Showing papers on "College English published in 1986"

Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation.

Abstract: Over the last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together to learn and to make meaning in a discipline, and who have rejected philosophically the kinds of approaches to teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, the problems for education in the seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, the growth in the number of nontraditional learners in the collegiate body, the alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, the acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges to an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called to question our obsession with the major metaphor for learning over the last three hundred years, "the human mind as the Mirror of Nature." As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can "to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible" and also insists that we help our students "through the exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, to sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight" ("Liberal Education" 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon the works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According to this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is "a collaborative artifact" (103) that results from "intellectual negotiations" (107). Bruffee explores the curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on the classroom and the other on the philosophical underpinnings of the new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on the delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into the issue of assessment generally as a force in postsecondary

The Perry scheme and the teaching of writing

Abstract: (1986). The Perry scheme and the teaching of writing. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 152-158.

The Community College Scholar.

Abstract: CLARK Kerr, former chair of the Carnegie Council on Higher Education, recently described community col leges as "the great, surging segment of higher educa tion" providing "youth service opportunities" that bring together the "now separate streams of work and educa tion" (4). Yet, as one reviewer noted, this "great surging segment" was left out of A Nation at Risk, a controver sial 1983 report on the nation's high schools. Prepared by the National Commission on Excellence in Educa tion, the report scores four-year colleges and universi ties for neglecting to provide leadership in setting standards and monitoring programs that would "raise the sights of those who set the high schools' curricula" (Healy 14). The omission of community colleges from the report is striking not simply because community col leges currently employ one-third of all college teachers and enroll one-third of all college students but because they have been successfully engaged throughout their century-long history in doing exactly what the report claims colleges and universities have failed to do: facilitating the entry of high school graduates into the worlds of education and work. Why do so many educators continue to discount the role of community colleges in higher education despite the valuable "youth service function" they provide? De spite record-setting enrollments in the 1970s? Despite the innovative approaches to student recruitment and basic skills instruction that have gradually worked their way into even the most select universities (Cross 34)? Howard London, in his study of the attitudes of community col lege teachers, believes that educators' lack of interest in the work of two-year colleges is partly due to these in stitutions themselves. Because the recent growth spurt among two-year colleges has been a "gangling, awkward, adolescent one complete with problems of self consciousness and self-identity," community college in structors find themselves in a limbo between high schools and four-year colleges and thus have enormous ambiva lence when defining their own roles (London 64). This in-between status is reinforced by the hiring practices of community colleges; administrators generally recruit teachers from the education layers that sandwich their institutions since there are only about a hundred pro grams expressly designed to train community college in structors. A 1976 survey by the Center for Community Colleges shows that 33% of the teachers come from high school faculties; 11% from four-year college faculties; 25% from graduate schools (with or without completed degrees); 5% directly from undergraduate institutions; and the remaining 25% from trades, government, and industry (Weddington 39-41). Unfortunately, the diver sity of two-year teaching personnel and the pragmatism Linda Ching Sledge

Integrating Writing Instruction with Word Processing

Abstract: One of my colleagues lies in wait for hopeful job candidates visiting the campus to mention computersthen he pounces with what he considers his trick question: &dquo;What do you helieve is the real impetus behind all of this urgent computer activity? Is it to save us, the instructors, work, or will it turn our students into better writers?&dquo; The job candidates are invariably caught shortcomputers do not save time except with students needing extra practice drill, and there is no empirical evidence that having students use computers improves their writing. 1

Evaluated Quantitative Research for Relating Reading and Writing in Beginning College English.

Abstract: ABSTRACT College freshman composition courses are often taught on the assumption that students need little or no help in reading, with the result that reading materials are only used as models of writing. However, research such as a 1978 study at the University of Minnesota wherein freshmen scored significantly lower in reading skills than did freshmen 50 years earlier, indicates that freshmen need to study reading at the instructional level, as they do not appear to absorb it as a functi'n of learning to write. A review of nine experiments that used sentence combining to improve writing showed that the technique failed to improve reading significantly, and three experiments that used analytical reading indicated that the method failed to improve writing. Because reading and writing are different skills, both should be taught directly, but because of their similarities, instruction in reading and writing can take place in the same course. Additional writing research shows that 18-year-old freshmen appear to develop natural capacities for writing--the number of errors they make decreases and the level of sentence complexity increases--but that they need some instruction to continue improvement. Overinstructing them in one narrow area of writing, however, seems to damage students' other writing skills. (Twenty-eight references are included.) (JC)

Should Students Be Well Read Or Should They Read Well

Abstract: After their study of college English departments, the writers define what secondary students should read to be well read and what analytic skills the student who reads literature well should possess. They suggest a three-point plan for evaluating a school's literature program.

New Ideas about English and Departments of English.

Abstract: Before I served as editor of College English I was an ordinary person. I had never heard of Lev Vygotsky, nor was I aware that we live in the midst of a paradigm shift. I wasn't sure what tagmemic means, or what the pentad is. The word * 'literacy" made me think of cement-block rooms filled with reading machines and remedial reading instructors. If I had been a sculptor commissioned to execute in marble or bronze my idea of an English program, I would have placed Literature at the center a large female figure looking like a 19th-century icon of liberty, clasping to her bosom with both arms a large volume containing her own history. To her left, rather aloof, would have been a young man representing Language, and to her right, bent to some low but worthy task, like plowing or weaving, would have been an androgynous figure representing Composition. Now just exactly what that young man who represented Language did in life I wasn't sure, but he and his kind seemed to be smart, aggressive and most confident people; I kept a respectful distance. What those people in Composition did I knew very well. Certainly it could be esteemed from afar, but I didn't actually want to do it again myself. So I sat at the foot of my lady Literature (or perhaps more accurately, Literary History), and thought and taught and wrote about the texts she sanctioned. Most college and university English programs still look like that. And I must confess I am still thinking about and teaching literary texts that are at least marginally canonical. But College English has taught me some ideas about language and literature that have forced me to begin thinking of English programs in radically different ways. I have learned to think of English teachers, in secondary schools as well as in colleges and universities, as colleagues concerned with all kinds of writing, maybe with all uses of language, maybe with all uses of sign and symbols which lets in film and semiotics; where one appears, can the other be far behind? The ideas I had to entertain as editor have strengthened my disposition to take seriously the social origins and effects of literary texts whatever they are. Indeed, they have taught me to add such disclaimers ' 'whatever they are" to phrases like "literary texts." I still believe in the existence of literature, but I have learned to think of it as being so implicated in our system of language that I can't always tell where it starts or stops and some kind of writing ends or begins.

A Study of English Placement Test Subscores and Their Use in Assigning CSU, Fresno Freshmen to Beginning English Courses.

Abstract: EDRS PRICE MF01/PC04 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Academic Persistence; *College English; College Entrance Examinations; *College Freshmen; *Educational Testing; English (Second Language); Essay Tests; Grade Point Average; Higher Education; Introductory Courses; Predictor Variables; Remedial Instruction; *Screening Tests; State Universities; *Student Placement; *Writing (Composition) IDENTIFIERS *California State University Fresno