Value of Writing for Undergraduates: Placement Guidelines & Requirements

At American University, every undergraduate (according to section 8.5 of the Handbook) “must satisfy the Written Communication and Information Literacy I requirement” in one of the three following ways:

1. Complete either  sequence of WRTG-100 and WRTG-101 combined or WRTG-102 and WRTG-103 combined;
2. Satisfy exam placement test scores of a 4 or 5 on the AP Language example, AP Capstone, or a 5+ on the Higher Level IB and complete WRTG-106 with a C or better; or
3. Transfer with a satisfying credit equivalent as well as complete with WRTG-101 or WRTG-103 with a C or higher.

This literacy requirement is invaluable to undergraduates and unavoidable as it is not only required to graduate but if students do not satisfy this requirement “within the first 30 credit hours in-residence after matriculating”, they will be blocked from further course registration within the system.

L2 Speakers & Writers

I asked Lacey how L2 speakers function within the department and she noted that while international students must satisfy a particular TOEFL score to continue the writing requirement like everyone else or join courses exclusive to L2 speakers (in a program called IAP: International Accelerator Program” which is “a newer recruitment and bridge program run by a private company who recruit students and provide bridge courses”), the transfer is not always smooth.

IAP students (95% or more generally come from China) generally take WRTG 100 in IAP student specific sections, taught by faculty specialized in L2 writers and composition. These faculty are highered by the writing program but funded by IAP. Once students pass the 100-level course, they can “officially matriculate into the university and take classes with all other students, including WRTG 101.

Lacey notes that “an unanticipated consequence, though, is that these students tend to enroll in sections in large groups, and we’ve ended up with some WRTG 101 sections where 17/19 students are Chinese.  This obviously creates problems for the faculty member and for the other two students in the class—as well as for the Chinese students.”

While there is an international student coordinator for the program, which is staff with TESOL expertise, the student populations are growing more and more. While the coordinator is, as Lacey notes, “an amazing resource for faculty and for students… [who] provided training… [and] teaches one section of College Writing each semester,” there probably needs to be more support from IAP and from international offices on campus.

One idea I had as I was reading through this work was for all sections of WRTG to emphasize linguistic differences, dialects, and cultural rhetorics of writing. For example, discussing how the five paragraph essay, thesis in the beginning, etc. are very American ways of writing. This could help bridge the gap between international students in the classroom as well as domestic, native-speaking students. If the populations are increasing, I also wonder if emphasizing more TESOL/L2 training for all faculty might be beneficial.

Susan Miller-Cochran in her piece “Language Diversity and the Responsibility of the WPA” notes that “Determining placement and curricular options needs to be context-specific and a placement strategy needs to be realistic, given the institution’s mission and resources” (215). If AU has the resources from the IAP as well as the international student population increase (i.e. the exigence for such change), perhaps taking Miller-Cochran’s advice would be necessary.

For example, Miller-Cochran advices incorporating “attention to second language writing issues into preparation of teaching assistants” as well as training faculty. When I was going through my own TESOL training, even though I would go onto continue teaching English 101 at NC State the following semester, I was able to use what I learned in my ELL classes with native speaking students and emphasize different cultures of writing. International students in my classroom appreciated the focus on what it means to write as an American and were more willing to voice concern as they evolved as writers. I wonder if this could be a helpful tactic.

Program-Specific Training and Professional Development

AU’s writing program has two key committees that keep faculty and staff updated with different forms of continuing education.

There is the Mentoring Committee (MC), which plans an all-day pre-Fall day of workshops and presentations to prepare teachers for the new school year. The morning sessions are for new/newer faculty and then the afternoon workshops are structured for everyone. The MC also assign “mentors to new and newer faculty, with class visits and work on materials”, and they schedule several “Teaching Roundtables” (TRTs) throughout the year, which I assume are discussion groups for faculty to voice concerns from their classrooms and get additional pedagogical support.

Second, there Professional Development Committee (PDC) which keeps faculty up-to-date in the field of writing studies. For example the PDC “chooses readings for our twice-a-year reading groups when we devote one of our program meetings to discussing readings in writing studies”, says Lacey. She goes on to note that they design events to support faculty’s public academic identities as well through publication and conference presentation support and guidance.

Finally, the university itself offers “a wide variety of professional-development opportunities (including a university teaching conference in January), which a number of faculty take advantage of”, plus the Writing Studies Program offers money for conference attendance.

Course Objectives for the First Year Writing Courses

Below are the course objectives that every introductory writing course follows. These objectives are divided between course levels and are organized into four chief categories:

1. Writing and Research = Metacognitive Processes (focus on metacognition)
2. Information Has a Life Cycle and Value (informational literacy)
3. Writing Requires Entering an Ongoing Conversation (akin to the Burkean parlor); and
4. Structure, Style, and Mechanics are Rhetorical

See the individual outcomes below.

Writing and Research Are Meta-Cognitive Processes.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106, Students will…
Identify and evaluate other creators’ projects and argumentative moves in response to the needs of rhetorical contexts.	Develop and evaluate research and writing processes and modes that can be adapted to a variety of rhetorical contexts.
Reflect on the efficacy of researching, inventing, drafting, offering and enacting constructive feedback, and revising for their own writing.	Experiment with and refine reflective strategies that can be applied to researching, inventing, drafting, feedback, and revising for a variety of projects.
Study the importance of academic inquiry for knowledge creation and testing the soundness of beliefs.	Formulate strategies for academic inquiry as part of their processes for creating new knowledge and testing the soundness of their beliefs.

Information Has a Life Cycle and Value.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106,  Students will…
Revise their existing research strategies to reflect intellectual curiosity and discover a variety of authoritative perspectives.	Practice dynamic and adaptable research strategies that respond to mode, genre, and/or discipline.
Acknowledge the factors that govern authority are complex and dependent on rhetorical context.	Choose information that will be persuasive in specific rhetorical contexts.
Practice rhetorically appropriate strategies for integrating information.	Enact increasingly sophisticated strategies for integrating existing information and creating new knowledge within and across disciplines and genres.
Take responsibility for crediting others not only to avoid plagiarism, but also to participate in the exchange of ideas.	Enact academic integrity principles and citation conventions as a way to establish credibility and acknowledge intellectual debts within disciplines and genres.

 Writing Requires Entering an Ongoing Conversation.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: 101 / 106,  Students will…
Develop and practice rhetorical reading strategies across modes and genres.	Use rhetorical reading strategies in their writing practices.
Recognize that writing responds to conversations in and across fields of knowledge, modes, and genres.	Participate in conversations that move within or across fields of knowledge, modes, and genres.
Recognize persuasive moves within or across modes, genres, and/or disciplines.	Employ persuasive moves within or across particular modes, genres, and/or disciplines.
Accurately and effectively summarize, paraphrase, and quote, accounting for the creators’ aim. Practice synthesizing multiple points of view.	Preserve creators’ positions within conversations while also synthesizing multiple points of view, including their own.
Distinguish between ambitious and unambitious theses, and practice developing appropriate theses.	Develop an ambitious, thought-provoking, arguable thesis in their writing projects.

 Structure, Style, and Mechanics Are Rhetorical.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106,  Students will…
Explain the rhetorical importance of organizational strategies when constructing an argument. Identify and practice strategies for successful transitions within paragraphs and between paragraphs.	Practice project-driven organizational strategies, including mode-, genre-, or discipline-driven conventions of organization. Adapt transition strategies to a variety of rhetorical contexts.
Identify and practice strategies to develop concision, precision, freshness, and sentence variety through specific choices in syntax and diction.	Identify and practice project-, mode-, genre-, or discipline-driven approaches to syntax and diction, including the relationship between rhetorical context and tone.
Describe how mechanical choices are rhetorical.	Practice and refine strategies for making mechanical choices.
Articulate the rationale behind format and citation as a response to rhetorical context and follow appropriate citation conventions.	Identify and practice discipline- and genre-specific formatting and citation conventions.

Themed Instruction

Courses are twice a week for 75 minutes each during a 15-week semester in both the Fall and Spring.  Last time, I noted how the WRTG-101 courses are “themed.” Lacey elaborated this week that instructors design their own themes by proposing them to the WPA, ensuring that they will be teaching mostly writing instead just the content, and then these themes are distributed to students and advisors so they are able to choose a course intelligently. This approach was referred to by David Smit as the “epistemic approach” (used originally by Kenneth Dowst) (191). The themes are linked to the website as well.

For example, in a sample syllabus I was given, the theme is “history” but the opening notes:

First and foremost, this is a writing class, not a history class.  But examining and challenging presentations of history will give us the material for our writing.

Thus these themes help ground the different writing courses, and perhaps give students a sense of agency in choosing which theme they would relate to. When reading Matthew Heard’s “Repositioning Curriculum Design”, his argument that curriculum design should be “an act of invention–an act that prolongs our engaged inquiry into the values, habits, and assumptions that we practice as students and teachers” applied here as well (316).

By giving instructors the freedom to not only theme their courses but choose other required texts and class writing projects, the WPA encourages the inventive nature of curriculum design.

Finally, Lacey noted that they as a program are “wrestling with some of the implications of anti-racist assessment for sentence-level work” in relation to grammar assessment. Since grammar and current-traditionalist instruction has long been a form of gatekeeping within academia, I can see this being a difficult problem to address and I plan on asking her to elaborate on what those conversations look like next week.

Works Cited

Miller-Cochran, Susan K. “Language Diversity and the Responsibility of the WPA.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Ed. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Logan, UT: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 212-220.

Heard, Matthew. “Repositioning Curriculum Design: Broadening the Who and How of Curricular Invention.” College English 74.4 (2014): 315-336.

Smit, David . “Curriculum Design for First-Year Writing Programs.” The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown. New York: Erlbaum, 2002. 185-206.

Wootton, Lacey. “WPA Course: Shaping the Curriculum (Report 2) Questions.” Received by Bethany Van Scooter, January 29, 2019.