Unit Brainstorming

The working title for the course Jessica Brugler and I are working on is Becoming a Member of the Academic Discourse Community.  The course would be for both native and non-native beginning writers.  Our course is based on Bartholomae & Petrosky’s idea of placing students within a discourse community so they can learn the language of academic reading and writing.  We also incorporate elements of Kutz, Groden and Zamel’s theory that every student has something to bring and that learning composition is very much like learning a new language. 

 

We are planning to develop unit two of this course and our topic focuses on Acknowledging student’s Linguistic Competence; Every student has a language to bring; Building on one’s linguistic knowledge; Bringing one’s language & adapting it to the language of academic discourse.  This unit will build upon pre-reading, annotation and pre-writing heuristics that were taught in unit one.  The previous unit will have begun to introduce our students to academic discourse and have given them some tools they can use to further develop their writing process.

 

This second unit will help them assimilate even further into the new academic language they are learning and facilitate them in developing arguments and claims.  In unit one our students have been doing expressivist writing and will continue in unit two only they will start to incorporate taking a stance in their writing.  We begin unit two with a writing to read activity where the students write an anonymous letter to a friend.  This assignment will give the students an opportunity to express their identities in their writing as well as see the diversity of their fellow classmates.  Our goal is to show students that there are benefits to both being a native English speaker as well as a non-native. And to debunk the myth that native speakers find learning this new language of writing easier than non-native speakers due to English being their mother tongue.  The students first homework assignment will be to write a personal narrative about their experience as beginning writers. We then wish to give our students a taste of academic success by having them read short stories from How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life by Tom Miller.  It is an interesting book of 55 short stories of second language learners having success at learning English.  We would probably give our students a choice of several stories from the book and have them read two.  The stories are about three to five pages long.  It stated in The Discovery of Competence that national statistics indicate that almost half of every entering group of first year students at public institutions of higher education have dropped out by the end of the first year.  Our motivation here is to give our students confidence that they can be successful.  We would then assign a paper similar to the one in Facts Artifacts and Counterfacts (p. 32) only have the paper topic be recalling a time when they experienced success.  We would formally teach thesis statements and give activities facilitating students in taking a stance.  We like the idea of having students volunteer their papers to have them critiqued by the class and foster their revision. This is something we would have modeled previously in unit one. 

 

The end of unit paper assignment would be as follows:

Argument Essay                                                                                                                                                                                                       

●       Formal (thesis statement, reference class readings, 1 outside resource)                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

●       Informal (expressivist, personal experience)                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

●       Prompt: Has your current knowledge of English facilitated or debilitated your transition into academia?

 

 

 Jessica and I will bring an example of the grid for our unit to class.  The subsequent unit of our course would continue to immerse our students in an academic discourse community helping them build on and incorporate their linguistic competence into the new language of academic reading and writing that they are learning.  The papers assignments would progressively become more formal.