viewpoints, community college of philadelphia journal of collegiate learning, teaching, and assessment, 10th anniversary issue

Course Protocols Will Support Pedagogy, Normalize Procedures in English 101

by Dianne Perkins
English Department

At its Plenary Meeting of April, 2006, the English Department unanimously voted to approve the document “Protocols for English 101,” which attempts to forge more consistency in the kinds of assignments that students receive, each semester, in hundreds of sections of College Composition I—a course pivotal to their success not only in English 102, but in writing assignments across curricula.

One instructor recently wrote that she finds the document valuable to her writing assignments in history courses and therefore hopes that it might be made visible to instructors across curricula.

As Chair of the English 101 Committee (Mark Hughes, John Joyce,, Carol Kreitchet, Carol LaBelle, Madeline Marcotte, Girija Nagaswami, and Shirley Niederberger) that worked for three years to produce this document, I am deeply grateful to the editors of Viewpoints for giving it such institutional visibility and invite colleagues, across curricula, to share their responses.

PROTOCOLS FOR ENGLISH 101

Pedagogy

  1. A. To bolster their reading skills in a course that requires text-based writing, students should receive the following:
  2. B. To demonstrate their ability to identify main ideas in assigned texts, to paraphrase those ideas, and to distinguish between textual assertions and personal responses to them, students should write two to three short summaries of assigned nonfiction. (See The Advantages of Summaries);
  3. C. Students should receive a process-oriented approach to writing that encourages them to invest time and care in the prewriting, drafting, and post-writing processes:
  4. D. Students should write five to six text-based essays of gradually increasing length and complexity. Assigned summaries and essays, including the final exam, should assure that students write at least 5,000 words (approximately 20 pages), not counting revisions (See Raising the Bar Gradually.);
  5. E. The rhetorical tasks that dominate major writing assignments should be analysis, comparison/contrast, interpretation and argument rather than description or narration, which are less often required in other college courses;
  6. F. Students should receive frequent practice in paraphrasing sentences and short passages from nonfiction texts;
  7. G. Students should be taught when and how to quote phrases, sentences, and passages from assigned texts; how to mesh quoted material with their own sentences; and how to introduce and analyze quotations;
  8. H In keeping with practice in composition courses across the nation, including our major transfer institutions, at least two thirds of assigned reading should be nonfiction (See A Range of Nonfiction Readings.);
  9. I. To discourage plagiarism, instructors should discuss the academic conventions that render it a serious offense; provide clear definitions and examples of plagiarism; illustrate several ways to avoid it; and offer students practice in quotation, paraphrase, and attribution of ideas;
  10. J. Although English 101 does not require a formal research paper, students should be taught how to quote using parenthetical documentary style (MLA or APA) and be asked, before their final exam, to write an essay synthesizing ideas from at least two related texts;
  11. K. To respect variations in instructors’ teaching demands but ensure students an adequate opportunity to revise papers, students should be allowed to revise at least two essays before midsemester and one essay afterwards;
  12. L. To provide practice in timed writing after their diagnostic essay and before their final exam, students should write one of their summaries, and one of their essays, in class. (Instructors who teach fifty-minute classes might permit students to draft an essay in class, collect those drafts, but return them at the start of the following class for another half hour or so of editing.);
  13. M. As English 101 calls for “a review of grammar,” students should be provided instruction on errors committed in the context of their recent collective writing. Students whose writing shows chronic grammatical problems should be referred to the Writing Center with their prior graded papers. (As students often approach tutoring as an opportunity to obtain “quick fixes” for problems in a prospective paper, instructors should refer grammatically weak students to the Writing Center with papers that are already graded, requesting address of one or more sentence problems that will require several tutoring sessions);
  14. N. Although a process-oriented approach to the course is advocated, no more than six hours of class time should be consumed by peer-review of writing, and such sessions should be guided by handouts that pose specific editorial questions.

Instructors’ Administration of English 101

  1. A. In the first week of the semester, instructors should obtain a diagnostic in-class essay to gain an early impression of students’ writing, using this “benchmark essay” for any or all of the following purposes:
  2. B. Early in the semester, instructors should distribute a rubric that illustrates their criteria for evaluating essays;
  3. C.After completing third-week attendance reports, instructors should issue Tutoring-Referral Forms to students whose writing shows a need for early intervention;
  4. D. To minimize confusion and facilitate students’ work with tutors, instructors should issue major writing assignments in hard copy—and, if possible, make them available online;
  5. E. Syllabi for English 101 should fulfill not only the College’s generic requirements, but provide the following information:
  6. F. Although “MP” is a legitimate final grade in the course, instructors should not use this grade on individual papers. (Some students have argued that successive “MPs” on papers entitled them to an “MP” in the course.) To avoid this dilemma, instructors might use a numerical grading system (say, from 1 to 5) or issue comments alone until papers are of passing caliber;
  7. G. At midsemester, instructors should frankly discuss with classes the demands of enrolling in the truncated summer version of English 102, the benefits of taking the course in a 15-week semester, and the advantages of registering for the course as soon as possible.

Recommendations for the Department

  1. A. The department will create a set of norming essays that establish a public standard for “B,” “C,” and “MP” grades among a recent set of departmental final exams;
  2. B. The department will create two sample syllabi for English 101 and English 101/108 for new instructors that, based on staff-ordered texts, reflect the recommendations of this document;
  3. C. To compose departmental exams with the care that they warrant, an English 101 Final Exam Committee should meet in the summer to compose exams for the coming fall and spring semesters, publishing them during In-Service Week each September. Two to three instructors who participate in this process each summer should each receive a half-credit of extended time;
  4. D. To encourage more consistency in grading standards, instructors should have a chance to practice group grading well before the final-exam period; the department should designate an earlier day of the semester (such as Professional Development Day) a group-grading day;
  5. E. Twice each semester, the department should disseminate a statement reminding faculty of some necessary variations in grading criteria, confirmed by research, for ESL students;
  6. F. Although a grade of “D” confers credit for graduation, the department should require a grade of “C” in the course as a prerequisite for English 102;
  7. G. The department should create an English 101 “course packet” that contains the following:
  8. H. To supplement the thin exercises of even the best handbooks, the department should compose its own duplicable book of exercises addressing the most common grammatical errors and stylistic weaknesses of our English 101 students—providing, at the top of each page, the directive, “You will find an explanation of this common writing error on page(s) ______ of your handbook”;
  9. I. In concert with the College Library staff, the department should determine what elements, if any, of information literacy might be built into English 101, or whether a separate one-credit course on the evaluation of online sources (such as the controversial Wikipedia) should soon be required of all CCP students;
  10. J. Instructors should publicize, by departmental listserv, any text or theme for English 101 that has been particularly successful—attracting a teaching circle likely to yield assignments for the course which, refined by group effort, evolve into “classic syllabi” that others can use in coming years.

References

Lindemann, Erika. “Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature.” College English 55 (March 1993): 311-16.

Steinberg, Erwin R. “Imaginative Literature in Composition Classrooms?” College English 57.3 (March 1995): 266-80.

Tate, Gary. “A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition.” College English 55 (March 1993): 317-21.

The Advantages of Summary

The ability to summarize is essential not only to research, but, it might be argued, most expository writing. (How can one exercise an opinion upon a text whose main ideas one cannot identify and paraphrase?) Increasingly, textbooks on college writing, such as Longman’s new Academic Writer’s Handbook, devote an entire chapter to summary, a skill required in assignments across curricula.

Although one might argue that summary, in itself, is an “artificial” assignment, it is also a discrete skill (as arpeggios are to an aspiring pianist), without which students are unable to distill their reading, conduct even the simplest research, or meet the demands of writing assignments across curricula.

Early exercises in summary teach students how to identify main ideas and accurately paraphrase them without allowing their personal opinions to obtrude upon those ideas—an exercise in detachment that most English 101 students need if they are to gain proficiency in “academic writing.”

For the past decade, major assignments in Developmental Writing at Temple University, whatever the assigned text, issued the same instructions: “Summarize and respond.” Such directives, like a mantra, provided students repeated practice in related, but distinctly different, cognitive skills. Because few of our English 101 students enter our course with such prior practice, two short summaries, assigned early in the course, help them to redress that lack of experience.

One-page summaries offer distinct pedagogical rewards. They can be graded and quickly returned, offering students prompt feedback on their writing. The entire pack, with students’ names erased but instructors’ comments visible, can be duplicated and distributed to a class. They can be organized via the problems they typically reveal: the first few may have cited examples rather than the main ideas that those examples served to illustrate; the next few may have distorted a claim of the text; the next few might have inadvertently plagiarized; a final group may have frequently shifted point of view.

Students offered early practice in summary, moreover, tend to write strong introductions to essays that include comprehensive context for the academic conversation in which (through analysis, or interpretation, or argument) they must position themselves.

For all these reasons, the ability to summarize a short article or essay should be an exit criterion for English 101.

A Range of Nonfiction Readings

A rich selection of nonfiction for students might include not only a few short informational chapters of the type they are likely to encounter in textbooks across disciplines, but excerpts from literary autobiographies (Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Richard Rodriguez, Amy Tan, Richard Wright), essays in the belletristic tradition (James Baldwin, G.K. Chesterton, Edward Dahlberg, Samuel Johnson, Michel de Montaigne, Cynthia Ozick, Octavio Paz, Oscar Wilde, Alice Walker, Mary Wollstonecraft), chapters from philosophic classics (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life), contemporary social or cultural criticism (Elijah Anderson, Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Pete Hamill, bell hooks, Jonathan Kozol, Christopher Lasch, Eric Schlosser, Laurence Steinberg, Deborah Tannen, Cornel West), polemical classics (Albert Camus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell), popular history (Roger Ekrich, Danny Danziner, John Gillingham), essays on science and technology (Loren Eisley, Steven Jay Gould, Jerry Mander, Carl Sagan) or the philosophy of science or medicine (Charles E. Rosenberg, Alfred N. Whitehead, Edmund O. Wilson), sustained reflections on the psyche and soul (Mohandas Gandhi, Robert Hillman, Thomas Moore, Mary Pipher, Rainer Maria Rilke), as well as carefully selected articles from such publications as The New York Times, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.

A rich range of nonfiction, in short, should help students to distinguish between facts and ideas; main ideas and examples of those ideas; deftly supported claims and thinly supported ones; a literal, metaphoric, or ironic, expression of a truth; articles and essays; journalistic and academic prose; and the missions of disciplines embodied by selected texts—making assigned reading in English 101 an introduction to various windows upon the world, accessible to all through higher education or a passion for reading.

Raising the Bar Gradually

The criterion of “gradually increasing complexity” might be achieved in any, or all, of the following ways:

Cover

©Copyright 2007. Contact author for permission

Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007