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Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1994. / Title from title page screen, viewed March 22, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Larry D. Kennedy, Raymond A. Davidson (co-chairs), Patricia H. Klass, Barbara L. Nourie. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-90) and abstract. Also available in print.

Since the first course in rhetoric began at Harvard in the 1890's, college and university English departments have been concerned about the writing proficiency of freshmen. This concern was magnified by the adoption of open-admissions policies in the sixties, and as a result many English departments began developing remedial English courses to deal with the unprepared student.This study proposes to investigate this development from a variety of perspectives. Its main purpose is to present a model textbook for remedial composition, explain how it was used, and analyze the results of its use in the classroom. The first three chapters provide a justification for such a textbook. The first chapter contains a discussion on the changing attitudes toward education in general and freshman composition in particular that have resulted from the drop in SAT scores and the adoption of open-admissions policies.The second chapter is an analysis of information about remedial programs at American universities based on a questionnaire which asked the following questions: 1) How do you identify the remedial student? 2) What is the relation of your remedial program to your regular program? 3) Who teaches your remedial courses? Is there an orientation program for the staff? .4) What is the focus of your curriculum? sentence? the paragraph? the essay? 5) What texts using? 6) Do you have any self-study documents that see?The third chapter is a history of the development of the remedial English course at Ball State University over the past five years. It includes an evaluation of the texts that have been used, the different types of standardized tests that have been given, and the progress of a selection of 102 students.The fourth chapter is the model textbook, Beginning Writing, that was used in two special sections of English 102 in the Fall Quarter of 1976. Each chapter of Beginning Writing, follows the same format. First there is an illustrative quotation, usually from a literary work, followed by a carefully written introduction to the various forms of writing assigned in the remedial English program. Next are three illustrative essays: one by a professional writer, one by a strong student writer, and one by a weak student writer. Each selection is followed by questions related to its organization and development, assignments for a journal, and a list of theme topics. Finally, there is a cartoon that emphasizes a major point discussed with the chapter.The fifth chapter contains a journal of the quarter and case studies of twelve students from the two sections which used Beginning, Writing. This analysis identifies the strong features of the textbook and those sections that will require revision.

For years, basic writers have been identified and labeled as remedial. Several alternative approaches have had limited success in terms of developing basic writers' skills. My study explores the potential of in-class tutoring to serve as an educational alternative to working with basic writers. Once Ball State's in-class tutoring was in place, I was faced with evaluating and justifying in-class tutoring in terms of department pedagogies, Writing Center goals, and effect on basic writers. However, in order to understand the Writing Center's role in basic writing programs, I had to design a study which would incorporate the most important factors of evaluation: assessment data and observation. My study identified key factors of in-class tutoring, to justify the continued existence and development of in-class tutoring at Ball State and possibly beyond. By breaking my analysis down into two areas, assessment data and observation, I isolated the individual aspects which affected the program. Although this data does not offer conclusive evidence about the program itself, the assessment data offers some interesting patterns of growth, and the observational data proved to be useful in terms of evaluating the program from an administrative perspective. My analysis of the issues and data lead me to conclude that in-class tutoring is worth evaluating and researching. / Department of English

Basic writers often require different courses than traditional Freshman Composition 1 students to succeed in college. Ball State University's basic writing program offers a two-semester sequence that provides students with additional time and attention, thereby addressing these students' special needs. The program encourages students to see themselves as academic writers and as part of the academic community.This study examined the degree of presence of academic voice in students' writing as measured at four intervals during the program's initial year. A 2 x 4 analysis of variance measured change in academic voice for female and male students, using the Academic Voice Checksheet. In addition, students' levels of confidence was measured using the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test (W.A.T.) and correlated to the presence of academic voice using the Pearson product-moment correlation. Findings are presented in an analysis of the study group as a whole and in an analysis of six individual students' work. Those students' profiles were examined for overall academic voice, discrete features of academic voice, the W.A.T. overall scores, and specific questions dealing with student confidence.The analysis revealed that a change in the degree of presence of academic voice occured during the two-semester sequence. However, male and female students were seen to have the same basic profile, thereby suggesting no difference according to sex of student, challenging current gender theory. A comparison of the initial measurement and the final measurement indicated a positive change in a majority of academic voice scores.A correlation between the academic voice score and a decrease in students' writing apprehension was found in the final measurements. Five percent of students' W.A.T. score may be explained by the academic voice measurement. In the study group, 65 percent of the students showed a decrease in W.A.T. scores between the two measurements, indicating a positive lessening of writing apprehension.This study suggests that the basic writing sequence at Ball State University is providing an environment that facilitates students' use of academic voice and lessens their writing apprehension. Both factors enhance students' opportunities for academic success. / Department of English

This study evaluated the comprehension of inference statements by language-learning disabled (LLD) children and children with normal language development (NL) under two conditions: uncontextualized and contextualized. The contextualized condition was designed to encourage retrieval of information from the subject's general knowledge — a procedure proposed to encourage elaborative inference-making. Two text passages were analyzed according to a model developed by Trabasso and presented by Trabasso, van den Broek & Suh (1989), which yielded a set of bridging causal connections across clause units. Sets of three true and three false causal inference statements were developed to represent bridging inferences for each story. In addition, three true and three premise statements were obtained directly from each story, yielding a total of twelve statements for each text. Subjects were ten language-learning disabled students (7 boys, 3 girls) and ten children with normal language development (5 boys, 5 girls) aged 9 to 11 years old. Mean age for children in both groups was 10 years, 4 months. Children were selected for the LLD group on the basis of the following criteria: (1) enrollment in a learning assistance or learning resource program for learning-disabled students, preferably for remediation of Language Arts; (2) history of speech-language intervention in preschool or early primary grades; (3) normal nonverbal cognitive skills; (4) lexical and syntactic comprehension within normal abilities (as determined by standardized language tests for the LLD group); (5) native English speaker and (6) normal hearing ability. Every subject received both stories and conditions. Story presentation and condition were counterbalanced across 8 of the 10 subjects in each group; condition only was counterbalanced across the remaining two subjects in each group. Inference and premise statements were randomized; each random set was randomly presented to each subject. Items were scored correct or incorrect. Subjects were also asked to answer open-ended wh-questions. Responses were compared and analyzed using a nonparametric statistical method appropriate for small sample sizes. Results indicated significant differences between the LLD and the NL groups on the number of correct responses to inference and premise items. Both groups scored significantly worse on inference than premise items. Analysis did not indicate that the LLD group scored significantly worse on inference items than the NL group did. Results also suggested that a contextualization effect operated for both groups, which affected the retention of premise items but acted to improve scores on inference items. This effect was seen most notably for the LLD group. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

An experiment was conducted to determine how learners and teachers of English as a foreign language in Japan cooperatively attempt to improve the comprehensibility of their talk in English during performance of various conversational tasks. The basic practical issue under study was the possibility that certain kinds of teacher-led groups and tasks would be more effective in generating repair and negotiation of the language by which tasks are accomplished than others, and that these group-task combinations might eventually be employed as alternatives to traditional teacher-fronted forms of foreign language instruction. The study was operationalized in a 2 x 5 between-and-within subjects, repeated-measures analysis of variance design. Two, six-dyad, teacher-led groups -- homogeneous (Japanese teacher/Japanese learner) and mixed (native English speaking teacher/Japanese learner) -- were formed in order to compare the frequency of 12 repair exponents generated during performance of five tasks. Teaching goals were represented in two tasks, instruction in use of the string-searching function of a laptop computer 1) with and 2) without the computer physically present. Non-teaching (social and cooperative problem-solving) goals were embodied in three additional tasks, 3) free discussion, and construction of a Lego (snap-together) toy accomplished with participants facing 4) away from and 5) towards each other. Task categories were also divided into experiential and expository activities (respectively, Tasks 2 and 5, and Tasks 1 and 4) following a model for use of reference in English. Experiential dyadic activity was related to the occurrence of exophoric (pointing out) reference and expository dyadic activity to the incidence of anaphoric (pointing back) reference in the task transcripts. Results of the analysis of variance indicated that while tasks differed on the basis of repair and reference, the groups did not: Dyadic talk was more responsive to the nature of the task than to the language background of the teacher. Further analysis suggested more frequent and elaborate repair during tasks which combine non-teaching goals and experiential processes as compared with tasks emphasizing teaching goals and expository processes. Qualitative analysis of task transcripts supported this distinction and elaborated specific discourse functions for such repair exponents as referential questions and confirmation checks which characteristically co-occur in conversational discourse. Based on these findings, it was concluded that Japanese teachers are capable of generating appropriate conversational repair in dyadic interaction with learners largely on a par with their native English-speaking counterparts. To this extent, their potential contribution to learners' acquisition of a foreign language is of an equivalent value. Furthermore, teacher-led small groups can be effective contexts for generating a rich supply of conversational repair and. thus should be considered as alternatives to traditional teacher-fronted foreign language classroom instruction. Finally, tasks which support achievement of social and problem-solving (i.e., non-teaching) goals through experiential activity are effective contexts in which normal forms of conversational repair can be generated. Since such tasks can be adapted easily to classroom settings, they merit consideration among the range of task options available to teachers and other instructional planners. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

In recent years, many composition teachers and theorists have turned to the process approach to writing in an attempt to better understand both the act of writing and the writers themselves. Even though various theorists have made headway in the analysis of students' writing processes, further research is needed to explore whether college basic writers are aware of their own writing processes and whether this awareness can lead to discovery of the self as a writer and to diminished writing anxiety.One way for students to become aware of their composing processes is through process journals, in which they write about their actions in creating and revising their papers. Using process journals as an independent variable, this project studied differences among three groups of basic writers at Ball State University: those who wrote process journals frequently, infrequently, and not at all. I evaluated effects of process journals on self-reported awareness of process, as measured by a Writing Skills Questionnaire, and on writing apprehension, as measured by the Writing Apprehension Test (WAT). To measure changes among groups over two semesters, I analyzed students' questionnaire responses using mean scores and two Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests.Results showed that process journals did have a significant impact on students' attitudes about themselves as writers and on their awareness and control of writing processes. This study did not find, however, that process journals significantly decreased students' writing apprehension scores. In addition, it did not find Ball State University's basic writing students to be highly apprehensive writers. Although further research is needed to verify these results and expand the scope of research in process journals, the initial findings here suggest that process journals can be an important part of many students' writing experiences. / Department of English

by Barbara Wei-hao Shen Costin. / Bibliography: leaves 169-174 / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1986

The purpose of the investigation was to examine the effect of training on the use of morphology and syntax of language delayed children. Performance with no instruction was compared to performance with two methods: (1) a Standard Remedial Instruction Approach and (2) the Individualized Instruction Approach. The intent was to determine if a standard method would be superior to no instruction; and then, if individualization of training procedures, based on a functional analysis of the child's approach to learning tasks, would facilitate progress over what might be achieved with the standard method. Finally, a follow-up test was done to check if skills were maintained. Three language delayed children in a Primary Resource Classroom served as the subjects. A multiple baseline across subjects design was employed, with a sequential multiple intervention component added. Using each subject as his own control, his performance was compared across adjacent phases. Instructional phases were introduced to subjects in a staggered fashion rather than at the same time to test the power of each intervention. The method chosen as the Standard Remedial Instruction approach was the Interactive Language Development Teaching method. The Individualized Instruction approach was devised from a functional analysis. Diagnostic teaching provided the means for doing the functional analysis, during which the child's responsiveness to varied stimulus, response, affective and cognitive dimensions of tasks was observed. Performance under the different phases of the study was measured by experimenter-made criterion referenced tests on the specific language forms being taught. Each test required a degree of generalization since novel stimulus materials were used. Visual analysis of the data was facilitated by use of trend lines made by the method of least squares, to determine changes between phases. Trend lines of adjacent phases were compared in terms of level and slope. The procedures described above yielded the following results: (1) All three subjects showed notable improvement in performance with Standard Remedial Instruction as compared to Baseline performance; (2) All three subjects displayed some improvement with Individualized Instruction over Standard Remedial Instruction, but by trend analysis, only one exhibited marked improvement; and (3) The performance of two subjects on follow-up testing was commensurate with the level of performance obtained during Individualized Instruction. The findings of the study indicate that, within the context of the public schools, improvement in morphology and syntax of language delayed children is dependent upon the use of systematic language instruction. Provision of such instruction, and the establishment of more efficient screening procedures for identifying expressive syntax problems, therefore seem warranted. If a standard remedial instruction program does not seem to be effective, an individualized program may be needed. A functional analysis of the child's learning characteristics appears to provide a sound basis from which to develop an individualized program. Speech and language clinicians, thereby, could increase their effectiveness by learning to conduct a functional analysis. The study further documents the promise of time-series research for use with a handicapped population. A public school system could use such a design to evaluate methods or programs. It would be relatively easy and inexpensive to conduct. A limitation of the particular design used for this study was that the effect of method two could not be separated from the effect of method one since it was always preceded by method one. An alternation of methods could alleviate the problem. A study of this type has minimal significance by itself but in a series can make a contribution.