Remediation at a Crossroads
from NCTE INBOX 4-26-11
In a recent article (Inside Higher Ed, April 21, 2011), NCTE member Mike Rose worries that we may not be ready to transform the remediation curriculum in our colleges even though that curriculum “is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate.” He notes that current reform proposals on college access and success are based on an economic model that at best will give us a snazzier version of the same old thing. The following NCTE journals discuss college-level remedial writing courses and the issues that surround them.
The College Composition and Communication article “Evaluating Writing Programs in Real Time: The Politics of Remediation” shares an analysis of a course curriculum as manifested in actual classrooms. By poring through teachers’ portfolios and transcripts of interviews with teachers and tutors, the authors discovered problems with the curriculum as interpreted and implemented by instructors. It was discovered that many of the students who were placed into remedial writing had passed not only the pilot course but also some core curriculum courses for which they ordinarily would not have qualified.
A study presented in the Teaching English in the Two-Year College article “How Far Do They Get? Tracking Students with Different Academic Literacies through Community College Remediation” follows the progress of 238,032 students who enrolled in either an ESL composition, a developmental composition, or a college composition course at one of nine community colleges. It was found that coursework requiring greater reading skills challenged developmental students even after they had completed their college preparatory work.
The article “Critical Language Awareness and Learners in College Transitional English” from Teaching English in the Two-Year College reviews the literature on Critical Language Awareness (CLA) studies in transitional English courses and with other related student populations in order to build an argument for using CLA as a curricular approach in the classroom.
Would you like to talk with other educators about this issue? Visit the Teaching Writing group in the NCTE Connected Community where Traci Gardner started a conversation titled, “Conspiring to Improve Writing?”
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