The Writing Template Book.pdf

ISBN-10: 0-472-03193-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03193-1

Published in the United States of America

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

® Printed on acid-free paper

2010

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The Writing

Template Book

The MICHIGAN Guide to Writing Well and

Success on High-Stakes Tests

Kevin B. King

Northern Essex Community College

New Hampshire Community Technical College

Foreword by Ann M Johns

San Diego State University

Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

FOREWORD

During my more than 30 years of teaching writing to international,

bilingual, Generation 1.5, and other students, I have been introduced

to, and attempted, all of the major pedagogical approaches. In the

1950s and early '60s, when the teaching of writing became an issue sep-

arate from the teaching of language, we were introduced to the current-

traditional methods, product-based approaches in which focus on

correct form dominated our work (see Johns 1997). When writing mat-

tered and wasn't just a reflection of speech (see the audiolingual

method), we were interested, first of all, in perfect representations of

words and sentences. Weiderman (2000) refers to this period in lan-

guage teaching history as "scientific": teachers "proceeded in a lockstep

fashion, teaching bits of language from the grammatically simple to the

grammatically more complex" (5). Our colleagues in first language

composition and the work in contrastive rhetoric also introduced us to

simple discourse forms. Comparison-contrast, cause-effect, and narra-

tive were three forms that we taught, in a lockstep manner, as structures

for essays. There seemed to be only one ESL (and novice student) com-

position book, American English Rhetoric by Robert Bander, published by

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, that we were given to use in our composi-

tion classes. A typical chapter title was "The Expository Composition:

Developed by Comparison and Contrast."

Influenced in the 1960s by world events and remarkable changes in

the United States, we began to question the approaches that concen-

trated solely on form and correctness, considering them to be too

constraining for the students we were attempting to liberate. Thus, there

occurred in composition instruction (and elsewhere) a major paradigm

shift: from focus on perfect sentences and perfectly structured texts to the

students, writers drafting and redrafting their assignments to solve

rhetorical problems through texts. The learner-centered "process" move-

ment, which continues to be basic to many composition programs,

concentrated its efforts upon developing the learners' search for mean-

ing and their writing processes. Rather than devoting time to perfection

in student writing and stamping out errors, the teachers encouraged

vi Foreword

meaning-making, drafting, revising, and redrafting, all taking place in a

collaborative environment where students peer reviewed each other's

work. Students were encouraged throughout the process to reflect, thus

developing a metacognitive awareness of their individual ways of

approaching, and solving, their rhetorical problems. For some students

and many teachers the process movement has, in fact, been liberating.

As we now know so well, perfection and form are not all there is to

successful writing.

However, there's another side of the process story that needs to be

considered as we teach novice and second language students, many of

whom do not yet control the registers or syntax of academic or profes-

sional Englishes. Jim Martin (1985), an Australian theorist, argues that

the process movement has benefited only certain groups of students:

those who are sufficiently familiar with the text products ("the genres")

required in professional or academic context. Martin maintains that

process approaches "promote a situation in which only the brightest,

middle-class, monolingual students will benefit" (61) since they are the

ones who have already begun to be initiated by their families or their

elite schools into the academic and professional discourse communities

they plan to enter. As Anyon (1980) and others have noted, most

schools are already structured by social class, preparing selected

students for certain types of professional lives. Support of these class dis-

parities has no place in our composition programs.

So what do we do? We attempt, in some way, to close the gaps

among rich, middle class, and poor as well as between those who speak

and write English in various registers with ease and those who don't. In

the theory and practice that is typical of post-process methodologies, a

variety of pedagogies designed to achieve these ends have been devel-

oped. Some of those efforts follow the work of the New Rhetoricians in

North America (see, e.g., Coe 2002), individuals who believe that to

understand writing, a person must first understand the context and

community in which the writing takes place. Others, such as the

Australians and English for Specific Purposes practitioners, argue that

we must teach the functional relationships between what a text should

do linguistically and its purposes for the communities in which it will

be read or published. In the Australian context (see Feez 1998), curric-

ula have been designed to demonstrate these functional relationships at

the text ("genre") and sentence levels. Both text structure and syntax are

shown as contributing to success of a text in a specific context.

The Writing Template Book addresses the needs of students who are

preparing for high-stakes assessments in contexts where they have

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