ENGL 102P-103P
First-Year Composition Program
University Writing Center
Disciplinary Courses

I. Characteristics of ENGL 102P-103P:

Focuses on students-at-risk with good academic records, mostly from under-funded urban schools

Established since 1968

Approximately 60% student population is African American; other 40% Hispanic (rapidly increasing), Asian, European, "white," Native American, or non-resident alien

Approximately 85-90% passing rate for all 102P-103P students; they move on to ENGL 104

35% retention rate for stretch course students (university average: 49%)

Two-semester version of a one-semester course (ENGL 103)

Class ratio 15:1

Tutoring in Communications Skills Lab one hour/week required; strong collaboration

Additional tutoring available for students in Chance Program

Writing assignments: personal essay, persuasion, reader response to texts

Reading assignments: student-authored texts in Contemporary Voices

Students exposed to many different ethnic rhetorics

Experimentation with language and format encouraged

Instructional emphasis on multiple drafting and various sources of feedback

Instructors experienced in responding to writers with diverse language backgrounds

Instructors retained yearly as specialized professional staff

Faculty training maintained through calibrating all first-year students’ placement exams

1. Diverse students can examine how dialects function in a variety of community contexts besides their own
2. Diverse students can use ethnographic and “linguistically conscious” writing to develop a scholarly ethos, while maintaining their home or community identity
3. Diverse students must make choices about rendering dialects orthographically or in Edited American English for readers of Contemporary Voices, the student-authored course text
4. Diverse students can become aware of their own, and others’, rhetorical agenda and can experiment with creating multicultural community
5. Diverse students have the opportunity in an academic setting to work closely with other readers who may need or ask them to explain and translate features of their dialects into different rhetorical forms
6. Instructors as well as all students become more conscious of diverse language backgrounds and their potential for scaffolding and forming interdiscursive links.

II. Characteristics of the First-Year Composition Program (ENGL 103-105):

• Focuses on students and on development of new teachers
• Established in the early 50s
• Student population in program similar to student population in university, but African American per cent slightly higher (18%)
• Two-semester continuum of courses (ENGL 103 & 104) or a one-semester accelerated course for advanced-placement students (ENGL 105)
• Class ratio, 24:1
• Tutoring in Writing Center encouraged, or sometimes required
• Writing assignment continuum: personal? public? professional writing (ENGL 103); investigative, argumentative, and analytical writing (ENGL 104)
• Reading assignments: multicultural essays from composition anthologies; book-length nonfiction
• Students exposed to academic language and Edited American English
• “Academic argument” encouraged (introduction, statement of fact, confirmation, refutation, conclusion)
• All students in composition meet at least once a week in computerized classrooms; informal online writing common, using email and WebBoard, an interactive electronic writing environment
• All instructors familiarized with sample assignments, program guidelines, and “exit criteria” for passing the courses
• Instructional emphasis on multiple drafting and various methods of feedback, e.g., teacher response, peer editing, use of the Writing Center
• Temporary faculty teach 25%, graduate instructors teach 75% of multiple sections
• Inexperienced graduate instructors required to take two in-service seminars (assignment and syllabus design, uses of writing technologies, response to papers, grading, classroom management)

1. Diverse students may choose topics that would be of interest to them
2. Diverse students can develop a rhetorical stance that represents their community’s perspective and deeply held values
3. Students can read culturally diverse writers in the course texts or in other sources and possibly gain sensitivity to the factors relevant to a writer’s cultural ethos
4. Diverse students may feel as if they are “auxiliary” to a presumably white, presumably middle-class audience of readers that the course texts presumably target--leading them to seek sources of authority more compatible with their own rhetorical traditions in their writing (e.g., the Bible)
5. Experienced instructors might be alert to scaffolding opportunities for students, if they specify elements of style, audience analysis, and other key rhetorical features of a writing assignment
6. Experienced instructors may help students position their use of cultural rhetorics in their writing, affirming students' social and cultural identities as they acquire academic literacy
7. Inexperienced or even experienced instructors may resort to the deficit model when responding to students’ writing, assuming that they are fully addressing multicultural needs by including diverse writers in the course texts

• Focuses on students and on development of tutors/faculty
• Established in 1988; Writing Center historically associated with First-year Composition
• Leadership in Writing Across the Curriculum Program (WAC) now emphasizes Writing Center as key component of support for cross-disciplinary faculty
• Per cent of diverse students frequenting Writing Center high (approximately 50%); per cent of "mainstream" students rapidly increasing
• Student/tutor ratio in Writing Center 1:1; some small-group tutoring
• Use of tutoring in Writing Center mostly voluntary; cross-disciplinary classes increasingly encourage it; tutor/faculty partnerships forming
• Writing Center writing activities: “focused” free-writing associated with revision of drafts, outlining existent drafts to aid re-organization, pre-writing to generate first drafts, revision on sentence and paragraph levels, editing
• Writing Center reading activities: rereading for comprehension, reference back to textual citations for appropriateness and accuracy, reading drafts out loud as an aid to revision and editing
• Tutors collaborate with students to help them adapt to academic language, Edited American English, disciplinary conventions
• Some online writing; Writing Center developing technological capacity
• Occasional class visits, assisting with assignment-specific aspects of writing instruction
• WAC workshops and WAC newsletter encouraging discipline-specific writing instruction and multiple drafting in cross-disciplinary assignments
• Writing Center tutors required to do in weekly staff meetings; courses in tutor training and WAC initiated; students’ diverse learning styles emphasized

1. Diverse students can bring their personal perspectives to their writing tasks
2. Diverse students can use their cultural rhetorics to interpret assignments and break the codes of very challenging texts
3. Diverse students can use their own language to help them interpret what they read
4. Diverse students’ perception of their academic ethos and audience can change dramatically (one student demonstrated these goal statements for a progression of Writing Center sessions: “to know how bad I write and learn ways of writing better”; “to help me understand what I need to correct”; “to make sure my paper is readable”; “to make sure others can read and understand my paper”)
5. Professors can clarify disciplinary conventions and formats to Writing Center staff, so tutors can explain to students what is expected in assignments from class to class
6. Professors can work with Writing Center staff to design assignments that accommodate a variety of learning styles and cultural backgrounds
7. Tutors may overlook heuristic value of cultural rhetorics in deference to professor's expectations

• Class ratios: 35-500:1
• Correlation between retention and percentages of student diversity not uniformly clear in each discipline
• Writing assignments often formal, discipline-related, content-oriented, format-driven
• Reading assignments discipline-specific--but more frequently involving multicultural content
• Students mostly expected to adapt to academic language, Edited American English, disciplinary conventions; awareness of heuristic value of AAVE, other dialects, or ESL/ASL interference not evident

1. Diverse students can enroll in courses that are explicitly designed around or include multicultural issues
2. Diverse students can read the work of prominent multicultural writers in many disciplinary venues, although texts predominantly reflect academic language and Edited American English
3. Diverse students can practice developing a scholarly ethos in writing tasks
4. Diverse students may--or may not--receive a clear definition of discipline-specific written conventions from professors
5. Diverse students may be required to do revisions as a result of professors’ written feedback; sometimes the professor may insist that the student go to the Writing Center to get help, but going to the Writing Center may not be mentioned as a resource and may be left to the student’s own initiative
6. Diverse students may feel that professors’ response to their writing is substantive and useful for revision, yet they may be made to feel their cultural rhetorics are deficient in comparison to Edited American English.  E.g., Consider the following excerpt from responses to an African American student’s draft of a history essay that begins largely with a discussion of African American cultural values, community consciousness, and cultural references:
 
Already you are on p. 2.  The reader has no idea of what city is the focus, nor what particular black community is the focus.  What are the years of the study (that should be in the title)?  What are the particular issue(s) you plan to discuss in the paper (introduction)?…  This paper is to be HISTORICAL, not discussing problems in the year 2000.  That’s not historical, that’s SOCIOLOGICAL.  You need to rework this entire paper.

Notes:

Characteristics of the NIU student body.  According to the NIU Office of Institutional Research Data Book for 1998, 73% of the student population came from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. 20% came from counties near DeKalb, 4% from other areas of Illinois, 2% from other states, and 1% were international.  Median freshman age was 18.5.  2,831 freshmen enrolled, along with 2,310 transfers (the majority of the latter having completed core-competency in writing elsewhere). Total undergraduate enrollment was 16,341.  Approximately 11% of all undergraduates were African-American, 6% Hispanic, 6.5% Asian, 75% white, and the remaining 1.5% either Native American or non-resident alien.  Women accounted for 54% of undergraduate enrollments.  Significant increases in numbers of under-represented groups are expected.  From the period of 1994 to 2005, the NIU Office of Institutional Research projects increases of 64.8% among populations of Hispanic high school seniors, 45.6% among Asian Americans, and 8.8% among African Americans.  36% of NIU students are presently over 25.

Scaffolding. A technique whereby a student uses a known discourse form that internally organizes experience as “a heuristic for problem-solving that requires analogical reasoning” --see Lee, Carol. Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Interdiscursive links. The connections that students make between their own discourse and academic writing, resulting in the construction of identities that can participate actively in multiple cultures-- see Adler-Kassner, Linda. “Structure and Possibility: New Scholarship about Students-Called-Basic-Writers.” College English 63.2 (2000): 229-43.