The Legacy of First Year Composition

While I was reading the legacy of first year composition, my first thought was a flashback to when I worked in the writing center and wondered why we (student writing center consultants) were receiving training to work with ESL students and special needs students, but professors were not. I used to wonder why the university saw nothing amiss with having student workers trained to tutor students in need of second language assistance but not bothering to offer courses to facilitate a more efficient and useful educational experience for those students. I still often wonder why more teachers are not required to receive this kind of training.

When it comes to oral proficiency being neglected in favor of writing, I am disturbed for both L1 and L2 students. Many first year students do not know how to speak and represent themselves orally in a professional manner. Only recently has this been addressed in L1 first year curriculums so I can only imagine how L2 oral training has been similarly neglected. Too often, students are trained primarily to write and, while writing is important, have no idea what to do when they need to make a coherent verbal argument. In the situation of the nursing student, Yang, she would have benefited from some courses that could address areas of communication that would prove most relevant to her nursing program. While I’m not really sure if the problem was that people couldn’t understand her accent rather than that they wouldn’t understand her accent, she would have benefited (as would any student I think) from being able to engage in spoken dialogue and oral presentation in her classes. I say this as someone who personally hates giving presentation; it helps to hear yourself talk as you consciously address an audience with purpose. That experience can give you something that you don’t necessarily pick up on when engaging in casual conversation.

According to Leki, assigning arbitrary topics in compulsory writing courses encourages plagiarism? Hmmm…I can see how that might happen. I think giving students arbitrary topics can lead to a lack of motivation. It’s like giving busy work, and when students are given busy work they resent it and they put as little effort into it as possible. A lot of the literature says that motivation has a lot to do with student learning and development. I like when the authors discuss why it doesn’t make sense to relegate writing to the freshman year when the freshman year is when most students haves courses that do not require them to use the writing they are learning. When I began college as a freshman, I was lucky enough to be put into an experimental “Cluster” course. I had one group of classmates with whom I took three classes, all intertwined. We took Writing 2, Geography, and Religions of the world. The courses were taught somewhat collaboratively in theme and we were made to apply the lessons of each class to the other classes. I am a staunch supporter of teachers working collaboratively to develop lessons which can be taken out of one classroom and applied or connected in another. Students wonder all the time what the importance is of the classes they are required to take and what possible connection there could be between subject A and subject B.