This work deals with the growing trend among many American universities to relegate basic writing instruction and other remedial courses to community colleges and the problems contingent with such a trend. While American community colleges were initially founded to give students a foundation of coursework that could then be transferred to a baccalaureate-awarding university, recent decades have seen community colleges grow away from this transfer function and toward vocational training and a stratification of the American population that further marginalizes basic writing and basic writers. Additionally, the placement instruments currently used to gauge a students ability to handle university-level coursework can, at times, give an unfair assessment of a students true ability, thereby forcing that student into a recurring cycle of remedial classes from which he or she may never emerge to finish a baccalaureate (or even an associates) degree.
This work also looks at basic writing programs at Texas community colleges as a representative of the types of basic writing instruction currently being undertaken at the community college level across the country as well as at the problems that arise within these programs and the practices that contradict existing basic writing pedagogy and theory. In contrast to this, the work details the beginning of a basic writing course at the University of Texas-Tyler, the theoretical foundations for that course (as opposed to the practices currently in place at the community college level), and a case study of five students in the inaugural offering of this course and how the methods employed in the course helped these students address issues such as their perceptions of themselves as students and scholars and their perceptions of the difficulties they faced in handling university-level writing assignments.
Finally, this work looks at some recommendations for basic writing instruction in the present and implications for basic writing research in the future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-05012007-160103 |
| Date | 01 May 2007 |
| Creators | Tuberville, Brenda Gail |
| Contributors | Carrie Leverenz |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-05012007-160103/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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