McCormick Chapter 4

It’s sort of funny that I’m about to summarize a chapter which defines summarizing as “inadequate,” though apparently it’s only inadequate if used as a “stopping-point” (p. 113).  In the chapter, McCormick described her socio-cultural interpretations of some cognitive research on student reading and writing.  Students in the experiment were provided with a text on time management.  Ideas in the text were intentionally contradictory, and the writing assignment purposefully vague.  Students wrote their papers, and groups and control groups participated (or did not participate) in metacognitive activities and think aloud protocols.  McCormick’s interpretations of the data were not exactly empirical, but rather she came to conclusions about some ideological underpinnings which influenced the students’ approaches to the tasks. 

McCormick argued that “ideology is expressed in the education systems of any society” (p. 106), and the ideological assumptions guiding students writing in this case had to do with closure, objectivity and unity. 

Regarding closure, students felt the need for everything in their writing to “fall into place.”  Rather than listening to their own ideas, and approaching the writing task with tentativeness, there was a need for closure in the form of straightforward summaries.  Students did not want to question ideas in a text, but rather, preferred get down to the bottom of exactly and definitively what the text was saying.  Reasons for this had to do with the perception that teachers want a polished, coherent final paper, and yet students only want to write one draft.  Therefore, instead of engaging with the text and writing drafts from a place of tentativeness and exploration, students tend to write one, straight-to-the-point draft, producing closure in the form of summaries (p. 114). 

Students also demonstrated through their writing beliefs about objectivity vs. subjectivity.  They felt the need to remain objective, not due to lack of coginitve abilities to write about their own ideas, but because of a lack of strategies helping them to do so.  Many students had also been taught to never use “I” which is confusing in a society which honors the individual, and contributes to students remaining objective in writing despite their desire to express their own thoughts.  McCormick suggested that we should provide students with opportunity to recognize that “there is not one correct and objective answer to a given problem” (p. 119), so they can explore why disagreements exist.  Students in the experiment struggled to incorporate, synthesize and analyze ideas representing conflicting view points, and therefore might have benefited from instruction allowing them to recognize the situated nature of positions, explore the assumptions underlying their own stances, and then acknowledge that they are choosing among diverse positions (p. 120). 

Students in the study also valued unity.  As mentioned above, they did not want to acknowledge contradictory ideas in their writing. “Students’ reticence to discuss a text’s contradictions is clearly both a cultural and cognitive problem.  Some students may fear that in discussing a text critically, they are implicitly criticizing the authority of the teacher, whom they imagine thinks the essay is coherent” (p. 126). This is about the idea of authorship and textual authority.  Students should be made aware “that texts are always contradictory” (p. 126), and should be encouraged to look for cultural contradictions in the texts they read.

McCormick argued that we should explore why students read and write as they do (after observing what they do).  She seems to be making some generalizations about ideological assumptions particular to a specific culture and context.  I wonder exactly how to accomplish what she asks us to do in a diverse class of international students representing multiple nationalities (or in any class represented by various, very different cultures)…

Various Approaches to "Mother Tongue" (8 blogs)

Blog 1-8: How would each of the teachers below use use Mother Tongue in a developmental writing class?  What kind of pre-reading, during reading, and post reading activities would they do?  What kind of writing might they assign?  How might they structure the writing process? How might they evaluate the writing? 

a traditional remedial teacher (e.g. Fry)

It is actually difficult to imagine a traditional remedial teacher using this reading, which honors and validates “non-standard” Englishes.  Students might be asked during reading to identify parts of speech, sentence and paragraph structures within the piece.  They might be asked to “correct” the passages which portray “non-standard” English.  There might even be some reading aloud, with an emphasis on phonics, or silent timed readings. After reading, students would likely be presented with some comprehension questions. Perhaps they would then write a short paragraph on the importance of Standard American English.  The writing process would be structured very rigidly with an emphasis on mechanical correctness during revisions, and students’ final papers would be evaluated on grammar, spelling, and structure.  (This is the worst possible version of a traditional remedial class, I think.)  

a teacher who aligns with SFSU's IRW philosophies

After previewing and skimming the text (and possibly reading something short which puts the text in context) students might write before reading, to reflect on the questions they have, what they want they already know, and what they want to know about ____________.  During reading, students might write a double entry journal, and after reading and class discussion, a reflection on what they learned from the reading.  There might be a difficulty paper involved, or some research on language rights or discourse communities.  If a research paper were assigned, students would also provide a cover memo reflecting on their reading and writing processes, and perhaps they would work with classmates to collaboratively create rubrics for their assignments. There would be plenty of collaboration during the reading and writing processes, which would be scaffolded carefully, while providing room for students to implement their own individual strategies and approaches.  In addition to student input on evaluation, teachers would consider ideas, connections, purpose, and audience awareness, but tone, mechanics and surface features would not be ignored. Teachers would also highly consider a student’s metacognitive piece of writing (about the writing and reading) while evaluating the work. 

a teacher who aligns with Discovery of Competence

The text would be used as inspiration for students’ ethnographic research.  Just as Tan videotapes and transcribes conversations with her mother, students might be asked to do the same during conversations they have in the cultural contexts they are researching.  This would be used to begin investigations on the differences between spoken and written language.  For this approach, I’m not sure I can break down pre-, during and post-reading activities in a linear or structured way, but while reading, students might be asked to find connections between Tan’s experience and their own ethnographic research.  Perhaps the text could be used to help students write research questions related to the language they are investigating in their own communities.  Evaluation would take place via written dialogue between teachers and students (as students move through the process of drafting their ethnographies). 

a teacher who aligns with Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts

Students might be in the process of developing a theory on the uses of English and English dialects in academic and non-academic contexts.  Perhaps they have already written several discovery drafts on autobiographical experiences related to their own uses of language, and they are starting to situate themselves and their own theories within other texts, and vice versa.  This is much shorter than a typical F, A & C course reading – I think students might actually read “The Joy Luck Club” (or another novel related to the theme) instead. Regardless, students would read at home, and then journal after reading.  In class, they might complete some group activities on the reading (e.g. “list characters and events in the story,” “determine the most significant events” “identify how the significance of the reading relates to our class theory on language use” etc).  Teachers would then present the class with examples of student writing, and the class would discuss the reading in relation to the samples. 

a cognitivist teacher

There would be some pre-reading questions to activate schema, along with comprehension questions (and these would also be given pre-reading).  I’m not sure which “meaning” exactly the teacher would be aiming for, but there might be one interpretation of the text in mind, which the teacher hopes to lead students toward with schema activation activities.  The reading might be broken out into sections, with guiding questions (and maybe images) for students to consider and answer as they read.  After reading, they would answer the questions given before they read.  Students would then write an essay on the meaning of the text (but they would be aware that there is a “correct” meaning, which might not align with their own personal interpretation).  They would however, integrate their own knowledge and experience into the paper.  Papers might be graded on how “well” the student understood the text, and how successfully they conveyed that understanding in writing. 

an expressivist teacher

Before reading, the students might write their own questions (to ask themselves) regarding their own personal experiences with language and dialect.  They would decide for themselves what to do during reading (journal, reflect, annotate, nothing etc).  After reading, they would discuss and write about their own individual interpretations of and experience with the text.  There is no right answer.  This entire reading and writing process would be very recursive and not prescribed in any specific way.  The paper would receive feedback (the teacher’s response to the student’s reflective experience with the text) but would not receive a grade.

a socio-cultural teacher

Students would really delve into the cultural, historical, and contextual significance of the text.  They might investigate societal factors which construct beliefs and issues related to language discrimination and language rights. Pre-reading, students would be asked to research issues related to immigration and “Englishes.”  (Specifically they would look at the context connected to Tan’s mother’s experience as an Asian American immigrant in California in a specific year.)  During reading, students would be encouraged to ask questions about why Tan’s mother faced discrimination, and what was going on historically and societally to cause the events depicted in the text.  After reading they would discuss such questions and then write a paper on a related prompt, possibly integrating other culturally or historically related texts.  Papers would be evaluated on the effectiveness of arguments made (arguments all incorporate cultural/historical factors related to the text and possibly compare/contrast to the present time) and how students support their arguments.     

a teacher who aligns with McCormick's ideological approach

working on it…

Cognitivism: Theory and Practice (2 blogs)

***Blogs 2 and 3 combined***

Theory:

The cognitivist theory of reading privileges the text, as opposed to the expressivist theory which privileges the reader and the social-constructivist theory which privileges the context.  The model favors the mental capacities of a reader, and from a traditionalist perspective, views learning to read as acquiring a set of skills. 

Central to the cognitive model is schema theory, which according to Mary Crawford and Roger Chaffin, works on three main assumptions:

Mental representations are abstract, not literal copies…schemata are thought to serve as the basis of comprehension and memory…[and] finally, schemata are said to enable readers to make inferences when they are reading (p 18-21).

An objectivist perspective might stress that knowledge is “directly embedded” in texts, and that providing readers with particular schemata, or background knowledge, leads toward ‘correct’ ways to comprehend or interpret the text. 

They focus on so few schemata and because they privilege particular schemata that are supposedly needed to understand a text ‘correctly’, they paradoxically suggest that schemata can be considered as discrete, independent structures rather than as complexly interwoven networks of discourses” (p. 25).

This reminds me of something I once witnessed in a CMS reading and basic skills class.  The (international) students were reading a short story in which one of the characters wore a fancy suit.  The teacher wanted the students to make inferences about the character based on the clothing he wore.  One student from Saudi Arabia said that the character must have a job, because all people who wear suits have jobs.  The teacher told the student he was wrong – in the United States, it’s not true that all people who wear suits have jobs.  The student really tried to argue his case by explaining that in his country, all people who wear suits also have jobs, but to the teacher, the student was comprehending the text incorrectly.  He was using his own schemata to make sense of the text in a way that allowed the words and ideas to interact with his own culture and knowledge, but wasn’t getting at the meaning favored by the teacher.  It doesn’t sound so bad written out here, but my co-TA and I were both pretty surprised by how the student was treated in his own attempt to make meaning of a text. 

Practice:

To put the cognitive model into practice, a teacher might provide pre-reading exercises to activate students’ background knowledge.  One approach to the situation described above (a less progressive and culturally sensitive one), might involve some pre-reading questions which lead students to make specific types of connections between how people dress and their employment statuses.  In this case, the students would be guided toward the correct answer, which would allow them to comprehend the text in a specific pre-determined way.  Another more expressivist approach might allow students to explore their own ideas about dress, work and culture, drawing on their own schemata as it fits into their discourses and cultural backgrounds, so that they may interpret the text more subjectively. Schema seems pretty simple to activate by leading discussions about topics related to a text before reading, but McCormick certainly complicates the issue, adding many cultural implications.  

Reactions to McCormick

Blog 1: REACTIONS to McCormick: What do you like? What's don't you like? What seems problematic?

McCormick’s theory might be interpreted as one of balance between expressive, social and cognitive theories, while one reading becomes “better than another because of its consequences, be they social, political or historical” (p. 90).  The idea is that there is an interface of matching repertoires (the reader’s and the text’s), which are also influenced by literary and general ideologies.  All maintain dialectical relationships with one another, and can intersect as matching repertoires, mismatching repertoires, or tensions. 

I’m not sure what seems problematic, as I’m not yet clear exactly how this all plays out in practice, but I like that it incorporates many previously conflicting theories into one. I agree with Jennifer who states, “I believe we should consider all three theories as pieces that work together to build a stronger, more inclusive pedagogy for teaching reading and writing.”  I look forward to further exploring how this all might play out in the composition classroom.  

Reading, Writing and Authority (F, A & C Chapter 4)

Chapter 4, “Writing, Reading and Authority,” presents a case study of a student named John, and his academic development in the Bartholomae, BRW adolescence-themed class. At first I found this read a bit excruciating and Discovery of Competence–like, as John began to discover an evolved sense of his own self through the extensive and exploratory process of reading, drafting and dialoguing with his teachers.  Wall argued for the importance of  “posture of authority,” or the idea that “academic composing requires us to recognize mutually opposing forces of individual expression and social convention,” and through the interplay of these forces, a writer assumes a stance (p. 106).  We learn of John’s process of beginning to assume authority over his own ideas in written discourse, and the chapter finally stops being so excruciating when we see the progress John makes in the end (I suppose we had to experience some of the pain he went through to get to that point…)

I found the writing samples provided pretty fascinating, actually.  At the beginning of the semester John produced this snippet of writing:

So for the first time in my life I talk about something that I could never talk to anybody else.  I told him how I didn’t think I was as good as anybody else (p. 111). 

Toward the end, (for another paper) he wrote:

Maya was ambitious and always exploring her environment.  Thus, she succeeded. On the other hand, Holden was not ambitious and did not explore his environment. He was overwhelmed by his choices. Holden would have been better off in Samoa..” (p. 132)

It’s not just that John uses some fancy discourse markers in the second example (but wow those make a difference!), and while Hull does mention a “superficial and perfunctory attitude toward difficult reading” visible still in the final month of the semester, there are also “gains in coherence, hypothetical deductive reasoning and academic diction” (p. 132).  Wall was still concerned at this point, but learned that two and a half years later, John was succeeding in his literature class and was able to express an understanding of the complex relationship between writers and academic communities (see p. 133). 

A couple key aspects of John’s BRW course which helped him get to this point include the following:

• John’s teachers explicitly rejected the intentionalist model of composing, which would have required knowing what to say and how to say it before sitting down to write (p. 109).  It was mentioned that John probably benefited from not having been previously instructed in the intentionlist model (which in a way put him ahead of some of his more advanced peers). 

• John’s process of discovery drafting and revision allowed him to the “first step in [his] efforts to break out of the very dependence on the words of others that he describes in [his] draft.”  He was allowed the freedom of dialoging with the self he created on paper and defining his own new persona, rather than depending on the words of others (p. 111).

• Related to the point above, John engaged in dialogue with the language already on the page to achieve his main ideas.  “You discover what you mean by responding critically to what you have said” (see p. 125).  This is the dialectic of composing. 

The generative process of discovery drafting clearly allowed John to develop as an emerging member of the academic discourse community, and I appreciated reading about his progress. 

is this also true of writing in general?