Most Useful Blog Posts This Semester

"Active Reading" - This blog posting was useful to me because I was able to connect what active reading is with my own potential practices in the classroom.

"Historical Perspectives" - I enjoyed the historical perspectives provided in the article. In many ways, the current state of English language instruction are the culmination and a mix of trends of the past. And this past repeats itself, moves in cycles. I was able to see the various schools of thought and can glean something from each era that informs my teaching now.

"Sugie Goen's article and my blog" - I got a lot out of Sugie's article. The articles basically lay out a rationale (a strong one at that) for integrating reading and writing curriculum. I had seen firsthand the impact of an integrated curriculum at De Anza College, but the articles really drove home the why and how of integrated reading and writing. It really informed my recent blog on the memo to a curriculum committee to enact an integrated course into the curriculum.

"Ideas on Integrating a Reading and Writing Course" - I loved the many ideas the article presented: freewriting, difficulty papers, KWL+, use of different types of text.

"McCormick's Three Approaches" - McCormick succinctly lays out her theory in her text, and by blogging about it, it helped me to understand the approaches and where I stand and the pros/cons of each. I'm definitely a blend of all three, but would lean towards cognitive and socio-cultural.

"Ideas for IRW Plan" - This was a very hands-on blog posting, which I liked, because it asked me to apply and practice trying to write down some of my ideas for a course. I can refer back to this posting later when I'm putting together my course plan next semester in ENGL 710.

(2) Reactions to "Discovery of Competence" and "Bartholomae" - These blog postings forced me to interact with the readings and theories for courses, so I had to essentially understand the ideas well so that I could react pro/con to them. This was helpful in my deciding that I liked "Discovery of Competence" more than Bartholomae and will look to incorporate the former somehow into my future courses.

Memo to College Recommending Integrated Reading and Writing Course

Dear Committee,

I write you today to request your consideration to integrating the reading and writing courses at the college. My research on best practices theory and helping our students to succeed academically has made clear the need for integration.

We Read to Write and Write to Read

Reading and writing are complementary activities and are intertwined; you cannot do one without affecting the other. Each activity is not done in isolation but with an eye towards the other activity. When we read, we are actively thinking about writing and presentation. When we write, we consider the reader's interpretation of our writing; it does not happen in a vacuum.

According to Van Woerkum:

The writer may develop a more refined and vivid 

representation of the act of reading as 

a point of reference for his writing that can steer his 

design of the text and the process of formulating sentences. 

On the other hand, the writer could be motivated to trigger 

the readers in their active role. The writer can make active 

readers even more active, with the benefit of greater involvement, 

a prerequisite for attention as well as comprehension.

There is a communication with the text, whereby the reader poses questions and considers opposing viewpoints. This can help their abilities as a writer. Readers become active readers with the texts, and this stimulates their brainstorming, an important skill in writing. 

We are currently in a period of "Engaged Learning" (Alexander). Engaging students in the readings makes them active participants in the learning process, and this allows them to reflect more fully on the readings - a precursor to brainstorming for their written assignments. 

The Need for Integrated Reading and Writing

Sugie Goen and Helen Gillotte-Tropp in "Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing Crisis" relate the problem in colleges and universities whereby an overwhelming majority of students are in remedial reading and writing courses. They based the creation of their IRW courses on several key themes:

1) Integration: "better writers tend to be better readers" and that "better writers tend to read more than poorer writers"

2) Time: "Learning and improvement in reading and writing develop gradually" therefore we need courses that are higher unit and intensive than we currently offer. Perhaps offering them as a year-long sequence would be of benefit to our students.

3) Development: Again, it takes time for the skills to develop.

4) Academic Membership: students are part of the mainstream, as opposed to being "remedial" and the enhances their place in the college.

5) Sophistication: The course would be indistinguishable from the mainstream of courses on campus, and the additional time would allow instructors to properly scaffold activities so students can be sure to understand them.

6) Purposeful Communication: Instead of drills, students learn from meaning, that is what drives linguistic competence. According to Kutz, Groden and Zamel, currently in many basic skills courses the "focus in on language itself, on teaching its parts abstracted from meaningful contexts, in a prearranged order of skills development". 

Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp also posit certain objectives for these courses, which I believe we should also push for in our school:

1) To understand the way that readers read and writers write - by exposing students to different forms of writing across the disciplines, we can prepare them for the real world after they leave our college.

2) To develop a metacognitive understanding of the processes of reading and writing. By helping students understand their own processes and strategies for learning, they come to be in-tune with their own educational journey. One useful example of this is K-W-L+, a reading strategy where students gather what they know about a topic, what they would like to know, what they learned and any other questions they have.

3) To understand the rhetorical properties of reading and writing, including purpose, audience and stance. Writing activities are designed to develop essays and to support points of view, and for reading, to improve reading rate and comprehension and to do so with the reading-writing relationship closely experienced.

4) To understand and engage in reading and writing as a way to make sense of the world, to experience literacy as problem solving, reasoning and reflecting

5) To develop enjoyment, satisfaction and confidence in reading and writing

The foregoing curriculum and the theories backing it were found to be hugely successful at San Francisco State University. At the end of the year, retention rates were at 81%, which is higher than our current college success rates. According to Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp, "the data from the first year of the program offer compelling evidence that students in the integrated course can meet the cognitive challenges of learning to write as readers and read as writers, and that they can perform these tasks at a level of competence that places them fully into the mainstream of intellectual life at the university."

Based on the foregoing, I recommend your committee consider an integrated reading and writing curriculum. We will see higher retention and success rates, student confidence and utilize tested and successful practices for our students. This will further our college mission of student access and social justice. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Jim Nguyen

Chapter 9 of "Discovery of Competence"

The chapter focuses on the role of a multicultural curriculum and texts in student competence. The authors propose using multicultural texts in the classroom that will engage students and teachers to internalize the content from the perspective of insiders.

The authors seek to debunk the arguments that a multicultural curriculum somehow dumbs down the curriculum; rather, they believe multicultural curriculum enhances student learning and engagement. We must remain flexible and allow the new students we acquire the ability to "renegotiate" and to determine to some degree the texts that are used. The theory here is socio-cultural in that students need to interact with texts and then be able to situate themselves within that text and in their relation to the world as a whole.

A multicultural curriculum has value for both white students (learning about other cultures) as well as students of color (learn about diversity within own race or ethnicity).

I agree with all the points in the chapter and I plan on using multicultural texts and a multicultural curriculum when I teach my own courses. In terms of actual assignments I would use that utilize the theories presented here, I would give students an essay assignment that asks them to relate their own culture to the one presented in a text. How is it similar? Different? How are cultural values expressed in both their own lives and in the text?

Reactions to "Discovery of Competence"

I enjoyed reading this book in that it outlines at the very beginning the thrust of it's perspective: "(to) draw students into the academic community and help them discover their competence as writers and the relationship between what they know and what and how they will come to know". It's a very meta-cognitive, personal approach to teaching and learning, in my view. It's more empowering and inclusive, hopeful, than other views we've reviewed in the course. Students already possess skills to learn and comprehend, but the instructor acts as a guide to help them further develop their skills and to hone them.

Competence is not about learning grammatical structures, but about ideas and meaning making. It involves active engagement in a community. How we acquire language is that it is based in our environment, and perceived needs - the grammatical structures are formed eventually as we make mistakes and adjust. Learning a second language (English) should be no different.

I feel the course they are laying out is expressive and socio-cultural (McCormick) in that it draws on how students learned their first language (if English is their second) in determining how to teach English to them. In this way, it is more natural and organic, about ideas and meaning, as opposed to a rigid, structured way of learning English that some students are subjected to. So, the idea is that students are already competent in their language use, or fluent. The challenge just becomes finding ways to engage them into writing critically in a more academic way.

What I find to be potentially problematic is that it may be overly "expressive". How can we ensure the students are improving and are not merely expressing their opinions? How can we measure their progress as writers? Also, I would have liked more in the way of specifics of their course. What assignments would they give? What texts would they use?

I would adopt from their course to my own the use of narrative texts so they can express themselves and engage with readings that they can relate to, whether the readings are based on anthropology or social sciences, literature or the arts. 

Summarizing Chapter 6 of Bartholomae (By Coles)

This chapter highlights ways in which instructors can facilitate the revision process in student writers. One way is through class discussion and workshopping a particular student's essay. In this way, the writer can receive feedback and judgment about his/her writing but "informed response and support, including other possible interpretations of what the writer has described, other possible conclusions to be drawn from the story he has told". By critiquing someone else's work, the students develop their ability to analyze a text and try to get at making meaning out of it and to provide suggestions for the writer him/herself.

In contrast, written comments can provide more pointed comments to invite the writer to explore and to question his/her paper so that rewriting becomes a deliberate method of rethinking his subject. The example given in the text provides some praise of the essay ("good summary"), trying to get the student to provide more narrative through reflection, more examination of the issues. The idea behind the comments is to encourage student writers to engage with their writing as a reading, and vice versa. We do this to "help out students identify and interrogate the emerging meaning of their texts".

In this way, by receiving support from other students and from the instructor, student writers are thereby empowered to revise their own work and more appropriately adding his/her true voice to their writing.

Bartholomae Course Reactions

Comment on the course. What do you like? What do you have questions about? What is problematic? What will you include in your own unit design? How does the course fit with the principles and strategies that we've been discussing this semester?

What I like about the course and which I would try to include on some level in my own course:

• The rigorousness of the course. The expectations are high, and the students are expected to meet the academic standards set out by Bartholomae. (The course is trying to meet "cognitive" standards).
• Many opportunities for student writing, and subsequent review and revision/discussion.
• The desire to move students from simply summarizing a text to truly engaging with the meaning of text, themes, irony, and making conclusions to the students' own lives. ("socio-cultural", meaning-making)
• Treats students like adults, by putting them in a seminar style course/structure.
• I like the journal, both to reflect on readings/annotate but also to connect readings to personal life.
• I like giving students one hour a week to read in class and also the autobiography assignment.
• I like the reading assignments, I think they are good reads.
• I like the topic and making it relevant to the students ("adolescent development"). Some students might not like the topic, however. (It is "expressive" in this way).

What I have questions about/is problematic:

• I don't see much in the way of scaffolding the strategies, skills the students are expected to acquire by the end of the course. They are expected to learn by doing, by making mistakes, and by editing, but I can see students continually making the same mistakes over and over again without much in the way of guidance. In this way, the course seems designed as a "sink or swim" proposition from the start, and I think it will cause some students to give up and fail at the start of the course.
• I think peer review and editing is a double-edged sword. It would be helpful to see what other students are doing and compare to yourself and perhaps distance oneself from their own writing, but I think it can hurt self-esteem to have peers edit your writing and also seeing the same mistakes over and over again can be frustrating. I would proceed with caution here.
• The reading seems a bit heavy to me. Perhaps it would be better to warm the students up by reading some articles and short stories and then build to actual novels. I think giving students a week to read an entire book is asking too much from them.
• Although I like for students to reflect on their own lives, the course presented may make students feel uncomfortable sharing intimate details about their lives.
• It will be a challenge for students to complete an in-class final exam. I would allow them to take the exam at home and turn it in later.

Planning Ideas for IRW Unit

Here is what our group (Katie, Jordana, Susan and myself) have so far. The rest of the semester (skeletally, at least) if on Katie Bliss's blog at http://katiebliss.blogspot.com/. Kudos to Katie and the rest of the team for compiling our notes that we have put together on google docs.

American Dream Unit 1

The first unit can introduce the sub themes that will be covered the rest of the semester.

Students will read one-two articles each week to introduce them to the concepts. Unit one's end of the unit assignment will be a personal essay (though they need to interact with the texts and refer to the readings.) When they are in the full three-week unit dedicated to a sub-theme, that’s when they will write about it critically. Unit one will be more of a personal response.

Our Unit (Example)

Unit 1 Weeks 1-3

Week 1: What is the American dream? Is it still possible? (Jim)

Readings:

• Biography of the American Dream  (Time Article)
• The American Dream's Empty Promise

Skill Focus: Time management, critical reading strategies (narrow down specifically)
Pre-Reading Strategies

• Scanning 
• K-W-L+
• freewrite (what do you know about this topic? What do you want to know?)
• time management - lecture and writing (how do you manage your time? write a sample daily schedule and share with classmate/class)

During Reading

• Annotation (questioning, difficulties, stopping and reflecting)

Post-Reading 

• Summarizing
• Filling gaps
• graphic organizer
• reflection paper (allows student to look back on readings and reflect on them personally but also is a preparation for end of unit personal essay)

Week 2:  Economic Divide and Inequality (Jordana) 

Readings:

• Inequality Undermines Democracy , 
• Poverty in America: Why Can't We End It?  
• Defending the Dream: Why Income Inequality Doesn't Threaten Opportunity

Skill Focus: critical reading strategies, essay and sentence focus

Week 3: Twenty somethings:college (Katie and Susan)

Readings: 

• What is it with Twenty-Somethings Anyways? 
• Students Loans Weighing Down a Generation with Heavy Debt

Skill Focus: critical reading strategies, essay and sentence focus

End of Unit Assignment- Personal Essay (We can all create a prompt for our unit and put it on the handout for them to choose from.)