Teaching Freshman Composition Research Articles

Teaching Freshman Composition: Getting Started (1989)

Teaching Freshman Composition: Getting Started (1989)

Introduction: From product to process: Legacy of the problem-solving approach to writing

A 1993 cartoon from Wiley's Non Sequitur depicts Thomas Jefferson considering alternative openings for the Declaration of Independence. Alternatives range from "We the really ticked-off people" to "Yo, tax this," and the caption reads "Before eloquence there are rough drafts." Posted on the door of my office, the cartoon sends a message to students complaining about my revision requests; however, the message for me is more personal. The cartoon reminds me of my days teaching freshman composition, when I dissected the Declaration of Independence for my students as an exemplar of an argument essay, sent them off to write their own arguments, and then viewed with dismay their inability to write persuasive arguments. The cartoon emphasizes the writing process, whereas I, the writing teacher, had emphasized only the written product. Emphasis on the writing process is so widely accepted today that it is difficult for some to imagine how recently the idea was novel. It is an overstatement to claim that the study of writing as a cognitive process began with the publication of Hayes and Flower's process model in Gregg and Steinberg's (1980) edited volume, Cognitive Processes in Writing. Prior to that time, process-oriented arguments had come from rhetoric and composition researchers (e.g., Britton, 1970; Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, and Rosen, 1975; Moffett, 1968a,b; Emig, 1971; see Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt, 1993, for a historical review), and Flower and Hayes (1977) had already published in the journal College English. Still, the publication of Cognitive Processes in Writing, containing seminal chapters by Hayes and Flower (1980; Flower and Hayes, 1980) as well as Bereiter (1980), broke new ground within psychology. Just as the area of composition studies had

The joy of grammar: A Festschrift in honor of James D. McCawley Ed. by Diane Brentari, Gary N. Larson, and Lynn A. MacLeod (review)

600 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) AGR0 itself cannot provide these features. Spec of AGR must be the source. The parametric availability of AGR0 or Spec of AGR as the source of Ô-features is, in essence, the difference between null-subject and non-null-subject languages. Carme Picallo explores the internal structure of the Catalan DP in 'Possessive pronouns in Catalan and the Avoid Pronoun Principle' (211-34). She demonstrates that the alternation between possessive pronouns and strong pronouns in nominal constructions parallels the distribution of pro and overt pronouns as clausal subjects. This leads her to propose that pro is not only a null pronoun, but is lexically empty. The Avoid Pronoun Principle is postulated as a grammatical principle which ensures economy of lexical representation. Most of the reasoning can be applied to other Romance noun phrases. The other papers explore a variety of topics, including the structure of the negative phrase (M. Teresa Espinal's 'Negation in Catalan', 33-63), the structure of benefactive constructions (Albert Branchadell's 'Against argument augmentation', 1-32), clitics (Anna Gavarró's ? note on Catalan clitics', 65-73), compound verbs (Mireia Llinàs i Grau's The affix-like status of certain verbal elements', 129-47), the syntactic ramifications of the imperfect tense (Manuel Pérez Saldanya's 'Imperfects are pronominals', 201-10), and the nature of conjunctions (M. Teresa Solías ? Arís' The category of the conjunction in categorial grammar', 301-41). Taken together, this collection of papers is important for linguists working on Ibero-Romance , while containing theoretical proposals relevant to a broader cross-section ofthe profession . The obvious beneficiaries are syntacticians , but the three papers on phonology are mainstream contributions. University libraries and linguistics programs which publish working papers would do well to acquire the CWPL series . [John M. Lipski, University of New Mexico.] The joy of grammar: A Festschrift in honor of James D. McCawley. Ed. by Diane Brentari, Gary N. Larson , and Lynn A. MacLeod. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1992. Pp. xi, 400. Paper $79.00. This book, not the first to honor McCawley's linguistic intellect, gives a taste of the high esteem in which McCawley is held by teachers and researchers in our field, twenty-four of whom have contributed articles to this volume. The book reflects most of the areas of linguistic research in which McCawley has worked and published. There are articles on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and general linguistic theory—all of which McCawley has thought about deeply. Moreover , five of the twenty-two articles deal with East Asian languages in which McCawley has been interested throughout his career. Although the articles are written within diverse theoretical frameworks, their authors—colleagues and students of McCawley—have in common a deep commitment to their areas of research, a commitment that has been so characteristic of McCawley himself. The data presented in the articles are handled with honesty and rigor—again, in the McCawley tradition. The articles and their authors are Noriko Akatsuka, 'Japanese modals are conditionals'; Bill Darden, The Cairene Arabic verb without form classes'; Paul D. Deane, The transition from oral to written competence: Evidence from teaching freshman composition'; Donka F. Farkas, Two types of "world-creating" predicates'; Louanna Furbee, Tojolabal (Mayan) kinterms and the theory of markedness or a near triumph of the feminine gender' ; John Goldsmith, Tone and accent in Llogoori'; Georgia M. Green, 'Purpose infinitives and their relatives'; Eric P. Hamp, 4A semantic etymology '; Wesley M. Jacobsen, 'Are conditionals topics? The Japanese case': Kostas Kazazis, 'Gender and sex in standard modern Greek pet names'; George Lakoff, 'Philosophical speculation and cognitive science: Comments on William Lycan's logical form in natural language'; D. Terence Langendoen, 'Symmetric relations'; Alexis Manaster Ramer, The Korean precursors of generative phonology'; Salikoko S. Mufwene. 'Why grammars are not monolithic'; Younghee Na & Geoffrey J. Huck, 'On extracting from asymmetrical structures'; Almerindo E. Ojeda, The markedness of plurality'; Paul M. Postal, 'Phantom successors and the French /a/re par construction'; JerroldM. Sadock, ? paper on Yiddish for James D. McCawley'; Y. Tagashira, 'Survival of the positive: History of Japanese antonyms'; Timothy J. Vance, 'Lexical phonology and Japanese vowel devoicing'; BOOK NOTICES 601 Margaret E. Winters & Geoffrey...

The Joy of Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley

1. Preface 2. Japanese Modals are Conditionals (by Akatsuka, Noriko) 3. The Cairene Arabic Verb Without Form Classes (by Darden, Bill) 4. The Transition from Oral to Written Competence: Evidence from Teaching Freshman Composition (by Deane, Paul D.) 5. Two Types of World-Greating Predicates (by Farkas, Donka F.) 6. Tojolabal (Mayan) Kinterms and the Theory of Markedness or a Near Triumph of the Feminie Gender (by Furbee, N. Louanna) 7. Tone and Accent in Llogoori (by Goldsmith, John A.) 8. Purpose Infinitives and Their Relatives (by Green, Georgia M.) 9. A Semantic Etymology 10. Are Conditionals Topics? The Japanese Case (by Jacobsen, Wesley M.) 11. Gender and Sex in Standard Modern greek Pet Names (by Kazazis, Kostas) 12. Philosophical Speculation and Cognitive Science Comments of William Lycan's Logical Form in Natural Language (by Lakoff, George) 13. Symmetric Relations (by Langendoen, D. Terence) 14. The Korean Precursors of Generative Phonology (by Manaster-Ramer, Alexis) 15. Why Grammars are Not Monolithic (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.) 16. On Extracting from Asymmetrical Structures (by Na, Younghee) 17. The Markedness of Plurality (by Ojeda, Almerindo E.) 18. Phantom Succesors and the French FAIRE PAR Connstruction (by Postal, Paul M.) 19. A Paper on Yiddish for James D. McCawley (by Sadock, Jerrold M.) 20. Survival of the Positive: History of Japanese Antonyms (by Tagashira, Y.) 21. Lexical Phonology and Japanese Vowel Devoicing (by Vance, Timothy J.) 22. First He Called Her a Philologist and Then She Insulted Him (by Winters, Margaret E.) 23. Jottings on Adpositions, Case Inflections, Government, and Agreement (by Zwicky, Arnold M.) 24. Indices

Conspiring with Forms: Life in Academic Texts.

Breaking the silence on a number of sacrosanct aspects of higher education - and now and then raising a clamour about some highly politicised issues - Conspiring with Forms is a critique of both the academy and the current discourse concerning its purposes and direction. Academic life is embedded among forms, says Terry P. Caesar. It is a milieu of customs and conventions, practices and pretences, all bursting with implications and hidden costs for the mainly mute and complicitous scholars who perpetuate them. Many of these forms are texts - proposals, letters of application and recommendation, dissertations, freshman composition themes, and prefaces and acknowledgements in books. It is impossible, Caesar says, to be an academic and not produce them or, more important, be produced by them. To discuss these texts, Caesar seeks to combine theoretical sophistication with subjective depth and a measure of urbane wit. Essentially, he turns some of the techniques of contemporary theory and criticism back onto the system from which they evolved. At the same time, he draws on his personal experiences, supplemented with excerpts from actual texts of his own and others. Speaking sometimes as a job or grant applicant, for example, and at other times as one of a committee passing judgement on such aspirants, Caesar explores the various personal and professional assumptions made in the writing and reading of academic texts. He exposes not only the constraints that discourage open discussion of texts among scholars but also some limitations and abuses of the critical/theoretical methods he uses. In this last regard, a most telling chapter, Croaking About Comp, reflects on Caesar's 20 years of teaching freshman composition and on the widening gap between instructional theory and the mostly dreadful writing it tries to improve but may be helping to produce. On Not Writing a Dissertation, which ranges over the years Caesar spent completing his doctoral thesis, touches on personal conflicts and recounts professional entanglements that will seem familiar to many readers. Other chapters deal with more nominally textual matters, yet they yeild equally rich and disturbing insights. In Drifting through the MLA, which has something of the air of a travel essay, Caesar comments on magnitude and insignificance, and the dynamics of conference-going, specifically, at the annual Modern Language Association meeting. In Being a White Male, he discusses issues of gender and sexual preference from his own theoretically lamentable position. In perhaps the most provocative chapter, On Teaching at a Second-Rate University, Caesar voices many unspoken truths about the not-always-implicit hegemony of big name schools and their faculties. Though Conspiring with Forms delineates at length a kind of self-imposed malaise hanging over the academy, the author himself emerges as one who refuses to relinquish his claims to agency, no matter how baffled or effaced he is by multiple positions, impersonal forms, and institutional hierarchies.

Teaching Freshman Composition: Getting Started

Teaching Freshman Composition: Getting Started

One Historian's Educations

I T would be accurate to say that I stumbled into the study of history. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan I wound up majoring in English because I loved literature and was all thumbs in the chemistry laboratory, where originally I had expected to spend my life. I took enough credits in education to qualify for a teacher's certificate but only one history course-the obligatory year's survey of English history. course, thorough and fact-crammed, touched no interest of mine. When I could not obtain a high school teaching job in I939, my university mentor recommended me for a teaching assistantship at Penn State, where a graduate program was being developed in English composition. At that time there, the study of English was divided between two departmentscomposition and literature. I taught five sections of freshman composition for each of two years at seventy-five dollars per month and free tuition. I studied ancient and medieval rhetoric, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, English prose style, and even the American short story. Research took me to such entertaining volumes as Studies in Philology. My master's essay was called The Prose Style of Laurence Sterne, surreptitiously subtitled Oft Was I Weary When I Toiled at Thee. I think that I was the only one, however, who found something to laugh about in a library carrel. Sterne's sly wit saved my sanity. I taught composition and literature for two years while beginning a family and, after a two-year stint in the infantry, returned to teaching freshman composition to the best students I have ever had, World War II veterans. Before plunging in, I sought out a professor of English at the University of Chicago to ask whether I could go on teaching without further graduate work. He depressed me with his warning that a Ph.D. would be absolutely necessary for continuing at the college level. I could not bear to consider more advanced work like that I had already been through. A colleague at Iowa State told me about a developing new study-American civilization. He thought that I ought to go to Harvard, but that distinguished institution thought otherwise. I have been grateful ever since that Brown was willing to take a chance. In entering its American civilization program I hoped to make the study of literature more palatable, but I ran into Ed Morgan and a term paper he assigned in my very first semester of colonial history. I was soon digesting all the printed documents available relating to Leisler's Rebellion and was amazed to find that there were few certainties. What witnesses could one believe? Did history reduce itself to gossip? Anyway, it was far better than measuring the length of Sterne's dashes. In a history seminar I had an

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

Teaching Freshman Comp to New York Cops

IT IS ALMOST 200 YEARS since Blake transformed the clockwork of Newtonian thought into the towering death-symbol of Urizen. Freud, Joyce, along with a host of 20th-century physicists, have presented to our century a picture of decisive forces beyond our reason which are intertwined with our everyday lives. In linguistics there is growing acceptance of the idea that the structure of language itself is not imprinted on the tabula rasa of a child's mind but is inherent. It is surprising, therefore, that the teaching of writing has remained rooted in the prejudices of the Enlightenment: if one follows the general procedure of a proposition, paragraph development, etc., one ought to produce an acceptable narrative-i.e., one in which the writer's ideas are rationally presented. Two years ago, I began teaching freshman composition to a class of New York cops at Brooklyn College. My social prejudices notwithstanding (ya know, every cop is a criminal-Rolling Stones), my approach to teaching composition was as rooted in traditional prejudices as possible. I had never taught composition before-and, after all, given my own obvious lack of experience, who was I to impose what was then pure confusion on a group of not particularly

Teaching Freshman Composition: A Modest Proposal

A two year college is claimed to have these advantages : ^ more receptively to the educational needs of the community, liberal admission policies, comprehensive course offerings for students of all ages, extensive educa tional counseling, and most importantly, superior instruc tion. To the teacher, the last of these is obviously the most important and also the most questionable Before I state my contentions, I might list my quali fications to discuss the matter. I had always planned to be English teacher. Consequently, my schooling was always with that goal in mind. After I received my pre liminary degrees (A.B., M.A.), I applied for a teaching job. It was somewhat of a shock when I finally realized that these degrees only permitted me to do police duty for the board of education at a local high school, or else to teach freshman composition at one of the so called institutions of higher education. This golden opportunity would be at starvation wages. Since I didn't want to remain forever in the frayed collar class, I took a job as a communications specialist (ghost writer) for a large industrial corporation. In this capacity I wrote speeches, technical film scripts, advertising copy, television commercials, news releases, sales promotional material, technical articles, and any other type of writing that needed to be done. Writing was my vocation, but it was also my avocation as I wrote poems, essays, plays, and short stories, none of which were very commen?ai. Teaching also became my avocation as during this 15 year period I taught a variety of English courses at several four year colleges. Even tually, I returned to teaching on a full time basis at a junior college. Part of my teaching assignment has been freshman composition. My students included those intending to transfer to four year colleges and also those who are termed students, those students taking tech nical courses in electrical, electronic, mechanical, busi ness, medical, dental, or any of a dozen or so other fields. It is not expected that they will transfer or continue on with their schooling at the present time. They will be come technicians. It is my contention that junior college administrators, and English department heads, have taken an unrealistic attitude regarding terminal students and the freshman composition courses they are required to take to get the highly prized Associate degree. They contend that the terminal student should take the regular freshman com position courses. The entire freshman composition pro gram is predicated on the theory of integration and in most cases consists of expository writing. As a theory this has some merit. After all, if the tech nically oriented student is ever required to do any writ ing it will probably be exposition. But administrators fail to realize and chairmen of English departments will not admit that the English department teaching staff unconsciously thwarts the theory. Practically all fresh man composition teachers were English majors in college and want to teach the exotic courses in English and American literature to the superior, gifted, and literary oriented students. But in a junior or community college which has an open door policy only the more politically active teachers get to lecture about Shakespeare and his friends. Most English teachers have to be satisfied with the grand and glorious opportunity of teaching freshman composition classes. Some also get the chance to teach remedial English to the low and slow achievers. These teachers are ill equipped to teach expository writing, are not interested in teaching it, and are disgruntled because they must do so. They may have left high school teaching to get away from this. Now in their teaching they empha size creativity and the subjects they assign are not of a technical nature.

Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition

(1968). Teaching Freshman Composition. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 179-180.

Teaching College English: Five Dialogues: II. Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching College English: Five Dialogues: II. Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition

Teaching Freshman Composition