Freshman English Course Research Articles

Integrating portfolios into learning strategy-based instruction for EFL college students

What teachers can do to facilitate their students’ learning and develop autonomy has been one of the major concerns in second language instruction. This article explores the use of portfolios as a tool to facilitate student learning and develop learner autonomy. A pilot study with a class of 42 college students in 2000–2001 and then a formal study with a class of 45 students in 2001–2002 were conducted. Portfolios were integrated into the framework and procedures –i .e., diagnosis, preparation, instruction, and evaluation – for strategy training in a freshman English course at a four-year public university in Taiwan. Students’ English proficiency was tested via a pretest and a post-test. Information about students’ beliefs and attitudes about using portfolios and their learning style preferences was collected by both open-ended and Likert-scaled questionnaires. The study found that portfolios raised students’ awareness of learning strategies, facilitated their learning process, and enhanced their self-directed learning.

The labyrinth and library instruction: making mythology come alive

Freshman writing courses are designed to teach students the basics of writing a well-documented research paper. Librarian–faculty cooperation can help achieve this goal. This article describes the use of course-oriented library instruction as a way of improving the research skills of students in a freshman English course with a focus on world mythology. The librarian presents a variety of materials with a strong visual component to attract student interest, then leads an introduction to library electronic resources. Emphasis on active learning methods and critical thinking skills encourages students to choose from a wide range of library resources. The resulting student bibliographies were later evaluated for number of sources found independently, use of primary sources, and number of Web sources used.

Are Our Courses Working?

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

Collaborative Test Taking

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan H. WarrenAntonio Russo graduated from Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1998 and is now employed by Arthur Andersen & Company LLP in Philadelphia. Susan H. Warren is an instructor in freshman English courses and humanities at Widener. She also teaches at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania.

English for College Students in Taiwan: a Study of Perceptions of English Needs in a Medical Context

Prior to 1993 in Taiwan, English was a required course for all college students. However, in 1993, the Ministry of Education eliminated the English requirement, basing its decision partly on criticisms that it did not meet the students needs. To compensate, some colleges are in the process of developing specific English courses, having either a content base or a skills focus. Unfortunately, these courses, too, have been developed without conducting a needs analysis. The purpose of this study was to describe the perception that medical college students and faculty have of the English language needs of the students. Respondents included 349 medical students and 20 faculty at Chung Shan Medical College in Taichung, Taiwan. Survey information included respondents opinions on (1) the importance of English language use in students studies and their future careers; (2) basic English skills needed in a freshman English course; and (3) suggestions for development of an English language curriculum. Results showed that English was perceived as important for students academic studies and their future work. Students wanted a basic English language course at the freshmen level, naming listening as the most important skill to improve. Students and faculty desired more than one year of English language study.

Student Expectations of the Freshman English Course at Chinese Culture University

This paper uses a five-question questionnaire survey to investigate four freshman classes' expectations of the Freshman English course at the Chinese Culture University. Several significant findings have been made in this survey. First, most students surveyed (63.41%) expect to improve English language skills and only a few students (6.09%) expect to learn to appreciate Western literature as the primary goal of Freshman English (FE) course. Second, as for the primary goal of FEC, 47.73% of the students selected improving all four English language skills, 31.09% improving listening and speaking, and 10.97% reading and writing. Third, as regards considering taking Chinese culture into account as part of the FE curriculum, 54.26% of the students disagree but 45.73% agree. Fourth, 68.92% of the students agree but 20.73% disagree that FE is a course of general education in nature. Fifth, the top five expectations these four classes held towards FE are, in order of priority: 1. learning real-life or practical English; 2. improving listening and speaking skills; 3. being bold and courageous enough to converse in English; 4. expecting a light, lively and interesting class; and 5. increasing reading and writing abilities.

PLACEMENT VALIDITY OF A PROTOTYPE SAT WITH AN ESSAY

ABSTRACTGrades in college freshman English composition courses were predicted from high school rank in class, multiple‐choice writing scores, essays, current SAT‐Verbal scores, and scores from a revised version of SAT‐Verbal. Data were obtained from 21 English courses at 17 different colleges with some supplementary data provided by an additional college. In general, a writing composite score consisting of essay and multiple‐choice writing scores appeared to outperform current or revised SAT‐Verbal scores; validity coefficients were as high or higher for the writing composite score, and the underprediction of the grades of women students was reduced. The best predictions were obtained from the combination of high school rank with the writing composite score.

REMOTE SCORING OF ESSAYS

ABSTRACTEssays written by college freshmen on two different topics were scored first by readers working in a conference setting and second by another set of readers working in their own homes or offices. The conference readers were trained in the standard manner on the specific topics to be scored and were monitored by table leaders, as is done in standard scoring procedures. The remote readers received only written instructions in the mail and there was no monitoring of their scoring. Analyses of the reliability and validity of the two scoring methods were then conducted.Reliability comparisons favored the conference method over the remote method (.75 for conference scoring versus an average of .62 for remote scoring of two essays by three readers). Validity was assessed through multiple correlations with two criteria: (1) a four‐essay criterion, with each essay scored by three readers different from those who scored the essays being examined, and (2) freshman English course grade. The conference scores yielded a slightly higher average multiple correlation with the four‐essay criterion than did the remote scores (.67 versus .63), but for the English course grade criterion the average multiple correlation was the same for both types of scoring (.50). Average incremental validity (the contribution of essay score over and beyond the multiple correlation using multiple‐choice scores—TSWE and ECT) was .06 for the conference scoring and .05 for the remote scoring when the four‐essay criterion was used.The remote scores were also statistically calibrated by adjusting scores for reader tendencies. These calibrations were effective in reducing score discrepancies, and reliabilities and validities were increased slightly as a result of the calibrations.The comparisons conducted suggest some promise for remote scoring, especially if more sophisticated calibration procedures can be developed and if improved reader monitoring can be implemented, but with current procedures remote scoring is not as effective as conference scoring. Under certain circumstances, however, where cost or convenience may be relatively more important than reliability and validity, remote scoring may be preferable to conference scoring.

Bibliographic Instruction Across the Curriculum

Bibliographic instruction is steadily progressing across the curriculum at Chattanooga State Technical Community College. The major focus of instruction is in a core set of library skills taught through a sequence of required English courses rather than onc freshman English course. Supplementing the core program are classes integrated into developmental studies courses and instruction-on-demand classes in other collegc-level courses. This structure allows students to acquire a base of library-use skills through required English courses and permits librarians to introduce more complex concepts and subject-specific instruction as students progress through other required courses in their curricula.

Student Writers and Word Processing: A Preliminary Evaluation

Rather extravagant, and largely unsubstantiated, claims have recently been made about the potential of word processing to improve student writing. We are told that word processing not only reduces the number of errors in our students' writing but also encourages them to experiment, increases the amount of revising they do, enables them to perceive writing as a process, and gives them a sense of audience. 1 In fact, as a result of our enthusiasm for word processing, our discipline's initial skepticism about computers has been replaced by an acceptance of their instructional potential that is perhaps too uncritical. Few existing studies provide useful information about how word processing affects student writing or offer realistic evaluations of its effects on the process of composing. Rather than investigating a specific feature of writing, many of these studies attempt to determine the effects of computers on writing in general. Those that do focus on a specific feature of writing usually deal with revision, but few researchers define what they mean by the term revision, using it to encompass all rewriting operations and failing to distinguish among revising, editing, and proofreading. Because editing and proofreading affect only the surface features of a text, they should be distinguished from revision, which is more accurately defined as making semantic and rhetorical changes that affect the content and organization of a piece of discourse.2 In a small pilot study involving six student writers, I investigated the effect of word processing on revising. Using a case study approach, I attempted to discover whether the use of word processing increases the number of revisions-significant modifications in content and organization-that a student makes in his or her text. My subjects were six student writers, volunteers who were selected from two classes-an honors freshman English course and an advanced composition course. In selecting these six subjects, I considered two qualifications: ability to type and prior experience with a computer. However, the computer experi-

Freshman English: In Whose Service?

English departments carry the burden, and enjoy the benefits, of teaching Freshman English. It is a service they perform, in their own and in others' interests. Needless to say, these interests can sometimes conflict, as they do, for instance, when some faculty in the department view the appointment of graduate students to teach these courses as a way to ensure continued enrollment in graduate seminars, while the chairperson or the director of Freshman English views quality of teaching as the more appropriate criterion. Or the very designation of Freshman English courses as a service may affect the attitude of some faculty when they are occasionally asked to teach them; teachers have to teach composition, just as students have to take it, and although this chore might be seen as a change of pace or even as a challenge, it is rarely coveted. There is not much more to say about these attitudes, except that they are unfortunate. The situation might be made better, however, if we occasionally asked ourselves, whose service? I wish to offer here some practical and theoretical speculations on this question. In those colleges in which Freshman English is a required subject, the reason is ordinarily not because it contributes to our students' appreciation of imaginative literature or abilities in personal expression, but because the whole faculty views the skills of reading and composition as vital to its interests. The courses are required because the faculty in other departments and disciplines perceives them as service courses in which skills are taught which can be directly applied in the study of other subjects. When members of this faculty complain that We can't, for the life of see how what goes on in the typical freshman composition course can be of any use to us, they express the danger, or at least the anomaly, of teaching literature and personal writing to students who need specific skills that will see them through courses in anthropology, physics, botany, music, business, or sociology.1 But it is too easy to make the logical leap that teachers in those departments sometimes do, and assume that such skills are in their interest, to make their job easier. Those skills are, of course, in the interests of the students who will take these courses. Their interests and those of

Teaching the Teachers to Teach Black-Dialect Writers

LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

Long-Range Thinking: A Departmental Experiment in Self-Study

IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, a small group of persons in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan began to meet to discuss some tentative approaches to long-range planning. impetus for these meetings came not from a single and isolated matter but rather from a complex of events and experiences, some of them shared by everyone involved in the Department's work (some, indeed, shared by everyone in the profession) and some of them growing out of individual experiences. Falling enrollments in the humanities, new courses and new approaches to teaching within a discipline that at one time seemed comfortably defined as historical and literary (and English), the changing job market for graduates in the humanities: these were some of the factors to which we were all responding. Individually, some members of the group had been responsible for innovative programs that had already shaped changes in a particular way. Tim Davies and Jay Robinson had been deeply committed to the Doctor of Arts in English program at Michigan. Hubert English had served as chairman of both Freshman English course and graduate program. He knew various constituencies and could chart the alterations in their needs and expectations perhaps better than anyone else in the Department. My interest grew out of experience in the University Long-Range Planning Committee and out of a personal conviction that we needed to look ahead for ourselves to see if, in Curt Gowdy's memorable phrase, our future was still ahead of us. If we did not, it seemed altogether possible that others would look for us and make decisions based on criteria that we might find unacceptable. After a good deal of debate about the methods we might use and the purposes any sort of planning might serve, we settled on the creation of a descriptor questionnaire of a type that had been used by Claude Eggertsen of the Education School at Michigan in an attempt to define The Future Environment of the University of Michigan.' Our aims, of course, were far more modest than his. We simply wanted to know how members of the Department of English Language and Literature saw their discipline and their efforts within that discipline,

The Essay Assignment: A Teaching Device

The student writing a book report for a Freshman English course is doing on a small scale and with a single source the same thing [i.e., writing a historical report] as the president of a corporation who prepares his annual report to the stockholders, or as the President of the United States when, with the aid of all his departments, he reports to the people on the state of the Union. Scope and purpose will of course differ, and this affects the worth of the report as a historical record. But the general form and the devices employed are identical in all three. -Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, rev. ed. (New York, 1970), 4.

Fractions Make My Head Hurt

THE CURRENT back to the basics hue and cry reminds me of the story in Honey in the Horn where an oldtimer, working at the local sawmill, cut his own pay from $1.50 to $1.00 a day. When asked why he would do such a fool thing, the old man replied, Fractions make my head hurt. The profession's reaction to the public outrage that students can't write reminds me of that old-timer. We, too, seem to be attempting to avoid complication by reverting to a simpler number. To illustrate what I mean: In 1974 the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching gave the Modern Language Association a modest grant to finance a study of the state of the English undergraduate curriculum. Primarily, the officers of the foundation wished to know the answer to this question: How is the English profession responding to the students who are now going to college? One of the activities in the study was a national survey of the teaching of freshman composition. Four hundred thirty-six college and university teachers, directors of writing, and department chairmen from forty-nine states and Puerto Rico responded to MLA's inquiry and answered such questions as, What do you consider the main purpose of the course you teach? What is the average size of your freshman composition classes? How are the texts selected for the course?2 Quotations from this survey illustrate the divergent opinions and philosophies held about the college freshman English course.

Turning the Corner: Story to Meaning in Freshman Composition Classes

THOSE OF US WHO FOLLOW a write-from-your-own-experience philosophy in teaching Freshman Composition consistently run into one problem: a batch of trivial narrative papers to read each week. Following the lead of Ken Macrorie, Donald M. Murray, and, more recently, Joseph Comprone, we take this approach to keep our students out of the depths of the library, where they would spend hours researching a boring subject to an artificial and boring paper, and at their desks engaged in the process of writing, where they belong. Freshman writers, we believe, are apprentices in a skilled trade-writing-and like carpenters' apprentices need material to practice their trade on. But novice carpenters are not sent to the lumber mill to pick up their own materials each day. They keep hammering and sawing and all the material they need is kept at their fingertips. Freshmen have all the material they need for writing at their fingertips, too: their own experiences. Too often, however, they fashion those experiences into a dull, firstperson narrative of What I Did. The genuine significance of what they did lies undiscovered and undeveloped. The challenge for writing teachers is to help the beginners examine their experiences critically and turn the corner from simple narration to wider meanings and truth in their writing. In my freshman English courses I shy away from relevant or significant assigned paper topics. In fact I make no assignments at all other than that writing teacher's cliche, write about what you know. When I do get a paper entitled Pollution or Inflation I ask the writer how much substantial information he has to pass along to his readers. Does he really know the ins and outs of economic theory, for example? The answer is invariably no. A budding John Maynard Keynes is rare these days. Then I have two options. I can send him to the library to research inflation, in short to pick up a quick course in economics. Then he can a research paper, that exercise in footnotes and boredom. Or I can tell him, Write about something you know more about, something you've had some experience with. the next week it's My First Day in College. After three weeks of revision it's a well-honed My First Day in College. Full of hard-hitting specific detail and crisp dialogue, it still makes me yawn. I find myself repeatedly asking, So what? Simple narration, I reasoned, is the mode for best presenting unique experiences

English garbed in the humanities

AbstractAn experimental freshman English course in which the teaching of basic skills and exposure to humanistic disciplines have been integrated at every level.

The Cassette Tape Recorder: A Bonus or a Bother in ESL Composition Correction

The correction of compositions has been the bane of every ESL teacher since the first 500-word theme was submitted. While the teaching of correct principles of writing and their creative implementation in assignments ranging from controlled paragraphs to free compositions are never to be minimized as demanding tasks, the greatest difficulty in teaching composition is perhaps the effective use of the corrected paper as a tool for further student improvement in writing. Some research has been done in the area of composition correction by scholars such as Eugene Briere, Donald Knapp, and Jewell Friend. The latter two provided composition check-lists or evaluation sheets for the teacher as a guide to the correction and grading of student compositions. Almost thirteen years ago, John S. Harris of Brigham Young University began using reel-to-reel tape recordings to facilitate the correction of technical English papers in Texas. It proved cumbersome and timeconsuming; yet the results in terms of the students' improvement from their corrected compositions were noticeable. Recently, with the advent of the cassette tape recorder, this technique has become extremely valuable and even time-saving. It is being used currently in many of the freshman English composition courses and technical writing courses at Brigham Young University. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to explore and illustrate the advantages of the use of cassette tape recorders in the correction of ESL compositions on the intermediate to advanced levels (an appendix with suggestions for the procedure in tape grading is at the end of the paper); and to present the results of a preliminary experiment with accompanying student evaluation comments as to the effectiveness of such a technique compared with the use of a regular composition check-list or marginal notations.

Creating, Testing, and Evaluating a Communication Experiment for Community College Students

Because innovation without evaluation is often fruitless, the creator of a communication-oriented community college freshman English course converted a segment of this course into an individualized program and solicited detailed student appraisals. The sequence begins with dictionary study, reviews the principles of subordination, continues with studies in semantics and communication, and ends with practice in improving skills in writing letters and reports. The specific unit, converted into an individualized learning package, uses film and tape and enables the student to evaluate his own communication skills and teaches him how to write a concrete communication objective. Students' evaluations conclude the article and explicit student endorsements and criticisms are quoted.

English Composition by Workshop

This study was designed to determine the effectiveness of intensive in-class guidance of daily writing practice in freshman English composition courses as opposed to the presently practiced procedures in the course. The study involved 568 themes written by 142 students enrolled in six classes at UWM. Four groups were taught according to a workshop method developed by two instructors in English and an educational psychologist. Two groups were taught according to the procedures outlined in the freshman composition syllabus. An evaluation chart was developed by the three instructors and four complete sets of themes were graded once each by three raters. The hypothesis–there will be a significant difference in the grade achievement on selected freshmen English essays based on differences in instructional procedures between two control and four experimental groups–was supported. Since major variables of initial superiority of any writing group, variation in grading practices, and effect on students of theme assignments per se were not shown to be significant, it was concluded that the instructional procedures affected the grade achievement of the groups involved.