View from the margins - 1

The story adaptation and analysis essay suggests that this student is ill-prepared for university and the requirements of academic discourse. Problems can be seen at both local and global levels. Poor grammar, sentence and paragraph construction, informal and dialectical language, phonetic spelling, repeated words, tautologies and incorrect homonyms, all demonstrate a wide variety of local concerns. Problems with narrative structure, rhetorical issues and framing a coherent, supported analysis evidence some of the global issues.

The prevalence of concerns indicates that we are dealing with a basic writer. In addition, basic writers commonly focus on personal experience, clichéd maxims and attending stylistic features (Lunsford, 1980). Textual examples include: personal opinions cited as evidence such as ‘…children could probably cope with things like heads being chopped off’; maxims like ‘…children like adventure’ and ‘…children have short attention spans’; and use of personal pronouns such as ‘You have to be very specific in the way you write things’.

This is not to say that the student lacks intelligence; rather that the pedagogical approach requires awareness and sensitivity. The question here is how best to respond to this writer in order to encourage her progress. The answer lies, initially, in attaining an understanding of the issues surrounding basic writing.

The term ‘basic writer’ has taken over from remedial, developmental or illiterate but has itself developed condescending connotations (Bloom, 1995). It is most often associated with marginalised students: speakers of a different language or dialect, those with learning disabilities, older learners trying to retrain, traditional-age students coming from disadvantaged or erratic prior educations, and so on. However, a more general definition of the basic writer for our purpose is of ‘those who are least well prepared for college’ (Bizzell, 1986).

Composition researchers like Patricia Bizzell, Mike Rose and David Bartholomae have acknowledged the difficult transition such students face in adapting to formal university writing. However, their research centres on American universities where composition and rhetoric is taught, and basic writing programmes are available. Here in the UK, basic writers must fend for themselves within the general academic community. This has its advantage in that the student is less likely to be stigmatised while learning opportunities may be created through familiarisation with academic culture – Bartholomae (1985), for example, argues for an immersion in academic discourse. However, this puts the teacher under considerable pressure to decide best practice in a field of study that is highly conflicted (cf. The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing, which offers 321 separate reviews of book, articles and periodicals on basic writing).

What we have here is a student who has created what Bartholomae (1980) calls an ‘interlanguage’: a fusion of what she has learned of academic discourse so far and her own personal language and dialect. One technique for addressing this would be to ask the student to read their work aloud and Bartholomae demonstrates how a student will often self-correct as they read. This empowers the teacher to take a positive stance towards errors and initiate a discussion of the reasons behind them. Others would argue for a more direct empowerment of the basic writer and several approaches to this will be discussed in due course.

References

Bartholomae, D. (1980) The Study of Error. CCC 31(October 1980), pp.253–69.

Bartholomae, D. (1985) Inventing the University, in Rose, M (ed.) When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. New York: Guilford, pp.134-65.

Bloom, Lynn Z. (1995) A Name with a View. Journal of Basic Writing, 14(1), pp.7-14.

Bizzell, Patricia (1986) What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College? College Composition and Communication, 37(3), pp.294-301.

Lunsford, Andrea A. (1980) The Content of Basic Writers' Essays. CCC 31(October 1980), pp.278–90.

The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing (2005) 2nd Ed. Adler-Kassner, L. and Glau, G.R. (eds.) New York: Bedford/St Martins.