Hovey's work comes to life while Harris's does not. Harris relies primarily upon the horrific attraction of Frankenstein to seduce and hold her audience, weaving her biographical narrative in and out. Hovey uses a different approach. In Hovey's biography, George Sand is, herself, the attraction. Having no literary gimmick upon which to depend, Hovey artfully conspires to create of Sand a very real "real person." An examination of Hovey's success and Harris's failure reveals both the possibilities and the limitations of the adolescent biography as a literary form. Tamara Hovey's subject, George Sand, nee Aurore Dupin, was a brilliant nineteenth-century woman of letters, as famous in her times for her outrageous manner of dress and for her egregious [End Page 54] moral behavior as she was for her literary work. Born in Paris in 1804, Sand was raised and educated in times slightly more fortunate for women than a century before. French philosophers and politicians such as Denis Diderot and Marquis de Condorcet had spoken out on women's issues as early as 1762, and scores of men and women had written essays of feminist argument even a century earlier, but the first half of the nineteenth century remained of guarded hospitality to intellectual women. And George Sand was most certainly an intellectual woman. Born of a proletarian mother and an aristocratic, military father, Sand endured a childhood of schizophrenic contrast and emotional tumult. Her mother, Sophie, was constantly at odds with her grandmother, Madame Dupin de Francueil, a woman inordinately competitive for Sand's affections. When Sand's father, Maurice Dupin, died an untimely death, Madame Dupin offered graciously to take over the financial and moral responsibilities of supporting and educating Sand, but at the price that Sophie abjure all claims to her daughter. Sophie had little choice. Barely able to support herself on her wages as a seamstress, she surrendered custody of her child to Madame Dupin. In the years between the ages of four and fourteen, Sand was treated by her grandmother to a classical education with a private tutor, and she treated herself to jaunts in the countryside near Madame Dupin's estate at Nohant, France. Sand's naughty, adventuresome side inspired escapades with the local peasantry. Tomboyish and ungovernable, she did not develop in the lady-like way her grandmother had intended. She roved the fields as a child, created characters, novels and plays throughout her adolescence, and, at the age of fourteen, apparently to sober her somewhat, she was sent off for two and half years to complete her education at a convent. There she became a ring-leader among the convent girls, winning their respect and admiration both for her intellectual creativity and for her cleverness in amicably bending the strict convent rules. Sand might have stayed there longer, but her grandmother was getting on in years and wanted to see her married before her own death. [End Page 55] By the time she left her convent life at the age of sixteen, Sand had gained sufficient experience...

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: A Place in the American South

ATTEMPTS to interpret William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County as an entity with symbolic geographical meaning are varied. They range from that of the student in freshman English class, who upon encountering Faulkner for the first time must struggle to find any, to that of Gabriel Vahanian, who has termed Faulkner's world a historical map of the Christian tradition and a spiritual geography of Christendom.' One interpretation of geographical symbolism of Faulkner's county is paramount that Yoknapatawpha is really microcosm of the American South.2 But much evidence refutes the idea that Faulkner looked upon and presented Yoknapatawpha as the South in miniature and, rather, supports the contention that he regarded his county as place within the South. Outstanding among the evidences that Yoknapatawpha is not the South in miniature are the geographical parallels between the real Lafayette County and Oxford, Mississippi, and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson.' In Reivers and in Big Woods, Faulkner tells us that the locations of Sutpen's one-hundred-square-mile plantation and the wilderness where young Ike McCaslin, Boon Hogganbeck, and Lion hunted the bear, Old Ben, have disappeared beneath the waters of lake, thirty feet below the surface of government-built flood-control reservoir whose bottom[is] rising gradually and inexorably each year on another layer of beer cans and bottle tops and lost bass plugs.4 There is somewhat of sense of awe to look across Sardis Reservoir on the Tallahatchie River in northern Lafayette County and contemplate that in Faulkner's mind here once existed fictional places, that Sutpen's Hundred occupied much of the expanse, that the hulks of dead cypress jutting above the water are all that remain of the wilderness, and that Old Ben was slain at spot somewhere near the center of the north bank. The large-scale geography of Yoknapatawpha County is essentially the largescale geography of Lafayette County. Here, however, I do not wish to attempt to refute the notion that Yoknapatawpha is the South in miniature by scrutinizing the geographical parallels between Yoknapatawpha and Lafayette counties. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that Yoknapatawpha is place within the South by examining

Written language maturity and formal reasoning in male and female adolescents.

The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that a significant relationship exists between the development of formal reasoning and written language maturity as measured by length of minimal terminable units or T-units. Fifty subjects (25 males, mean-age 14.67 years and 25 females, mean-age 14.50 years) enrolled in high school freshman English classes were administered a series of 15 reasoning tasks requiring various aspects of formal reasoning for solution plus a test of field dependence-independence. Subjects were also given an in-class assignment to write an essay of 500 words about an important object in their lives. Various aspects of formal reasoning were found to correlate significantly with mean T-unit length for the males (r = 0.28 N.S. to 0.58 p < 0.001). The cumulative reasoning score correlated at 0.59 p < 0.001 with mean T-unit length. These coefficients were not substantially altered when field dependence-independence was partialled out. Surprisingly, for the females, formal reasoning did not correlate significantly with mean T-unit length. Although the reason for the discrepancy between the results for males and females is not clear, it is suggested that the reasoning tasks may be biased against females, and therefore not adequately assess their level of intellectual development.

Reading Aloud: On the Need for Close Reading of Great Works of Literature at the Lower Levels of Higher Education

Two RECENT CONFESSIONS, one at home, other at school, have convinced me that all is not well with teaching of some American classics. My twelve-year old son, assigned Fall of House of Usher, complained that he could not read tale. Students in my freshman English class, assigned The Great Gatsby, acknowledged that they began to understand book only on page three. From these admissions, I surmised: 1) that my son would probably not choose to read Edgar Allen Poe any more; and 2) that my freshman class would stop reading the near end, when Nick starts to talk history. In both cases, I had my fears confirmed. Both my students and my son uwere uneasy with words, had never studied them, as words, in context-listening to their pitch and wondering, especially over troublesome ones, why they were there. They had never looked at sentences that way either. For them, literature had no music or design. It was only a story to be summarized and a moral to be fished out. There is still in classrooms today too much talking about and not enough concentration on reading literature-not on interpreting it, but on reading it, and on reading it first out loud. As a result, students don't really get to a work and come away from imaginative writing with a sense that meaning is message and that message is a statement that is memorized for next exam. Such partial attention is a disservice, not only to needs of freshman class but also to idea of literature. Students who have difficulty with vocabulary can hardly appreciate theme, and literature that is presented primarily as a fortune-cookie proverb will never be read for evidence of craft. It is no accident that too many college freshmen know about but have never really read great works that appeared on their syllabi in high school. My son does not want to read Poe because he does not understand a lot of Latinate vocabulary; because he loses thread when he has to unravel

Humor and creative abilities.

Geaels and Jackson ( 2 ) found that highly creative children used an abundance of humor in their fantasy. Weisberg and Springer ( 5 ) also reported a positive relationship between humor and creativity in fourth-grade children. Torrance (4, p. 78) concluded that creative elementary school children were characterized by their humor and playfulness. Thus, there is some evidence for a positive relationship between humor and creativity in children and younger adolescents. However, the literature lacks substantial evidence on this relationship in older adolescents and young adults. The two most humorous men and women from each of eight college freshman English classes were chosen by their teachers using the following definition: One who is funny, amusing, comical, droll, one who appreciates the ludicrous. An additional 1 6 men and 16 women were randomly selecred from the remaining students attending the same classes. Mednick's Remote Associates Test (RAT; 3 ) , Form 1, and a version of the Unusual Uses Test (1 ) were chosen to measure two quite different creative abilities. In the Unusual Uses Test Ss were told to write down as many unusual and different uses as they could for a brick, a paper clip, a sheet of paper, and a un can. 3 min, were allowed per problem. Each problem was scored for the number of different answer categories mentioned. Then the four problems were individually standard-scored and added together to form S s score. The means 2 standard deviations for the tesrs are shown in the table below.

An Experiment with Grouping of Freshman English Composition Students

FOR AT LEAST a decade exciting developments have been taking place in the teaching of English at all levels. Whether stimulating, effective experi ences also have been the rule in student learning and the development of writing skills may still be somewhat in doubt, early returns appear to be en couraging. However, some disturbing e 1 e m e n ts are evident including the never-ending waves of en tering students and the reports of Kitzhaberand oth ers that all is not well in the teaching and learning of freshman English composition. Having followed Project English closely, English chairmen and freshman instructors were offered en couragement by early conclusions that ''Project English is producing. (1) That helpful results are even now in evidence and that the enormous influ ence of this movement and other efforts at improve ment of instruction are only beginning are hearten ing indeed. The inevitable question and classic challenge for those concerned with freshman English is, Of what value is it all if business at the old stand is run in the same old way? Attempting to meet this chal lenge, Augusta College began a search in early 1964 for a reasonable response to some of the develop ments in English instruction within the past few years. We begain with the question, must be our response to the freshman enrollment trends of to day? Students are entering college from a variety of high school programs, including the good and not so-good regular programs, special college prepar atory programs, and differing types of advanced or accelerated honors courses. Moreover, the rapid rise of the junior college movement throughout the country continues in reality to make every high school student a potential college preparatory stu dent What methods are colleges to use in ef f ec tively classifying this mass of students for instruc tional purposes? How are overflowing freshman English classes to be handled with students having such varied backgrounds? Can efficient, valid meth ods be divised for classifying the able student who already has a mastery of much of what is tradition ally taught in college freshman classes? Do chance scheduling or limited classification schemes place bright students with reasonably proficient writing skills in the teaching-learning situation conducive to continuing growth and stimulation ? Are average students wasting too much time in classes dominated by the gifted with rich backgrounds or by the less able who have inadequate backgrounds or poor po tential? Do the marked differences with respect to abilities, interests, motivation, and academic back ground of students in non-grouped classes enrich the teaching-learning of good writing skills, or should students be segregated in some way to make better use of the human resources available? If so, what are the discriminating criteria to be used? Do honor courses per se solve the problem or does this approach neglect the average student? Clear un equivocal answers to these and related questions would make the work of the college administration much more tolerable. That the resources of both faculty and students could be utilized more efficiently in classes of stu dents with similar abilities and motivation seem s to be plausible, but what evidence is there to support this hypothesis in the face of current trends? The inconclusive results of some efforts in the early 1930's to determine the effects of special grouping in higher education is recognized, but significant is the fact that no reported recent research of this type undertaken under conditions different from the pre vious efforts was found. Could the increased num ber of students from a variety of preparatory pro grams significantly change conditions under which freshman English should be taught today?

Verse: Lines Written on a Desk in a Freshman English Class

Verse: Lines Written on a Desk in a Freshman English Class

Lines Written on a Desk in a Freshman English Class

Lines Written on a Desk in a Freshman English Class

English Loan Words in Puerto Rico

ENGLISH in Puerto Rico, a perennial subject for debate and experimentation, has contributed many words to the Spanish customarily spoken there. A detailed account of the English influence would take up not only direct loans, but also literal translations, modifications of Spanish words both semantically and phonetically, and the larger problems of changed grammar, intonation, and stress.' Unable to make such a thorough report, I can offer a list of loan words which seems to reveal the important social and political connections of the American mainland and the island; and I can summarize the local attitude toward the English additions to Puerto Rican Spanish. The words are partly those I observed during the summer of 1952 in newspapers, in conversations, and in radio broadcasts, and partly those reported by students in a Freshman English class which I taught in Puerto Rico. The local attitude is altogether that of my students.

Farewell to Passiveness

D O WE wish a demonstration of the most damaging flaw in present college education? We need simply walk by the open door of a classroom and look in. The chances are about three out of four that the professor is the one talking-perhaps spiritedly, perhaps ploddingly. Whichever the manner, some of the students are either glancing inquisitively at the passerby or gazing in a trance out the window; others may be scribbling down the lecturer's words or doodling surrealistically in the margins of their notes. Few of them seem to be thinking with any originality or seriousness. Why should they? The professor is thinking for them. Eloquent lecturing, granted, can move students to admiration. Factcrammed lecturing may fill their notebooks with knowledge. But neither kind of instruction is guaranteed to arouse much independent, positive thought in the hearers. A quarter-century of teaching and observation has impressed me witlh the deepening conviction that any class procedure that leaves the student passive is to that extent ineffectual. As soon as students discover in a given course that the professor is to lecture every hour and without interruption, they automatically begin to relax, even the best of them, into a state of passiveness that may be pleasant but is far from being truly educative. In one of our leading universities, nevertheless, all the first-year graduate English courses are still conducted by means of unrelieved lecturing. There is absolutely no give and take between instructor and students. At least one professor, in fact, reads all his lectures and even reads his answers to questions that he allows his students to write out. One may well wonder why the lectures are not printed or mimeographed so that both instructor and students might stay home and save time. At another well-known university, not long ago, I visited several freshman English classes and found students reading newspapers and irrelevant books while the instructor was pouring himself into a lecture. In that same institution the deepening hieroglyphs in the soft pine benches offered tangible evidence of what students have been doing for generations while their professors have been thinking for them. Any teacher who invariably lectures and who naively assumes that that kind of instruction is indelibly effective should try this simple experiment. Let him, some mid-semester class hour and without warning, suddenly turn off his eloquence and ask the surprised students a pertinent question

To learn to read you must read

From eighty-five to ninety-five of a student's study time is spent in reading, and no pains should be spared to develop his reading habits to the highest possible degree.' Concurring with Wrenn in this opinion, the Dean of the Senior College, the English Faculty, and the Director of the Reading Clinic at George Peabody College for Teachers initiated in December, 1944, a remedial reading program, involving the 196 members of the freshman English classes. These students were given screening tests: the Kuhlman-Anderson Tests of Mental Ability and the Iowa Silent Reading Tests, Form AM. On the basis of the resulting scores the freshmen were divided into sections-two regular sections and two remedial.

The Value of Writing Philosophies of Life in Freshman English Classes

The Value of Writing Philosophies of Life in Freshman English Classes

A Reading Plan for Freshman English Classes

A Reading Plan for Freshman English Classes

Freshman English Classes Celebrate Book Week

Freshman English Classes Celebrate Book Week