Dear English Department,
I am writing to you to advocate on behalf of
introducing an integrated reading and writing (IRW) approach to teaching
composition at our community college. Based on research conducted by Sugie
Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp, who are notable pioneers of the
integrated reading and writing approach, along with my own experiences from
seven years of community college teaching, it is clear that an IRW approach can
effectively meet the needs of developmental English students, boosting their
abilities as both readers and writers. Above all, an IRW approach would utilize
strategies for “students [to] come to read as writers and write as readers”
(Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” (99), in
order to recognize the interconnected aspects of reading and writing. Research
conducted during San Francisco State University’s launch of their IRW program
has proven 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” (Goen-Salter, “Critiquing the Need to
Eliminate Remediation” 84). By integrating reading and writing into our
curriculum, we recognize these interconnections between the reading and writing
processes and thereby improve our students’ reading and writing skills
simultaneously. The following memo outlines the components of the IRW approach
and explains why implementing this approach at our college would provide a more
effective and stimulating curriculum for our students.
What is an
IRW approach? From
an IRW standpoint, reading is no longer secondary to writing, and students
instead “see how the structures, practices, and language of each process can
enhance understanding of the other” (Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp, “Integrating
Reading and Writing” 94). There are six fundamental principles upon which an integrated
reading and writing approach is based: integration,
wherein writing contributes to the development of reading, and vice-versa; time, which takes into account that
reading and writing skills develop gradually and within supportive communities;
development, which sets a slower
pace for the learning process that is more conducive to learning; academic membership, so that at-risk students
are incorporated into the mainstream academic community more quickly, thereby
ending the cycle of remedial failure and removing the punitive aspect of
remedial education; sophistication,
which recognizes that basic-level writing classes can be as sophisticated as
college-level classes by asking students to work on the same projects, such as
reading book-length works and conducting original research; and purposeful communication, which places
the teaching of grammar and essay-writing into broader contexts, imbuing the
learning process with meaning.
The
objectives of the original IRW program at San Francisco State University include:
having students read a range of materials and write from a variety of
viewpoints and helping students apply these skills both within and beyond their
work at the university; developing a metacognitive perspective of reading and
writing, involving developing conscious strategies for self-awareness;
understanding the rhetorical elements of reading and writing, including purpose,
audience, and stance; using reading and writing to engage with the world; and developing
enjoyment and confidence in reading and writing through self-assessment.
When IRW courses were first launched at San Francisco State in Fall 2001, student outcomes in the pilot IRW courses were compared with that of a control group. The outcomes showed that “[a]cross all categories of data, students in the integrated reading/writing program outperformed their counterparts in SFSU’s conventional sequence of basic reading and writing courses” (103). It is therefore important for more graduate teaching programs to extensively prepare instructors to teach integrated reading and writing and for our college to consider implementing this innovative approach.
Does IRW
work and why is it better than a traditional system where reading and writing
are taught separately?
Based upon the experience of implementing the IRW
approach at San Francisco State, it is clear that this approach is superior to
the traditional approach to separating reading and writing instruction. Sugie
Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp’s “Integrating Reading and Writing: A
Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis,’” argues that the historical tendency to
separate reading and writing as distinct processes is a primary contributor to
the “basic writing crisis.” In searching for new ways to address administrative
attempts to dismantle “remedial” courses, Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp
developed the innovative IRW program at San Francisco State, “in which instruction
in reading and writing is fully integrated, and students’ movement from the
margins of the university to its academic center can be appreciably hastened”
(91). The authors
cite empirical research showing the links between reading and writing, and the benefits
of reading and writing integration. They point out that before the
implementation of the IRW program, many basic writing students would remain at
the basic writing level well into their second year of enrollment at San
Francisco State University. In response, Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp
developed an accelerated program through which students could join the
mainstream academic community and take college-level English courses within one
year.
The
IRW system was piloted, found to be successful across the board, and eventually
replaced the old (two-tier) system. In the old system, students who scored in
the lowest quartile of the English Placement Test were required to complete a
full year of developmental-level course work in reading and writing by taking
separate courses with different instructors; this model was cumbersome and
redundant, and failed to alleviate the risk of dis-enrollment from the
university that would result if the remediation requirement was not completed
in one year.
San
Francisco State’s IRW program places at-risk students into a single course
which explicitly connects reading and writing and moves these students swiftly
from the developmental to college level within one year. Successful completion
of the course meets both the CSU remediation requirement and SFSU’s first-year
written composition requirement, enabling students to complete in one year what
previously took three semesters.
The
facts are clear:
as Sugie Goen-Salter explains, student retention has improved each year since
the IRW program was launched. For the three years of the pilot project, IRW
students passed the integrated course at a higher rate than students enrolled
in the traditional sequence. Goen-Salter provides detailed tables to
demonstrate how these outcomes were measured between the IRW and control groups
(see “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic
Writing ‘Crisis’”).
As
an instructor, it is also very clear to me that an IRW approach has a more
student-centered focus that will engage and meet the needs of the diverse student
learners in our community college classes. One of the goals of an IRW approach is “to break down
the barrier between text reception and text production, by inviting students to
look at a text they read for clues to its production, and a text they produce
for clues to how it might be received” (Goen-Salter 86), which occurs alongside
the development of metacognitive awareness. Assignments like the “difficulty
paper” and KWL+ (in which students establish what they already know about a
topic, what they would like to know, and after reading, what they would still
like to know/investigate) are designed to promote this kind of
self-consciousness about reading and writing processes, and to demonstrate
their reciprocal relationship. By situating the assigned readings within both
sociocultural contexts and the contexts of our students’
lived experiences, an IRW curriculum can provide meaningful instruction that is
relevant to the actual concerns and prior knowledge that our students bring
into the classroom, and can thus be a catalyst for deeper insights and critical
reflection.
Specific IRW assignments include KWL+, which elicits
students’ prior knowledge and encourages further inquiry, along with the “Difficulty
Paper,” which asks students to critically assess the roadblocks in their
reading process and to make an Action Plan for addressing these issues. These
assignments focus on generating knowledge from students’ own experiences and on
raising awareness of the processes students go through as readers and writers
(metacognitive awareness). As an instructor, I have found that assignments that
call for metacognitive awareness lead to an increased interest in and enjoyment
of the curriculum, which in turn leads to a greater “buy-in” of the reading and
writing skills that we are teaching. In the IRW classroom, students are
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. Students are supported
both intellectually and emotionally through this type of instruction. Moreover,
an IRW approach provides an invitation to students to join the academic
community more swiftly and smoothly, in part because students are now able to
realize their own potential as critical thinkers, readers, and writers.
For all of these reasons, I strongly urge you to
consider adopting an integrated reading and writing approach at our community college. I promise that you will not regret
this important decision.
Sincerely,
Jordana Finnegan, Ph.D.
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