O'Neill, et al., Ch. 4 and Intro, from _A Guide to College Writing Assessment_

Introduction
Summary: The gist of this piece is that WPAs will have to come to terms with assessment, a major initiative at colleges nation-wide. The authors write that assessment often drives curriculum, and that a good WPA needs to take an active hand in developing and administering assessments to ensure that productive, research-based assessments are used, thereby improving the curriculum instead of taking it down a dark path to poor pedagogy. They encourage readers to see assessment as an opportunity. The authors also state that WPAs need to understand assessment so they can advocate for productive assessment to audiences--other administrators, the public, the state--that may be less versed in writing theory and practice.

Response: I agree!

Uses: It's a short read that makes a good point. It's also a necessary point (based on my experience), and one that WPAs should recognize. Of course, this could have a place in the assessment section. I wonder if the same points could be made in a different way--in class, or in a general post--but then, it's good to have a reading make that point. This is a possible one to cut, though. We would need some way to introduce assessment, if we did decide to cut it.

Chapter 4
Summary: This chapter focuses on the context of a writing assessment. By context, they mean the writing program itself--spatially, courses and curricula, students, faculty, administrators, etc. The authors give a series of questions to consider about many of these. The gist of the chapter is that an assessment program does not occur in a vacuum--if it is done well, it should be a local artifact, closely tied to its context. This is a very practical chapter that gives suggestions for how to analyze the context of a writing assessment to aid in its development.

Response: I would not get rid of this piece. It is easy to apply and makes an extremely good point. One can't just adopt an assessment program from another school or discipline and expect it to work. It needs to be grounded in the individual school. Still, I have seen people try to do just that--search the web for an assessment model and try to adopt it wholesale. So an article like this is needed.

Uses: The assessment section of the course. It also has some relevance to a basic understanding of a writing program and how the program itself is a local artifact.

CIP Codes

Summary: These are codes used by the Department of Education. They represent, I think, national understandings of what these terms mean (such as rhetoric and composition). The tables can be accessed here.

Response: Firstly, I noticed a good bit of overlap between the definitions (writing, professional writing, etc.). I'm not sure of the significance of these codes, to be honest, other than to show what the government thinks we're doing when we're studying, say, rhetoric. The website looks like you can use the codes to do research, but I found the site difficult to navigate.

Uses: I'm not sure.

Phelps, "Composition Studies," from Enos, _Encyclopedia_

Summary: This article tracks the development of composition studies from around the 1960s to the mid-90s. Phelps identifies major tensions and commonalities between the different sub-areas of comp. studies. She discusses the teaching tradition (and composition's still-remaining grounding in the practical), the new rhetoric ("composition is the inheritor of classical Western rhetoric"), and the new science (which draws on methodologies from other fields such as the social sciences and education). A major heuristic she uses to explain the field is "a process of equilibration between forces of expansion and differentiation" (126)--expansion in terms of what the field studies (traditional writing, multimodal writing, etc.) and differentiation in terms of, I think, growing differences of focus that sometimes threaten to tear it apart. Phelps describes different ways to hold the field together--the dominance of one paradigm, the inclusion of all, and dialogue between different perspectives. She also discusses the importance of practice to the discipline.

Response: This article serves as an excellent introduction to the discipline. It is extremely readable and does a great job of outlining the different areas of interest in the field and showing the tensions. The publication of date of the book is 1996--I wonder what has changed? From my perspective, the digital dimension has been growing like wildfire, and I wonder if there could be another article that speaks to that that could perhaps be paired with this one.

Uses: This would be good early in the course to provide a basic description of the field to those students who are unaware of composition's history. It is important to understand the discipline, I think, before we get into the administration aspect.

Blog Community Analysis

For a definition of community, I draw from Lave and Wenger’s discussion of Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Garrison and Vaughn’s outline of Communities of Inquiry (CoIs). These theorists provide a useful map for the type of community desirable in a graduate program, and their theories can be extrapolated to apply to first-year composition as well.

Lave and Wenger address CoPs in the context of situated learning, in which what and how the learner learns is a function of his or her participation in the community. Lave and Wenger’s CoPs are always doing something—the “practice” component of the term—rather than simply existing. A learner begins on the periphery of the community and, by developing the skills, knowledge, and identity valued within the community, gradually becomes a full member with the ability to shape the community. This process involves more than memorizing certain facts or writing a certain way: Lave and Wenger write that “learning involves the whole person; it implies not only a relation to specific activities, but a relation to social communities—it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person. […L]earning involves the construction of identities” (53). More on this in a minute.

Garrison and Vaughan’s CoIs may be seen as a subset of CoPs that is focused within the classroom (virtual or physical). Garrison and Vaughan define a CoI as “a unifying process that integrates the essential processes of personal reflection and collaboration in order to construct meaning, confirm understanding, and achieve higher-order learning outcomes” (29). Through a blend of social, cognitive, and teacher presence, CoIs contain mutually supportive members who have “a sense of belonging” (21) and who identify, explore, and attempt to solve problems (22). The teacher “establishes the curriculum, approaches, and methods; [she] also moderates, guides, and focuses discourse and tasks” (24).

These two frameworks become useful when we consider that the blog assignment was given in the context not only of an individual course, but in the larger context of a graduate program. To my knowledge, the majority of the students in the course are in the PhD track; although individual goals differ, one accepted goal of PhD programs in general is to prepare students to become members of the academic community. Seen through Lave and Wenger’s lens, the “practices” of the academic community include critical reading and thinking, knowledge-making, inquiry, and discourse. Doctoral students begin on the periphery of this CoP and move toward full membership. As Lave and Wenger point out, full participation involves a shift in identity—we not only learn how to write in an academic way, we become academics.

The blog postings served to move us toward full participation in several ways. Firstly, the critical reading and analysis of research are key practices in academia, as is learning to write robust, concentrated, analytical prose that engages that research. Secondly, the blogs were public, which is important to the assignment: in academia, we engage in public discussion of ideas through publication. This serves to distribute knowledge freely and to open our ideas to criticism by our peers, which is vital to the continual evolution of understanding (knowledge-making) that is a central goal of academia. Learning how to publically critique research and post our own ideas moves us closer to full participation in the academic CoP. Thirdly, we can read and comment on each other’s blogs, which, in effect, represents a microcosmic Burkean Parlor in which we can share and debate ideas (the extent to which this last goal was realized will be discussed later).

The blogs also functioned well as part of a CoI, especially when seen as a component of the entire course. By asking us to critically read and respond to articles connected to the course outcomes, the blogs encouraged us to employ personal reflection and construct meaning. Additionally, we had to discuss why we would (or would not) recommend the article to others in our field, which asked us to engage not only the class community, but the academic community at large. While individual students’ paths of inquiry differed, they could be seen as diverging from the central course question of how best to teach writing from a distance, and can also be seen as a collaborative attempt to answer that question.

Whether the collaborative aspect of CoPs and CoIs was addressed to its fullest with the blog assignment is worth further inquiry. As I have discussed above, the blogs required us to engage with the scholarly community at large. However, the assignment as written did not require the same level of engagement with the class community. Individual course members commented on blogs to differing levels. (I have not done a systematic study, and am basing my conclusions on my observations of my own and others’ blogs.) The comments varied, sometimes suggesting connections to another article or providing another perspective, and sometimes amounting to a well developed “good job.” There was not a high level of collaborative inquiry and debate as might be hoped for in a CoI.

However, as a learner, I did not find this aspect to be problematic. As I have written above, the blogs were valuable even without strongly encouraging engagement with the other class members. The in-class discussions have been particularly robust and draw from readings, experience, and analysis. We have also had frequent collaborative projects that have required us to apply our knowledge in ways fully consistent with both the CoP and CoI concepts—the Blackboard-mediated project in which we were members of a school technology committee, for example, was exactly the type of thing we would have to do as full members of the academic community. These collaborative projects were, in my estimation, the key spurs to the development of course community.

The blog assignment could be modified to require more cross-student engagement. One way would be to use the collaborative class projects as a model: students might be assigned in groups (or self-assign based on interest), and each group would have the task of answering a central question about teaching writing from a distance. The blogs could be seen as pre-writing in which they looked much the same as they do now, but they would be focused on gathering and processing research to be used to answer the group’s central question. Groups would then need to engage with each other’s blogs as they moved forward in their process of inquiry. Chi-Cheng Chang found a positive correlation between class groups’ online discussion performance and the quality of collaborative class projects, suggesting that a collaborative project of the type I outline above might be enriched by incorporating a blog aspect.

I am not sure I would argue for this change, however. The blogs functioned quite well as they currently are, and their structure allowed students to pursue their individual interests, which probably increased engagement. Also, as I have said above, they met many of the key criteria of CoPs and CoIs.

They might also be useful in FYC courses. Many writers have explored the affordances of blogs in composition classes—Charles Tryon writes that encouraging FYC students to read, write, and rhetorically analyze blogs “provoked one of the most productive conversations [he has] ever enjoyed with students about writing, specifically in terms of the relationship between writing and audience. […S]tudents quickly grasped the importance of interactivity in the blog world” (130). Shu and Wang found that using blogs in college reading courses increased student retention, probably because “blogging activities increased the members’ interaction and helped them form a learning community in which they could make friends quickly and easily, offer comfort and support to one another, exchange relatively private information about school work and social life, and offer suggestions to deal with academic problems” (n.p.). Ben McCorkle successfully used blogs in a basic-writing course to encourage students “to participate in the academic conversation [and validate] their voices as engaged citizens with real opinions on issues that mattered to them” by having students post reviews of other blogs, a book, and individual topics that they found “newsworthy” (n.p.).

However, the community of the FYC class is significantly different from that of our class. The CoP of FYC might be seen as that of undergraduate academics, but that could be debated, and certainly their membership is likely to be more temporary than we hope ours will be in the wider world of academia. The CoI framework holds more promise for FYC—many schools offer themed FYC courses that examine art or science or literature, and it would be relatively easy to frame a themed FYC class around inquiry into some key questions. Blogs could be a part of that inquiry; however, they should not be seen as leading directly to the development of a class community.

In sum, the blogs were effective in our course, and they were consistent with the CoP and CoI concepts. There are ways in which the assignment could be modified to increase collaboration, but since collaboration was reinforced in multiple other areas of the course, such modification is not necessary.

Works Cited

Chang, Chi-Cheng. “A Case Study on the Relationships between Participation in Online Discussion and Achievement of Project Work.” Journal of Educational Media and Hypermedia 17.4 (2008): 477-509. Print.

Garrison, D. Randy, and Norman D. Vaughan. Blended Learning in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. Print.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: CUP, 1991. Print.

McCorkle, Ben. “English 109.02: Intensive Reading and Writing II, ‘Reading, Writing, Blogging.’” Composition Studies 38.1 (2010): 108-127. ProQuest. Web. 8 March 2011.

Shu, Hui-Yin, and Shiangkwei Wang. “The Impact of Using Blogs on College Students’ Reading Comprehension and Learning Motivation.” Literacy Research and Instruction 50.1 (2011): 68-89. ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2011.


Tryon, Charles. “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy 6.1 (2006): 128-132. Print.

Blog Post #5

Halio, Marcia Peoples. “Teaching in Our Pajamas: Negotiating with Adult Learners in Online Distance Writing Courses.” College Teaching 52.2 (2004): 58-62. Print.

Halio focuses her article on the challenges of responding to online students’ emotion-charged e-mails. This is a subject I have been interested in for some time, having experienced a number of emotional e-mail exchanges from both my online and face-to-face students. Halio’s article does not provide absolute answers; instead, it is structured to pose observations (mostly centered on one class that is representative of her experience) and suggest eight key questions for online writing teachers to address.

Halio uses research to contextualize her observations, but the bulk of the article is drawn from her analysis of e-mail archives from one specific online FYC course “for returning adult students” (59). Halio does not discuss how such students are filtered into (or choose to take) the course, but the eight students she describes are, indeed, returning students of non-traditional ages, mostly working and some with families. She notes a difference between both the volume and the content of the female and male students’ e-mails: “[w]omen’s messages often demonstrate their preoccupation with caretaking issues” and request emotional reassurance that they will succeed in the course (59); they also, as a group, write far more messages than the male students. The males “write angry messages challenging the structure of the course or questioning the usefulness of assignments […or] angry messages in response to feedback on assignments[….E]mail messages from male students are often subversive” (59).

The gender differences Halio observes are a key component of her article. Five out of eight of her questions—whether men and women approach online courses differently, how to help women find supportive networks, whether we should change assignments to focus on care-giving, how to help women “take charge of their own paths through our courses” (61), how to help male students take criticism better—focus on different approaches for each gender. These questions, as well as the more gender-neutral ones such as how to help students cope with stress and how to “avoid becoming therapists for our students” (61), are interesting and worth examination.

Perhaps because I am male, it seemed to me that Halio’s conclusions about female students were better supported than those about the males. She grounds her discussion about female students with several specific citations from three separate sources, but she does not cite any sources to support her analysis of male students. As I said above, the article is primarily based on her observations, and it is fair to note that the studies of female students she cites were probably discussing how female and male students differed, and so could be used to speak to male students. However, this is an area of the article I wished had more than anecdotal evidence. As a male adult distance student (admittedly in a different socioeconomic and cultural situation than her students), I have never written an angry e-mail to a professor; nor did I in my MA or undergraduate experiences. And while I have not systematically analyzed my e-mails from my own distance students, I would not agree that I have seen the same things noted by Halio.

However, this does not mean the article is not useful. Her questions at the end of the piece are good ones to address when building a course, and get back to the teacher’s responsibility to design a course that works well for students while also managing the workload and emotional stress of teaching. 

Blog Post #4

Prensky, Marc. “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom.” Innovate: Journal of Online Education 5.3 (2009): n. pag. Web. 5 June 2012.

Prensky is the originator of the term “digital natives,” which has gained widespread (albeit not unconditional) acceptance since he coined it in 2001. I decided to see what Prensky had written more recently.

In this article, Prensky suggests that the distinction between digital natives (those who have grown up with digital technology) and digital immigrants (those who have not) will become less relevant as time goes on, presumably because the digital immigrants will die off, or at least become less influential. He advocates an increased emphasis on the development of “digital wisdom,” which he defines as “a twofold concept referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.” By the first statement, he means making wise choices aided by technology—accessing health systems to improve patient care, for example. In the second statement, Prensky is referring to critical technology use, which he does not explore in the same detail as the first point. This is probably because the bulk of the article does not itself exhibit this second quality of digital wisdom, but consists of a list of the ways in which digital technology will improve our lives, such as “enhancing our ability to conduct deeper analyses.” Prensky writes that “digital technology is making us smarter.” He does not qualify this sentiment; while he does write that “every [technological] enhancement comes with a trade-off,” he doesn’t characterize any negative components of these trade-offs as meaningful, but as necessary sacrifices in service of positive progress. “The unenhanced brain,” Prensky writes, “is well on its way to becoming insufficient for truly wise decision making.”

I am no Luddite, but I found this article somewhat chilling in its unconditional boosterism of technology. Similarly to his famous “digital natives” article, Prensky cites very few academically valid sources, and those he does cite are only examined in the most superficial way. Ironically, according to his reference page Prensky has accessed the majority of his sources digitally; yet rather than exemplifying digital wisdom, his article embodies its opposite.

I would not recommend this article to my peers. However, Prensky raises a few points that are useful in planning how one might teach writing in a digital space. He writes that “as we offer more courses in digital literacy, we should also offer students guidance in developing digital wisdom [...] by letting students learn by using new technologies, [with teachers] putting themselves in the role of guides, context providers, and quality controllers.” This is excellent advice, and would serve students much better than the arbitrary limits some writing teachers impose on their students’ technology use. Teaching students critical technology use requires that we teachers approach technology with an open mind ourselves and move away from overly simplistic guidelines such as minimum numbers of non-electronic sources in a paper or word-processing being the only acceptable classroom technology. We need to exhibit digital wisdom ourselves so we can teach it to our students.

Blog Post #3

Smith, Cheryl C. “Technologies for Transcending a Focus on Error: Blogs and Democratic Aspirations in First-Year Composition.” Journal of Basic Writing 27.1 (2008): 35-60. Print.

In “Technologies for Transcending a Focus on Error,” Smith describes a blog project she undertook in a first-year composition class and suggests that it might be productive to explore similar projects in the basic-writing classroom. For her project, she created a class blog that she used primarily as a space for “pre-writing exercises [she] called ‘meditations,’ which would lead up to the three longer, formal essays” (41). Smith posted a variety of prompts on the class blog and encouraged her students to write longer, experimental pieces in response to the prompts and to reply to each other’s posts. She discouraged a focus on grammar, encouraging students to “try on writerly identities, try out ideas and claims, and test different styles for approaching those claims” (41). For one prompt, she also encouraged students to incorporate YouTube videos in their posts. For the most part, students responded very positively, both to the blog idea itself and to each other’s posts.

Smith’s approach rests upon several key understandings. Firstly, she adheres to the belief that “students at all levels, from basic to advanced, and with all degrees of academic experience, are likely to have had their minds and writing styles impacted by their exposure to technology. […] Basic writers are as likely as their peers to come to college with a determining Web 2.0 fluency” (36). Secondly, she sees blogs, specifically, as being democratizing through their “unique potential to free the writer’s voice that can especially empower those students who lack confidence in their language skills or are otherwise struggling. Further, by giving participants equal access to a public voice in a forum that is familiar to many young people, blogs create a safe place for risk-taking and error” (38).

Both of these understandings are worthy of examination. It is probably true that many traditional-age students have significant familiarity with Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and other social media. However, as Pavia points out in the article I blogged on previously, we should be wary of assumptions that ALL students, especially those in our basic-writing classes (because of the higher prevalence of working-class students), share a given level of comfort—let alone fluency—with Web 2.0. Additionally, as Smith notes herself, a blog might not be seen by all as a safe place. She describes an episode where students used the blog to critique a class project, and then interpreted her response to that critique as embodying the message “watch what you say” (48). Students became more timid in their posts, and Smith had to work to reestablish a more open environment on the blog.

Despite these concerns, I see Smith’s experiment as worth trying. One way I might proceed in the fall is to establish a private class blog for the developmental students in my ALP section. This could provide my basic writers with a space to experiment and pre-write, as well as develop a community where they do not feel any pressure of having their writing read by the college-level students. As I learned from past blog experiments—and as Smith recommends—one key will be good prompts. I like Smith’s idea of using the blog as a pre-writing space, but I may also incorporate prompts that address other topics to give students a chance to write on diverse topics.

Instructional Tool Presentation

Here is a link to my Instructional Tool PowerPoint. I'd recommend downloading it so that my narration plays.

LINK

Blog Post #2--Teaching Writing at a Distance

Pavia, Catherine Matthews. “Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom.” Journal of Basic Writing 23.2 (2004): 4-22. Print.

In “Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom,” Catherine Matthews Pavia describes the experiences of two basic writers in her computer-equipped basic writing course and uses their stories to enrich her pedagogy. Pavia cautions her readers that all students do not have computer experience and access, and that that computers should not be seen as unequivocal tools of empowerment for basic writers.

            Pavia begins by presenting research that “still tends to paint an idealistic picture” of computers in basic-writing classrooms, characterizing technology as increasing student motivation, enjoyment of writing, and writing volume, and portraying students as comfortable and experienced with computers (5). Pavia complicates this view by focusing on two of her students who wrote less on computers and frequently chose to write by hand. She interviewed each student, took notes on their writing, and asked them to write about their own experiences with computers. The students were not selected randomly, and Pavia’s study should be seen as a discussion of specific circumstances rather than easily generalizable research, but the students’ experiences and Pavia’s conclusions are helpful to the basic writing teacher who wants to consider how best to reach all of her students.

            The students’ specific experiences differ, but there are many similarities. Both are low-income, and neither came from households with extensive computer usage. Neither student likes to write. Both have a positive view of computers, “reflect[ing] society’s positive and idealistic views about computers and the benefits of computer literacy” (12), yet both dislike writing with computers even more than they dislike writing in general. Much of this dislike seems to stem from unfamiliarity with computers—neither can type well, and both produce much less writing when using computers than do their classmates. Neither has access outside of class to an up-to-date personal computer. Pavia writes that for these two students, “writing on computers in the classroom did not lead to more empowerment when viewed from a more short-term focus on the class itself” (16). In fact, the technology “may lead students to doubt their [writing] abilities when what they really need is confidence” (17).

            In light of her research, Pavia now has students write “technology narratives” early in the semester in which they describe their past experiences with computers and current attitudes toward technology. She adapts her course to her students’ experiences. She has also added basic computer instruction to the course and assigns some writing assignments to be completed by hand. Finally, she “avoid[s] assignments in basic writing classes that might subsume writing by involving technology in the writing process in even more complicated ways than word processing does” (19)—in other words, no multimodal or Web authorship.

            As I mentioned above, Pavia’s research is not easily generalizable. However, I would still recommend this article. In addition to the value of her conclusions and her excellent critique of the overly rosy characterization of computer usage in basic-writing classes, her description of how she adapts each class to the specific students she has serves as an excellent model for other teachers.

Pedagogical Tool Review

Pedagogical Tool Review

Introduction:

            Next semester, I will begin teaching an accelerated-learning course (ALP) in which developmental writing students are integrated into a college-writing class and asked to do college-level work. The developmental students will receive additional support, and one of my goals is to provide much of this support in a way consistent with a blended online/face-to-face classroom.

            I have taught developmental writing for a little more than a decade, and one of the key ways I have found that developmental students lag behind their college-level counterparts is in their command of standard written grammar (SWG). While the power dynamics and even the existence of a “standard” written grammar have been challenged (Barbier; Smitherman), it has also been well established that students—especially those who already come from outside the culture of power—are disadvantaged in the workplace and academia by their uncertain command of generally accepted grammatical conventions (Beason; Delpit). I choose to move forward by stressing to my students that so-called standard grammar is something they should learn for a specific purpose: to get ahead in school and work. They should employ it in much the same way they employ their good set of clothes for a job interview—SWG can get them in the door and set them up for success.

            Unfortunately, I have been frustrated by how challenging it is to teach SWG. Even when students accept my rationale for learning it, they exhibit resistance and fear inculcated by years of inept and often punitive grammar instruction. I have responded in several ways, including writing my own handbook on basic grammatical ideas and punctuation that grounds the concepts in rhetorical context and draws its examples from articles we read in class. My methods have been well received, but I am still searching for better ways to address grammar.

            In keeping with my goals to make my ALP class a blended environment, I decided to search for free computer-based games that addressed basic grammar. While there are numerous grammar resources online, most of them (including those offered by the major textbook companies) are strongly reminiscent of the blue mimeographed worksheets I remember (with nausea) from my youth. I do not want a drill-and-kill approach; instead, I want relaxed, fun learning that does not remind students of their past grammar instruction. It took a surprisingly long time to find non-worksheet-based grammar games that might be applicable for a college developmental student, but I did find two worth exploring: one on the web, and one for the iPad, which I included because of the prevalence of i-devices among my students and my school’s current project to explore student and instructor iPad usage.

Description:

            Grammar Ninja: This game is featured on multiple sites; the one I reviewed was at http://www.wordgames.com/grammar-ninja.html. The purpose of the game is to help players learn parts of a sentence, such as nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, etc. The premise is that you are a ninja who throws stars at the parts of speech that are called for in a sample sentence. You can choose from three levels of difficulty—the higher ones add in additional parts of speech—scribble notes on the screen, ask for a hint, and finally throw your star into the correct word. The game will indicate whether you are correct or not and will provide help if you are incorrect. At the end of a question set, the game provides feedback based on how long it took you and the percentage of correct answers and gives you a “ninja rank.” The game also features fun music and decent graphics.

Grammar Ninja Front Page
                            

Grammar Ninja Game Page

Grammar Ninja Final Score

            wiseHopper: This is a free iPad or iPhone app. The game allows you to play with math, words, or grammar. The basic premise is that you are an insect trying to hop across a stream before being eaten by a giant frog. In the grammar game, you progress in order from verbs to pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions. The game gives you a sequence of sentences that scroll across the stream in opposite directions; it then prompts you to identify, for instance, verbs, and you, as the insect, have to hop on the appropriate word in each sentence. After you make it across a few sentences, the giant frog appears and begins to hop after you, increasing the pressure to decide on the right word to hop to. If you choose the wrong word, your insect falls into the river. If the frog catches you, you get eaten. (For those readers of a certain age, the game is very reminiscent of Frogger on the Atari.) Once you make it across the stream, the game tells you your time, and you can try to beat your best time. The graphics have limited animation but are quite pleasing.

                          

wiseHopper Front Page                     

wiseHopper Game Play

Review:

            Grammar Ninja: This game seems targeted to the middle-school level, judging by the level of the graphics, which are cartoonish (albeit well done) and the task itself. Additionally, the sentences are not based in the students’ own writing, nor in the context of a finished piece by another writer. This lack of rhetorical context makes the game problematic. Research has suggested that direct skill instruction has little, if any, positive effect on student writing (Hartwell; Tchudi and Mitchell).

            However, many of the students in developmental courses have around a middle-school understanding of basic grammar. Discussions of relatively simple, yet important, concepts such as complete sentences are made more complex by students’ limited understandings. As Beason demonstrated, it is important for writers’ ethos that they learn to write complete sentences and to avoid fused sentences reliably. In past classes, when I have tried to reduce complete-sentence tests to simple formulations (“Look for a noun, verb, and complete idea.”), I have encountered difficulty because students are not able to identify nouns and verbs. I have decided that some basic understandings of parts of speech may be necessary for us to have a productive conversation.

            As one of my principle goals with the ALP course is to help students to conceive of themselves as college material, the level of the game concerns me. They have work to do to get to the college level; however, I worry that the basic nature of the game may serve to highlight for them how far they need to come. I do not want them to think that I conceive of them as middle-school students. However, it is difficult to predict student perceptions. A colleague of mine has used Grammar Ninja in her developmental writing classes and reports that many of the students, especially the males, love it. They found the rankings at the end to be motivational, and got competitive with each other to attain the highest scores.

            wiseHopper: This game is similarly targeted to much lower than a college-level student. However, I found myself more engaged than with Grammar Ninja; somehow, the pursuit of the frog intensified the game for me and made me more focused. (Or maybe it’s because I always liked Frogger.) The quality of the graphics was pleasing and did not seem insulting, and the pressure of the frog increased the difficulty in a positive way. The game does not give hints or the same quality of feedback for missed answers as Grammar Ninja, but if you fall off into the river because you answered something wrong, it highlights your correct answers in the previous sentences, making it easy to hop back to where you messed up.

            Somewhat confusingly, wiseHopper does not recognize helping verbs. For example, in the sentence “I am writing an essay,” wiseHopper would count hopping onto “am” to be a mistake and “writing” to be the only correct option. While this is not a deal-killer for the app, it would require a “grammar-speak” explanation to the students, which is one thing I am trying to avoid.

            Like Grammar Ninja, wiseHopper does not provide any rhetorical context for the sentences it includes, and it suffers from the same pitfalls as other methods of direct skill instruction. However, it might serve as a precursor to more effective grammar instruction by helping students learn basic grammar vocabulary and the ability to recognize parts of speech.

Discussion:

            We know that grammar usage can serve as a socioeconomic marker and influence how others see us (Beason; Gorrell; Lynch-Biniek). We also know that grammar is best addressed rhetorically—as an element of the transaction of meaning between writer and reader—and not with piecemeal sentences divorced from context (Dawkins; Williams). Neither of these programs follows these best practices, and both are more closely aligned with the teaching of grammar as a series of isolated and absolute rules.

            However, I plan to try them this fall, and I would urge other teachers of developmental writing to give them a careful look. When used narrowly as a relatively painless way to build a common grammatical vocabulary and improve sentence recognition, they may have merit. The competition and video-game-like feel might engage students in an otherwise boring subject, and when used for a short time early in the class, the software might provide a scaffold for basic writers to engage grammar in a deeper, more rhetorical way as the class progresses.

Works Cited

Barbier, Stuart.  “The Reflection of ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’ in First-Year Composition Course Objectives and Descriptions.” TETYC 30.3 (March 2003): 257-67. Print.

Beason, Larry. “Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors.” CCC 53:1 (September 2001): 33-64. Print.

Dawkins, John. “Teaching Meaning-Based Punctuation.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 31:2 (December 2003): 154-162. Print.

Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press, 2006. Print.

Gorrell, Donna. “Style and Identity: Students Writing like the Professionals.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 32:4 (May 2005): 393-402. Print.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47 (February 1985): 105-27. Rpt. in The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. Eds. Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn. 3^rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995: 370-393. Print.

Lynch-Biniek, Amy. “Bemoans, Belittles and Leaves.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College. 33.1 (2005): 29-37. Print.

Smitherman, Geneva. "CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights." CCC 50.3 (1999): 349-376. Print.

Tchudi, Steven, and Diana Mitchell. Explorations in the Teaching of English. 3^rd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Print.

Williams, Joseph M. “The Phenomenology of Error.” CCC 32 (1981): 152-68. Rpt. in Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into the Field. Eds. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps. Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996: 163-175. Print.

Citation for Blog #1

Carpenter, Trudy G., William L. Brown, and Randall C. Hickman. “Influences of Online Delivery on Developmental Writing Outcomes.” Journal of Developmental Education 28.1 (2004): 14-35. Print.

Distance Writing--Blog Post #1

In “Influences of Online Delivery on Developmental Writing Outcomes,” published in the Journal of Developmental Education, Trudy Carpenter, William Brown, and Randall Hickman, all from community colleges around Michigan, share results on developmental students' success and retention rates in online writing courses. As the authors point out, the conventional wisdom has been to steer developmental writers away from online classes for fear that the online environment adds technological barriers to a population that already has an uncertain future of success.Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman complicate this assumption in productive ways.

The authors studied a group of 256 developmental students who self-selected online developmental writing courses over a period of four years. In comparison to the students who comprised the general population of developmental education at Lansing Community College, the students in the online group tended to be "older, female, white, and part-time, with higher reading and writing placement scores" (15). A veteran composition teacher might notice that this describes what is generally the highest-performing group in a community-college writing class, possibly skewing the data; however, the authors attempted to control for all of these variables, as well as student credit load, time of registration, and math placement scores.

The two variables of key interest to the researchers were completion rate (i.e., whether students finished the course) and success rate, which they defined as a final grade of 2.5 or higher. The authors found that delivery method was a reliable predictor of both retention and success--in opposing ways. Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman found that students were less likely to complete online developmental writing courses, yet if students completed the course, they did better in it. Their data suggest that "there are some things about online instruction as  delivery method that lead to greater withdrawal rates but that may ultimately lead to success rates for those students who finish the course that are comparable to, if not greater than, success rates in traditional, face-to-face instruction" (16). They admit that the greater withdrawal rate may have indirectly affected the greater success rate, since poorly performing students may have dropped rather than sticking it out and receiving a poor grade. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was the case. An additional limitation is that all of the online sections were taught by the same instructor. The authors attempted to control for this by comparing success and withdrawal rates between this instructor's face-to-face sections and those taught by other instructors, and they did not find a statistically significant difference. However, the possibility remains that their sample group was too limited for their results to be generalized.

Despite these difficulties, the study serves as an interesting data-driven rebuttal to those who say developmental writing courses are recipes for disaster. Instead, the study’s findings suggest that developmental writing classes may be a viable alternative to conventional instruction and merit more consideration.

Blog Post #6--Linguistics

Evans, Ann. “Beyond Grammar: Linguistics in Language and Writing Courses.” Pedagogy 11.2 (2011): 285-300. EbscoHost. 7 June 2011. Web.

Evans argues that the inclusion of several basic linguistic terms and concepts in either late high-school or early college writing classes can increase students’ understanding of how language works and improve their command of it. The specific terms/concepts she advocates including are morphology, semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics. Evans devotes several pages to a short definition of each concept, a justification for why it matters and how it can help students write, and suggestions for exercises to try.

Evans stresses throughout the article that the goal is not to turn students into linguists, but to help them understand some basics about how language works. The exercises she proposes are written to encourage a sense of play and to help students gain awareness of their own language-rich environments—for instance, a semantics exercise asks students to transform the word “whoops” depending on context, choosing an approximate synonym that they would use when speaking to different audiences (291), and one of her sociolinguistic exercises encourages students to “report on the various linguistic communities they were a part of during their holiday dinners” (298). Additionally, Evans’s exercises all ask students to generate writing after the concept is explained, rather than fill out worksheets.

However, when Evans writes that “the concepts and exercises introduced here are simple” (286), I have to disagree. Some of the concepts—like morphology—seemed easy at first blush, but as I got further into her descriptions and suggested exercises, I found that the concepts were not simple at all. (In the section on morphology, for example, Evans spends some time using other languages such as Turkish and Italian as examples, and while I think I understand what she is getting at, the examples served to confuse more than clarify.) In fact, I found the definitions in each section somewhat confusing, and I am skeptical that high-school or early-college students would be able to master the concepts without quite a bit of instruction.

In my reading on grammar instruction, I have found that two reasons for moving away from the traditional teaching of grammar are frequently cited: firstly, that such instruction is decontextualized and disconnected from student writing; and secondly, that time spent on grammar instruction is time not spent on actually producing writing. While Evans is not suggesting a return to traditional grammar instruction, I see her methodology as subject to the same critiques. Although her exercises ask students to produce writing, the writing itself is decontextualized in that it is not part of a larger assignment: it is writing to understand the linguistic concept. Also, the concepts she suggests are not simple and will take time to explain. Not only might that time be better spent writing, but students might end up focusing too much on mastering the concepts in the same way that a heavy focus on grammar can lead some students to think that good grammar equals good writing. This article is well written and interesting, but I remain unconvinced that it is the best path for improving student writing.

Blog Post #5--How professional writers write

Schuster, Edgar H. “Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules.” English Journal 100.4 (2011): 71-76. EbscoHost. Web.

Schuster partially addresses the concern I raised in my last blog post: How, exactly, do professional authors write? While he does not examine the actual composing processes of professional writers, he does focus in detail on the ways in which professional writers (and one talented student writer) selectively break rules of grammar and style in service of meaning.

As a framework for the article, Schuster examines a paragraph from Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and three paragraphs of an eleventh-grade student’s personal essay. As he notes, both pieces of writing are very well done, yet both break generally accepted grammar and style rules: specifically, admonitions to avoid passive voice, weed out “be” verbs, don’t begin sentences with conjunctions, and eschew sentence fragments. Schuster spends time on each rule, first laying out the generally accepted rationale for the rule, then presenting sentences from his selections as they appear (with the rule broken) and as they might appear if the rule were followed. He handles the comparisons fairly—the rule-following options are well constructed and are not straw men—and that is why these sections are the most effective parts of the article. The direct comparisons (and the analysis with which he follows them) demonstrate the ways in which breaking the rules can lead to clarity and emphasis that are probably more consistent with the authors’ intentions.

Schuster provides ancillary examples of good rule-breaking writing alongside the two main examples; however, the majority of these come from creative-type writing (fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction). My guess is that his awareness of this is why he ends the article with a section entitled, “But What about Formal English?” This is certainly a fair question, and Schuster attempts to address whether rules can be similarly bent in formal writing. However, the piece he selects as an example of formal English is David Foster Wallace’s introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007. The paragraph Schuster examines is quite good, and, as he points out, it does break many common grammatical and stylistic rules. I wish he had looked at something else, though. While DFW’s piece is “formal” in the sense that it is public, non-fiction, and edited, the rhetorical situation for which he was writing is different from the “formal” ones in which many college students will be asked to compose, such as the business world or the sciences. What is needed (and perhaps exists, although I have not come across it) is an analysis of which grammar rules matter in disciplines far removed from English. (Larry Beason’s 2001 CCC piece, “Ethos and Error,” in which he examines business-people’s reactions to a variety of common “errors,” is a major step in this direction, but stands mostly alone—again, at least as far as I’ve been able to uncover.)

Still, Schuster’s article is well worth the time to read for its lucid and careful examination of specific samples of writing, which provide support for the claims some of my other authors made for how professional writers bend and break rules for a rhetorical purpose.

Blog Post #4

Rustick, Margaret Tomlinson. “Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.1 (2007): 43-62. EbscoHost. 29 May 2011. Web.

Rustick spends the first part of her article discussing the historical debate surrounding grammar instruction, touching on what she sees as the rejection of any discussion of grammar in composition, to the politics and power dynamics of correctness, to the difficulty of figuring out exactly how to teach grammar in context.  Despite these conflicts, she suggests that teachers need to move forward in the teaching of standard written English (SWE) in some way because the world outside of English studies values it. In order to meet this challenge, Rustick suggests we draw from ESL research, treating SWE as something akin to a second language. The two languages between which students must learn to code-switch are their oral (home) language and the written (SWE) language of the classroom.

The bulk of Rustick’s article describes several grammar games she uses with her students. “It is important,” she writes, “to understand that the primary purpose of grammar gaming is not to teach terminology or prescriptive rules, nor is it simply a way to have fun. Instead, the basic premise […] is that students need to practice using language the way writers do” (50). Rustick’s ending assertion—that students need to use language like “real” writers do—is one I have read in several different articles, most recently in Dawkins’s and Micciche’s pieces. A question I have, though, is how do real writers use language? And how do we know? All the above authors spend a small amount of time addressing my first question—the gist seems to be that real writers are guided by a rhetorical transaction of meaning and by stylistic considerations rather than by hard and fast rules—but all elide the second question (how do we know?). In a field that is focused on how writing is generated, this elision seems odd. Of course, we all can read professional writing and see how different rules are bent, and books on the composing processes of professional writers abound (I use Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing in my classes), but if the stated goal is to replicate another group’s composing process, more needs to be said about that model process.

The games Rustick presents do sound interesting. All have to do with playing with punctuation, word order, and sentence structure to see what happens, with a goal of increasing the ability to make conscious decisions about the above elements of writing without getting stuck on terminology. Rustick also suggests talking with students about the different considerations and options presented by oral and written compositions. It is an interesting article, and I think it will be helpful as I develop my basic-writing course for the fall. I do, however, wish for a more in-depth analysis of the practices of professional writers, and I also question whether it is appropriate to model what we teach students on how professional writers write. After all, the purposes and genres for which our students will end up writing are different that those of most professional writers. But I do like the movement away from hard and fast grammatical rules and the acknowledgement that too much terminology can serve to confuse and dismay students.