First-Year University Writing

A Corpus-Based Study with Implications for Pedagogy

L. Aull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137350459
• eBook ISBN: 9781137350466
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

First-Year Writing describes significant language patterns in college writing today, how they are different from expert academic writing, and how to inform teaching and assessment with corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical genre analysis.

1

First-Year Writing Today

Introduction

The cry that new college students can’t write is old and persistent. In the 1870s, Harvard University’s president railed against incoming students’ “incorrectness” and “inelegance” in writing, spurring several literacy crisis reports under the title “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” In 1975, a Newsweek article bearing the same name suggested that most graduating secondary students were not “able to write English at the minimal college level” (Sheils, 1975, p. 58). In 2011, The Guardian reported that across England, both “non-traditional” and “traditional” new college students were struggling with essay writing (Tickle, 2011). And recent U.S. descriptions suggest the same, going as far as to label new college students the “dumbest generation” (Bauerlein, 2008; Holland, 2013; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newsom, 2009). More tempered accounts, stemming from research across the world, also note a mismatch between secondary and college writing: “The academic prose of students is a reflection of the gap between secondary and post-secondary contexts,” write Carmen Sancho Guinda and Ken Hyland; as a result, “learners [are] bridging the gap through imitation and self-discovery” (2012, p. 6).

Such claims are not mere alarmist handwringing. They fuel the exigency for institutionalized approaches to first-year (FY) college writers—students caught in the “gap” between secondary and post-secondary contexts. One institutional approach is the U.S. model of required FY writing courses. These typically semester-long courses are designed to offer new college students practice with general academic writing before more advanced, field-specific writing. Often this approach focuses on academic essays, critical thinking, and genre awareness, and it is mirrored in critical thinking and argument modules such as those offered in Singapore and U.K. colleges (Tickle, 2011). Another approach, focused more on discipline-specific academic writing, can be seen in foundational courses in academic literacy or writing across the curriculum that are popular in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. (Bazerman & Russell, 1994; Geisler, 2013). A final example, which overlaps with the other two but is designed specifically to support incoming non-native speaker students, includes English language learner (ELL) writing courses such as English for Academic Purposes. Both in and outside English-speaking countries, these courses have greatly increased over the past four decades (Jordan, 2002; Silva & Brice, 2004). All of these approaches aim to transition new college students into post-secondary academic discourse, and all could be described as part of the “generally increasing level of interest in discussions of academic writing across higher education” (Purser, Skillen, Deane, Donohue, & Peake, 2008, p. 2).

The term FY writing especially refers to the first model: tasks and courses designed to provide general academic writing preparation for incoming college students. Such courses and tasks are required of hundreds of thousands of native and non-native English-speaking students entering North American colleges each year, and they parallel myriad requirements across the world designed to prepare college students to write academic English. Through such preparation, colleges hope that FY students will become post-secondary writers, more skilled at the institutionally recognized practices by which academic writers use evidence and craft arguments. Across contexts, we might therefore think of FY writing as courses and tasks in which students begin (or fail) to prove that they are capable of participating in the written academic argumentation that so often constitutes the construction of knowledge.

This framing underscores that FY writing is always in some way related to access to higher education, a notion that helps explain why alarmist claims about FY writers correspond to periods of expansion in higher education. At these times, more students, and more kinds of students, gain access to college and are required to demonstrate their command of written, academic English, the dialect of those who have “customarily attended college” in English-speaking contexts (Berlin, 1984). In the U.S., this connection has been clear throughout the past 150 years. The late 19th-century Harvard Reports corresponded to the period of college expansion between 1890–1910, and they made “the ability to write correctly … an important rite in the entrance process for college” (Berlin, 1984, p. 72). Sheils’ “Why Johnny Can’t Write” corresponded to a period shaped by the U.S. GI bill and the establishment of land grant colleges in the mid-20th century (Connors, 1997; S. Miller, 1991). And 21st-century claims reflect the situation today, in which more international and domestic students are enrolling in U.S. and other English-speaking colleges than ever before (Education, 2013; Pascarella, Terenzini, & Feldman, 2005).

The relationship between academic writing and college access helps explain why FY writing courses can disproportionately fuel the fears of first-generation and other under-represented students. These students know that FY writing can be a key determiner in their future success (Penrose, 2002).¹ David Bartholomae has suggested that the entire field of rhetoric-composition, the disciplinary home of North American FY writing, is based on the relationship between student access and FY writing: he defines the history of the field as “institutional and professional responses to challenged standards, challenges to a standard of writing produced by writers who were said to be unprepared” (1996, p. 11).² For first-generation students, native English-speaking students, English language learner students, and the many professors who are not trained in writing studies but are required to teach it, FY writing can be a kind of specter—mystified, important, menacing—and fuelled by hyperbolic claims about how poorly students write.

But what exactly makes FY student writing seem so poor? Outcries like those in The Dumbest Generation and “Why Johnny Can’t Write” do not include empirical analysis of student writing. Reports on the U.S. National Educational Assessment of Progress (NEAP) writing exam note that few students show “proper language use” (“Writing Crisis,” 2012) yet do not specify what “proper language use” means. Likewise, many FY students and instructors have only an anecdotal sense of what characterizes FY writing. Sancho Guinda and Hyland suggest that one reason for this lack of clarity is “the dearth of adequate descriptions of specialized genres in higher education.” They imply that until we have provided students with “adequate descriptions” of academic genres, including common language choices, students are likely to struggle to comprehend the discursive needs and practices of academic communities (pp. 6–7).

These gaps, juxtaposed with the clear importance of FY writing in higher education, pose several questions. What are the salient, shared features of FY writing? How do those features differ from those in expert academic writing? How might we guide students to be more aware of such features and the principles of academic discourse they reveal? One under-examined way to begin answering these questions is through systematic analysis of language-level patterns in FY writing, and that is the central undertaking of this book.

Linguistic features in FY writing

By “language-level patterns,” I do not mean sentence-level errors, like comma splices or wrong word usage. Rather, I mean the recurring words and phrases that, regardless of topic, are shared across FY writing and across expert writing: the features that help writers frame their arguments and lead readers through them. These features are often called metadiscourse, because they are the meta-level cues that help readers understand and engage with the informational discourse of the argument. For example, at the beginning of this paragraph, I used the phrases I do not mean and Rather, I mean. These were not part of the specific information presented about language-level features; they were used in order to frame and elucidate that information. In the analysis in this book, it was certain metadiscourse features that were shared across expert writing and across FY writing, but which were often dissimilar between the two.

Here is one example of what I mean, beginning with writing expectations with which FY writers struggle. Many faculty I know critique FY writing because it contains overstated arguments. By this, instructors mean that students’ written arguments presume too much authority and go beyond the scope of the evidence they have to support them; in other words, the instructors want more supported and delimited arguments than they tend to receive in FY writing. But instructors may also want compelling, confident claims, and these expectations can seem incongruous for new college students. Even more to the point, many new college students are accustomed to standardized secondary writing assessments, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which solicit just the kind of generalized argumentation that many college instructors do not want. These standardized prompts rarely include reading material or a larger dialogue about a topic; they are short, timed tasks that often ask students to speak for large groups of people (e.g., whether secondary students should wear school uniforms (Ramineni, 2013)). More advanced academic writing, however, tends to require honed, calculated claims that draw heavily on textual and research evidence. Even in the broad strokes I am using here, it is clear that the writing expectations that students confront across secondary and college contexts can be dissimilar, if not contradictory. Furthermore, all of the above explanations rely on macro-level writing concepts rather than language-level expectations.

Now let’s consider related language-level patterns. The analysis in this book shows that FY writers tend to use metadiscourse features related to strongly stated opinions, personal evidence, and wide-reaching claims. This means, for example, that students tend to use boosters like without a doubt and clearly and personal evidence markers like in my opinion or in my experience. They also tend to extend their claims through far-reaching phrases like as human beings or young people today, even though it is unlikely that students can support such a large argumentative scope.

What expert academic writers do is usually quite different. They tend to write more measured statements and narrow the scope of their claims by using qualifying (or hedge) words like possibly, perhaps, and suggests. They rarely draw attention to personal experience, and when they do, they tend to connect their personal perspective to an argumentative view in phrases like in my own view. Likewise, advanced writers’ arguments tend to be much smaller in scope. They indicate the honed scope of their claims in phrases like in this case or in this study rather than phrases that address the world, humans, or society, even when they are writing for a general audience. Overall, then, expert writers tend to delimit their arguments through repeating metadiscourse features like hedges and narrow scope markers. Though an expert’s purpose and authority can be different—e.g., to craft arguments for peers, while FY students write to prove their knowledge to an instructor—expert academic writing studied in this book manifests several patterns like these which recur across many different genres and disciplines.

Of course, there is much more to say about academic writing than certain language-level patterns. But there is much to say about these patterns, not least because in this study, particular features recur across published writing despite different sources, genres, and fields, while other features recur across FY writing despite the thousands of different secondary contexts of the FY writers. These observations corroborate the usefulness of studying FY writers’ actual writing in order to come to conclusions about it. As John Swales put it, “student contributions are a continuing source of enlightenment for all the parties concerned” (1990, p. 82). As yet, however, there has been little research on features like these, and many laments and prescriptions about FY writing remain abstract and under-examined in terms of aggregate language-level patterns.

This book strives to offer an initial response to this gap, with three goals in mind. The paramount goal is to identify recurring linguistic features related to argumentation in FY writing, in relation to writing prompts and in comparison with expert writing. This is primarily done through a computer-aided, corpus-based analysis of 19,433 FY essays in comparison with an even larger corpus of published academic writing, with attention to how the recurring patterns relate to writing prompts and often-tacit expectations of academic writing. A second goal is to explore why such large-scale, linguistic analysis of FY writing is rare, which is why Chapter 2 is devoted to institutional and disciplinary history that explains the separation of composition and linguistics in U.S. research and teaching. A third goal is to consider why such an approach is possible and valuable, in light of rhetorical and linguistic genre studies, pedagogical applications for FY classrooms, and implications for writing assessment standards and transfer research.

What is not the aim of the book is to bemoan FY writing or simplify expert writing. My own conviction from this research is that in most cases, students can write when they begin college, but they write in ways that may not be valued by their college professors. The book starts with a view of student writing in terms of “processes of meaning-making” rather than “as skills or deficits,” and it emphasizes that there is often a disconnect between academic faculty expectations and student interpretations of what is involved in student writing (Lea & Street, 1998, p. 159). In the words of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, “Academic language … is no one’s mother tongue.” The goal of identifying linguistic patterns in academic writing is to help demystify it: to expose repeating features and attendant values that characterize FY and expert writing in order to guide students’ informed choices about whether and when they use features commonly used by experts.

This objective is not new. Almost 30 years ago, Patricia Bizzell and David Bartholomae intimated similar ideas as they wrote about struggling (or “basic”) FY writers. Bartholomae’s canonical 1986 essay “Inventing the University” suggests:

One response to the problems of basic writers, then, would be to determine just what the community’s conventions are, so that those conventions can be written out, “demystified,” and taught in our classrooms. Teachers, as a result, could be more precise and helpful when they ask students to “think,” “argue,” “describe,” or “define.” (1986, p. 601)

In an article the same year, Bizzell encourages a view of college writing as a “language community” in which the dialect and discourse conventions generate rather than merely convey particular ideas and world views. Bizzell especially argues that we need to better understand the “world view” of writers coming into college so that we can convey to them the potential differences between that world view and the one expected in college writing. Echoing Berlin’s sense that late 19th-century composition courses were formed to enforce a dialect of English, Bizzell frames academic writing as a certain version of English and attendant set of perspectives. Her goal is “to find an approach to the difficulties of basic writers entering college that can take into account these differences in dialects, discourse conventions, and ways of thinking” (1986, p. 296).

This book shares the view that we should expose the conventions and principles of expert and FY writing, but it takes a more linguistic approach than has been taken in studies of similar writers in the past. That is, it strives to identify “just what the [academic] community’s conventions are,” and just how writers “argue” and “describe,” specifically through identifying recurring linguistic patterns in FY and expert writing with the help of computer-aided analysis. The analysis also attends to individual texts and contextual features like the writing prompt, and the linguistic patterns are a unique focus that further illuminates contextual details. There are many other useful ways of examining FY writing that have influenced this study; for example, many qualitative and ethnographic studies have identified writing assignments, struggles, and strategies of FY writers (Bawarshi, 2003a; Beaufort, 2007; Downs & Wardle, 2007; Wardle, 2009). In this project, salient FY writing patterns, and their relation to particular prompts and to expert patterns, provide the starting point for identifying academic expectations and developing strategies for FY instruction. By extension, the book posits that along with analytic approaches more common in rhetoric-composition studies, methods like corpus linguistic analysis can provide additional insight into FY writing.

The current focus of FY writing and the benefits of an alternative

There has been important research on academic writing in rhetoric-composition and applied linguistics over the past 50 years that explores the writing strategies of small groups of FY writers or the language-level patterns of large groups of expert and English Language Learner (ELL) writers. But historically, there has been a fissure between the FY writing in rhetoric-composition studies and the analytic appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter: 1 First-Year Writing Today
• Chapter: 2 Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies in English: A History and a (Genre-Based) Way Forward
• Chapter: 3 Context-Informed Corpus Linguistic Analysis of FY Writing
• Chapter: 4 Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Scope and Certainty in FY and Expert Writing
• Chapter: 5 Linguistically Informed Pedagogical Applications
• Appendices
• Appendix 1: FY Prompts from Wake Forest University (2012–2013) and University of Michigan (2009–2013)
• Appendix 2: Lexical item lists and expanded tables
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index