Exploring composition studies: Sites, issues, and perspectives
Abstract
Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei Matsuda have created an essential introduction to the field of composition studies for graduate students and instructors new to the study of writing. The book offers a careful exploration of this diverse field, focusing specifically on scholarship of writing and composing. Within this territory, the authors draw the boundaries broadly, to include allied sites of research such as professional and technical writing, writing across the curriculum programs, writing centers, and writing program administration. Importantly, they represent composition as a dynamic, eclectic field, influenced by factors both within the academy and without. The editors and their sixteen seasoned contributors have created a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of composition studies as it stands in the early twenty-first century. Given the rapid growth of this field and the evolution of it research and pedagogical agendas over even the last ten years, this multi-vocal introduction is long overdue. © 2012 by the University Press of Colorado. All rights reserved.
... In a themed volume of Writing Program Administration (termed "the ESL issue" by its editors), Matsuda, Fruit, & Lamm, 2006 addressed a composition studies audience by decrying the monolingual preparation of writing teachers and writing program administrators. In the introduction to Exploring Composition Studies (2012), editors Ritter and Matsuda (2012) labeled SLW a "contested site within the field" (p. 8). ...
Second language writing has been variously described as a field, as an interdiscipline, and a transdiscipline. Not only are these characterizations of second language writing inaccurate; they are also precarious, fostering an intellectual climate in which other theories and practices emerge as substitutes. In fact, SLW acts as if it were a discipline, so the label discipline makes sense epistemologically and practically. Owning a disciplinary identity strengthens SLW’s theoretical and practical claims and supports researchers, practitioners, graduate students, and above all, multilingual writers.
... With the rise of the field of L2 writing circa 1990 as an interdisciplinary field situated simultaneously in composition studies and second language studies, the body of research on L2 writing in the context of U.S. first-year composition has grown exponentially. It has also found an audience in the community of mainstream rhetoric and composition scholars as well as writing program administrators, as evidenced by a growing number of L2-writing related articles and chapters in rhetoric and composition journals (e.g., College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Writing Program Administration, Written Communication) and edited collections (e.g., Behm, Glau, Holdstein, Roen, & White, 2012;Horner, Lu, & Matsuda, 2010;Ritter & Matsuda, 2012;Schick, Brooke Hessler, & Rupiper Taggart, in press;Severino, Guerra, & Butler, 1997). ...
First-year composition in U.S. higher education has been a major site of L2 writing research. Despite the historical division between mainstream first-year composition and L2 writing, there has been an increasing interest in integrating insights from L2 writing research into the professional literature in rhetoric and composition and writing program administration. Yet, a majority of composition courses are taught by those who are not specialists in these fields, and their level of awareness is yet to be examined. To investigate writing teachers’ perceptions of the presence and needs of L2 writers, we conducted a perception survey of teachers of both mainstream and L2 sections of first-year composition courses. The findings show that writing teachers do recognize the presence and needs of L2 writers, and more than a few teachers were enthusiastic about working with this student population. At the same time, many teachers—including those who taught L2 writing sections—did not make any special provisions to address the unique needs of L2 writers. The findings also show that teachers’ ability to address L2 writers’ needs were constrained by program policies, lack of common teaching and assessment materials, and professional preparation opportunities. This study suggests the need to better understand the specific needs of teachers in order to address the needs of their students.
The academic community relies heavily on written discourse for transmitting new theories and research findings. Written academic discourse is constantly (re)constructed as writers participate in a dialogue with past researchers and current readers. Thus, a central feature of academic discourse is incorporating outside sources. Undergraduate students must develop the related academic literacy skills, as numerous and complex as they are. This dissertation addresses how individuals interact with source authors when writing academic texts and seeks to understand how this might be a learning process. The study also focuses on the notion of ownershipof words, of ideas, of evidenceand how students negotiate boundaries when incorporating outside sources. Specifically, this dissertation investigates how multilingual, upper division students develop their academic writing skills in a writing class for future educators. Using case study methodology of eight focal participants from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, it draws on ethnographic data from classroom observations, textual artifacts, and interviews. Three areas are addressed where students might build upon their skillsets: source incorporation practices, paraphrasing practices, and the use of past experiences for evidence in a writing project. The overarching theme connecting these three areas is the relationship with ownership, and subsequently, the process of acquisition or appropriation (Bakhtin, 1981). iii
Graduate Studies in Second Language Writing advances scholarship on graduate study and professionalization in the field of second language writing by addressing the ways in which an array of processes and personal interactions shape the experiences of those who are entering the field, as well as those who provide them with guidance and support. By pairing several noted scholars with their former mentees, now established scholars in their own right, Graduate Studies in Second Language Writing takes select insights gained from that conversation and makes them available to a wider audience, including current graduate students in L2 writing and those looking to enter the field, as well as faculty advisors and university administrators involved in such programs. The chapters in this collection explore the intersections between personal, professional, and institutional demands of graduate study in L2 writing, highlighting the constant negotiation that occurs at different stages in one's academic career. The contributors to Graduate Studies in Second Language Writing graciously offer their experiences with graduate study in L2 writing and recommendations for navigating its sweeping landscape to help current and future students to find their way to becoming part of the larger disciplinary community. and First-Year Composition and helps coordinate a TESOL certificate and an ESOL endorsement program. Her most recent research article was published by TESOL press, but her research has also appeared in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies and INTESOL Journal. Tony Silva directs the Graduate Program in Second Language Studies/ESL in the Department of English at Purdue University, where he teaches graduate courses for PhD, MA, and Certificate students and writing support courses for graduate and undergraduate international students. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited numerous books and articles and is currently a member of the TESOL Board of Directors.
This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each intern's writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.
Rhetoric and composition's increasing attention to multimodal composing involves chal-lenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural compos-ing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semìotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to differ-ent communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it-and other modalities-can play in contemporary communication tasks.
Educators strive to create "assessment cultures" in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad's original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies. Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM's flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.
In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory? By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented paradigm of educational assessment theory subjugates and discounts the very social constructionist principles that empower composition pedagogy. Further, Lynne criticizes recent practice for accommodating the big business of educational testing - especially for capitulating to the discourse of positivism embedded in terms like "validity" and "reliability." These terms and concepts, she argues, have little theoretical significance within composition studies, and their technical and philosophical import are downplayed by composition assessment scholars. There is a need, Lynne says, for terms of assessment that are native to composition. To open this needed discussion within the field, she analyzes cutting-edge assessment efforts, including the work of Broad and Haswell, and she advances a set of alternate terms for evaluating assessment practices, a set of terms grounded in constructivism and composition. Coming to Terms is ambitious and principled, and it takes a controversial stand on important issues. This strong new volume in assessment theory will be of serious interest to assessment specialists and their students, to composition theorists, and to those now mounting assessments in their own programs.
The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise - and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views of accountability and assessment. The collection further argues that postmodernism offers a useful lens through which to understand the work of WPAs and to examine the discordant cultural and institutional issues that shape their work. Each chapter tackles a problem local to its author's writing program or experience as a WPA, and each responds to existing discord in creative ways that move toward rebuilding and redirection. It is a given that accepting the role of WPA will land you squarely in the bind between modernism and postmodernism: while composition studies as a field arguably still reflects a modernist ethos, the WPA must grapple daily with postmodern habits of thought and ways of being. The effort to live in this role may or may not mean that a WPA will adopt a postmodern stance; it does mean, however, that being a WPA requires dealing with the postmodern.
In Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960, Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students. Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century. She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge. Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students. © 2009 by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
The author discusses his experience in a university project that led to the creation of a first-year writing text based on interviews with members of a local neighborhood. In particular, he analyzes the negative reaction that many of the community’s residents expressed toward the text’s portrayals of them. From the tensions that developed, the author concludes that English studies must go beyond mere expansion of the canon and reflect upon the very nature of value, including the importance of “use-value” with respect to the production and circulation of community-generated texts.
Although the writing needs of English as a Second Language (ESL) students in U.S. higher education have been increasing as the number of ESL students continues to rise, institutional practices that are responsive to the unique needs of ESL writers are yet to be developed. The relative lack of attention to ESL issues in writing programs may be related to how the field of ESL umfing has been defined in relation to its related disciplines: Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and composition studies. This study attempts to construct a view of the field that meets the needs of ESL writers. For this purpose, I present three models of ESL uniting in relation to TESL and composition studies and discuss their implications.
The author critiques the much-publicized and potentially influential 2006 report of the Spellings Commission Report. He emphasizes the report’s inconsistencies, seeing these as reflecting a business model of education that neglects not only the decline in government financial support of colleges, but also the presence in them of new student populations
In reporting their research, historians of rhetoric and composition should be more explicit and specific about their investigative methods.
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"Branding" a university in an effort to attract student applicants and alumni dollars is increasingly commonplace. The history of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic attests to the ways student writers represent an institutions brand and provides a troubling picture of a world in which under-prepared students are branded out of existence.
As they prepare to teach writing, new teachers should respond to writing assignments that we deliberately design to be difficult, exploratory, or critically reflective, so that they may better develop flexibility and engagement as learners, teachers, and theorists in the field of writing instruction.
In this essay, I present three case studies of immigrant, first-year students, as they negotiate their identities as second language writers in mainstream composition classrooms. I argue that such terms as "ESL" and "Generation 1.5" are often problematic for students and mask a wide range of student experiences and expectations.
Kathleen Blake Yancey’s presidential address was delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas, on November 23, 2008.
The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker's efforts by focusing primarily on The Principles of Argumentation and the role of logic. Baker's view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students learn argument.
I use Burkean analysis to show how neoliberalism undermines faculty assessment expertise and underwrites testing industry expertise in the current assessment scene. Contending that we cannot extricate ourselves from our limited agency in this scene until we abandon the familiar "stakeholder" theory of power, I propose a rewriting of the assessment scene that asserts faculty and student agency and leadership for writing assessment. © 2011 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion — invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes — to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an experimental psychologist the next; to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional mysterious.
Although most portfolio evaluation currently uses some adaptation of holistic scoring, the problems with scoring portfolios holistically are many, much more than for essays, and the problems are not readily resolvable. Indeed, many aspects of holistic scoring work against the principles behind portfolio assessment. We have from the start needed a scoring methodology that responds to and reflects the nature of portfolios, not merely an adaptation of essay scoring. I here propose a means for scoring portfolios that allows for relatively efficient grading where portfolio scores are needed and where time and money are in short supply. It is derived conceptually from portfolio theory rather than essay-testing theory and supports the key principle behind portfolios, that students should be involved with reflection about and assessment of their own work. It is time for the central role that reflective writing can play in portfolio scoring to be put into practice.
Central to an understanding of the history and theory of classical rhetoric is an understanding of the keywords the ancients used to discuss their art. Keywords are those terms which are integral to a text's argument and which often resonate with complex denotations and connotations (Welsch). Keywords carry a heavy freight of meaning that simple, single-word definitions often cannot render. Furthermore, single-word conceptualizations tend to foist the reader's own associations onto the ancient and foreign words. The solution to this problem is not to translate
