Week 3: Course for developmental reading/writing students

If I could create a course for helping under-prepared students during their first semester of college, I would design an integrated reading and writing course, one that incorporates activities that promote a metacognitive awareness of reading and writing processes through self-reflection. This course would utilize strategies for “students [to] come to read as writers and write as readers” (Goen and Gillotte-Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” (99), in order to recognize the interrelated and interconnected aspects of reading and writing. I have recently worked with a few of my colleagues in the Foothill College English Department on designing a new, accelerated pathway for developmental English students that is explicitly modeled on the IRW courses described by Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp in their article “Integrating Reading and Writing,” and based on this involvement, I have become convinced that an IRW approach can effectively meet the needs of developmental English students, boosting their abilities as both readers and writers. I am guided by Goen-Salter’s point that “better writers tend to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers” (“Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation” 84).

My course would emphasize “active reading,” drawing upon the strategies outlined in Van Woerkum’s article, “The Active Reader.” In particular, I would incorporate pre-reading strategies such as previewing, predicting, and writing about first impressions and inferences before students read a text. I would also ask students to compose a portrait of themselves as readers and writers, focusing on what kinds of texts they enjoy reading and the areas in which they have struggled, and on their feelings about the writing process. This “literacy narrative” might also ask students to discuss their primary and secondary languages, prior English classes they have taken, and details about how they have evolved into the readers and writers they are today. I would try to “activate schema” before we begin a new text, to elicit what the students already know about the broader topic and to establish a context for their upcoming analysis of the assigned texts.

During the reading process, I would draw upon Van Woerkum’s idea that a reader must pay attention to what “is triggered” by the text (269). Making ongoing inferences and analyzing these inferences would help a student focus on what is being triggered as they read. To this end, I would also ask students to practice annotation and to keep an ongoing journal (one in dialectical format and one that contains more informal thoughts). In the dialectical journal, students will respond to and interpret key quotes and bring the quotes to class as a basis for discussion. In the informal journal, they will record their ideas and questions as they read, and these can basically be “first impressions” rather than extensively developed ideas; this informal journal assignment is intended to support and validate students’ initial thoughts and reactions. And based on an IRW approach, I would assign Goen-Salter’s “Difficulty Paper,” to get students to critically assess the roadblocks in their reading process and to make an Action Plan for addressing these issues.

After the reading process, I would help students trigger the “activation of new reading” (through research assignments related to a final essay and connections that students make to other texts assigned in the class), and I would have students assess the accuracy of their initial predictions and inferences. The course would start by assigning each text but would move toward granting students more choices, through a final research essay in which they find and analyze one or two sources on their own, and synthesize these sources with an assigned reading. I may also include a book report assignment that asks students to find and present information on a book of their choice that is related to the course topic.

For the written essays, we will practice the skill of timed in-class essay writing along with writing longer out-of-class essays that must be revised. The first essay will draw upon personal narrative, asking students to make connections between their personal experience and one text. The second essay will focus on comparison and contrast between two readings and will be a more objective, analytical (traditional academic) essay. The third essay will be a research project that synthesizes two sources found through original research with at least one reading from class. As we discussed in English 709 class, I would allow the first in-class essay to be the first draft of the first formal out-of-class essay and would provide comments on the in-class essay that students could use when composing their longer essay. I would focus on providing feedback that is focused on content and organization and less on the “errors” in sentence-level issues and grammar. All essays will relate to the broader course theme, which might be “California Dreams and Realities” or “Poverty, Inequality, and the American Dream” (I have taught both of these courses at Foothill College, but have not incorporated an IRW approach into either of them yet).

In terms of the role of grammar instruction in the course, I would hold off on grammar drills and focus primarily on more generative aspects of writing, including sentence-building strategies like appositives and verbal phrases, to show that English is not just about grammar drills. On the day an essay is due, I would lecture on one key grammar/sentence-level topic (such as run-on sentences or fragments) and have the students look through their essays for this problem and correct it before handing in the essay; I believe this would be a focused and more gradual way to introduce grammar rules into the class, which would also limit grammar to a more peripheral role in the class.

Specific activities that I would assign over the semester include:

·      As students practice annotation, they will meet in groups to collectively annotate one key passage, and then present their group’s annotations to the class, to promote discussion of what a strong annotation looks like. This activity also gets students to agree on what constitutes a strong annotation, so that they learn that annotation is a selective process involving careful consideration.

·      Students will engage in debates over issues in the readings, using their annotated texts as evidence to support their particular positions in the debate.

·      Students will draw comparisons to other texts, to their own lived experiences, and to the world at large throughout the reading process (a Text-Self-World graphic organizer can be used to facilitate this discussion).

·      Students will learn to visually represent the inferences they make during the reading process through drawings, collages, info-graphics, and other creative means of self-expression.

·      Students will be exposed to multimedia materials such as video clips, films, advertisements, songs, and any other source that extends their thinking on the printed texts and brings in new kinds of “texts” for analysis.

·      Students will reflect metacognitively on their reading and writing processes through brief written assignments and in a longer reflective essay at the end of the quarter.

·      Students will participate in at least one formal group presentation that encourages them to take on the role of “teaching” the class about a text and they will be responsible for leading class discussion on that day.

These are my initial thoughts about the design of my IRW course. For all of these assignments and activities, students will be encouraged to work collaboratively in pairs, small groups, and with the whole class. The goal is to establish a comfortable, stimulating, and productive discourse community where students from all backgrounds can participate and where diverse learning styles can be addressed and validated.