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ENGLISH 097: DEVELOPMENTAL WRITING

COURSE GUIDELINES

COURSE DESCRIPTION (UNIVERSITY CATALOG):

Intensive study of basic reading skills, focusing on the type of reading students will do in college.

GENERAL AIMS OF THE COURSE:

English 097 is a semester-long pre-baccalaureate course for students who score T141 and below on the California State University English Placement Test. The course is a prerequisite for English 098: Developmental Writing. While both courses stress reading and writing skills, 097 is designed primarily to improve students' abilities to analyze and interpret reading material of college-level difficulty. It is also designed to improve students' fluency in writing short expository prose that demonstrates appropriate grammar, sentence structure, and usage. In this course, instructors do not use drill-and- practice methods covering discrete points of grammar, nor do they specifically focus on methods that will only help students to perform well on standard proficiency tests. The course should immerse students in reading that challenges them, and it should provide many opportunities for them to write about what they have read.

STUDENT POPULATION:

English 097 students may be native speakers, but a significant number of them are English language learners. Nearly all sections include non-native speakers of many ethnic backgrounds.  Enrollment in each class is limited.

STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES FOR THE COURSE:

1. Students will demonstrate their understanding that academic reading is a rhetorical skill  by analyzing texts’ attention to audience and purpose.
2. Students will know how to apply the reading process which enables them to   understand a variety of texts, including print, visual, and on-line materials.
3. Students will demonstrate a repertoire of strategies which enable them to understand an  ever-growing array of genres, purposes, and text formats.
4. Students will demonstrate their critical understanding of what they read by  constructing appropriate responses to their reading.
5. Students will be able to use their own knowledge and experience, as well as the ideas of  other readers and writers, to evaluate the validity, impact, and quality of texts and the  intentions and skill of authors.
6. Students will synthesize and integrate information from a variety of sources. 
   

READING STANDARDS

The following "standards" established by NCTE, the IRA, and the University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading should be used as guides in designing a course syllabus and in designing classroom strategies. "Standards" are not curriculum, but are guides for curriculum and our specific course guidelines.  

Reading is not simply getting most of the words right or retelling the story. It includes making sense of literature, exposition, media, and other texts. In a contemporary world, texts include print materials, film, television, and other technological and symbolic displays. Students must develop increasingly sophisticated skills in understanding, appreciating, and evaluating what they read, and they must develop a repertoire of strategies that enable them to negotiate an ever-growing array of genres, purposes, and text formats.

1. Students understand and appreciate what they read. They demonstrate their understanding and appreciation by constructing responses appropriate to their reading purpose, the genre and tradition of the text, and the social context of their reading.
2. Students critically analyze and evaluate what they read. In the process they confront both text and author. They use their own knowledge and experience, as well as the ideas of other readers and writers, as a basis for evaluating the validity, impact, and quality of texts and the intentions and skill of authors.
3. Students learn the symbolic conventions of written language. They learn to understand and manipulate symbol systems, the print to speech codes of our alphabetic writing system, and structural, rhetorical, and literary conventions of increasingly sophisticated texts.
4. Students synthesize and integrate across information sources.
5. Students read strategically. They actively construct meaning as they read; they monitor their own comprehension by questioning, reviewing, revising, and rereading to enhance their overall comprehension.
6. Students participate as active and critical members of a community of readers.
7. Students read for many purposes.
8. Students read widely. They read a rich variety of texts, including narrative genres and expository and persuasive texts written by traditional and contemporary authors who represent a range of cultural traditions.

READING REQUIREMENTS:

1. Reading should be assigned for each class period, regardless of whether these  assignments will be discussed. 
2. Reading assignments should come from a wide variety of print and visual texts,  including newspapers, news magazines such as Newsweek, and perhaps more  challenging magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly; essays,  websites, short novels, and poetry are rich sources of reading as well. Students should  be encouraged to read for pleasure as well as to fulfill class assignments.
3. Reading assignments should be designed to help students actively engage in the  reading process, develop their ability to build vocabulary such as determining word  meanings from context, comprehend beginning college-level texts, and draw  inferences from their reading.
4. Reading assignments should lead to writing assignments, so that students understand  the connections between reading and writing.  Such assignments could include:  reading logs, reader response papers, and longer papers which demonstrate the  students’ understanding of the texts they read. Summaries and paraphrases are good  early assignments. At lease one paper should be based on response to or analysis of a  longer  work (whole text) of 50-150 pages to be read outside of class.

WRITING REQUIREMENTS:

1. Students should write a minimum of 5000 words, which are evaluated by the instructor.
2. Students should write a minimum of six complete essays of two or more pages in length, each of which follows a pattern of pre-writing, drafting, and revising.
3. Students should be given practice in writing at least two "timed" in-class essays.
4. Most of the writing for the course should be based on response to or analysis of the readings assigned. At least one paper should be based on the response to a longer work (or whole text) of 50- 150 pages to be read outside of class.
5. Additional writing in the form of journals is highly recommended.  
   

ADDITIONAL CURRICULUM GOALS:

1. Composing Process

By the end of the term, students should be aware of how the stages of the composing process--inventing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing-- become actualized in their own writing. They can be introduced to inventing devices for getting started, such as brainstorming, clustering and freewriting, as well as small group and full class discussion of topics. Instructors should strive to build a writing community by introducing peer collaboration in the reading and writing process, by encouraging peer response to student writing, by requiring conferences between tutor and student, and by providing conferences between instructor and student.  

2. Essay Development

Instructors should help their students understand the needs of their readers by having them work on producing essays which provide clear introductions and sufficient details to accomplish their writing purposes. While appropriate paragraph development is necessary in essay development, instructors should not assign very many paragraph-length papers. Patterns such as "comparison and contrast," "process," "classification," and "definition," may be introduced to support writing purposes, but should not be assigned as ends in themselves.

3. Study Skills

Because students who are placed into English 097 may have deficiencies in several academic areas and may be only marginally prepared to do college level work, instructors should help their students develop appropriate study skills by showing them how to use their textbooks and the apparatus of textbooks, by helping them build listening and note- taking skills, and by showing them how to prepare for the different types of examinations they will be taking at the university. Instructors should be aware of the resources available to their students in the Counseling Center and the Learning Resource Center.