Journal of Basic Writing

Volume 16 Issue 2, Fall 1997

Table of Contents

Abstracts

Volume 16 Issue 2, Fall 1997

Martha Marinara

"When Working Class Students ‘Do’ the Academy: How We Negotiate with Alternative Literacies"

Narratives concerning working class students are constructed to highlight the difficulties of negotiating academic codes and the necessity for writing teachers to strive to provide the space for working class students to "speak differently." Although the narratives of working class students open up sites of conflict and allow students to negotiate the borders between work and classroom, this negotiation carries the expectation for the student to learn the codes of the institution and the values of the academy. The knowledge and work that is valued by the university doesn’t change; instead, the narratives of the working class are subtly shaped to fit a set of representations of cultural knowledge that serve to reproduce the academy intact. However, the negotiation must flow in two directions: the academy cannot take over a text without being uncomfortably altered by it.

 

Nathaniel Norment, Jr.

"Some Effects of Culture-Referenced Topics on the Writing Performance of African American Students"

This study analyzes the effects of culture-referenced essay prompts/topics on the writing quality of eleventh- and twelfth-grade high school students who participated in a collaborative project between Temple University’s Writing Program and four Philadelphia public high schools. Trained raters scored 711 essays holistically. The students were also tested on a Cooperative English Reading and Writing Examination which the University administers to all of its entering students. Essays of twenty-five students who tested in their junior and senior years were analyzed using an analytical scale. The results suggest that the culture-referenced topics elicited better quality essays (i.e., in terms of fluency, coherence, organization). The findings indicate that culture-referenced prompts do make a difference in the writing performance of African American students.

 

Lynn Briggs and Ann Watts Pailliotet

"A Story About Grammar and Power"

There is little research about how pre-service teachers write about grammar and understand conventionality. Understanding pre-service teachers’ beliefs about grammar and conventionality through studying the war they write about it is important since their beliefs as pre-service teachers will likely influence the kind of teachers they become. Examination of samples of 50 pre-service teachers’ written discourse about grammar and conventionality revealed that they had largely negative attitudes toward writers who made conventional errors. However, rather than considering this simply as an issue of rhetoric or even pedagogy, this article proposes that such attitudes are reflective of academic power dynamics.

 

Mary Soliday

"Towards a Consciousness of Language: A Language Pedagogy for Multicultural Classrooms"

Despite their complex language histories, writers from diverse cultural backgrounds often tend to believe that language’s primary function is to convey information. This essay describes a language pedagogy which can help basic writers to understand language’s potential to shape, not just to convey information about, social experience. Students from diverse backgrounds can then more effectively critique the relationships of language’s uses in a variety of social contexts.

 

Mary Hurley Morgan

"Connections Between Reading and Successful Revision"

This essay discusses a study conducted to determine whether students who reread their drafts aloud as they revise compose essays that are stylistically superior to those of students who do not do so. It was found that this activity does not make a difference for poor readers. The implications of the study’s findings are that basic writing courses should focus on reading and style, in addition to the principles of organization and grammar that such courses are usually restricted to, and should encourage students to reread aloud as they revise.

 

Karen L. Greenberg

"A Response to Ira Shor’s ‘Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality’"

Terence G. Collins

"A Response to Ira Shor’s ‘Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality’"