Conforming Remedial Research Paper

Jordan Dreyer
William Breeze
ENG 308
30 October 2013
Re-Representing Remedial:
Grouping Basic and L2 Students Together as Unskilled Writers Whereas the perceived problem of Remedial Writing courses and the overflowing First Year Composition class is commonly perceived to have stemmed from the Open Admissions movement of the early 1970s, in reality the problem of underprepared college freshman goes back much further. Even before the light bulb, institutions of higher learning were dealing with problems of admission requirements, high schools’ methods of preparation and standardized testing (Halasek and Highberg). In fact, the first widely adopted measure for college admission, the Uniform Entrance Requirements (UER), appeared in 1894
Instead of paying attention to form, composition students in secondary and post-secondary classrooms have been asked to focus on content. This leads to more engaged learning, more critical thinking and, in the end, better form. These benefits show themselves in ESL classrooms, as well (Kasper 348). The process approach has been problematized, however, by the presence of non-mainstream speakers in the FYC classroom who feel no less amount of pressure when asked to free write in Standard English. This has led to research involving the use of non-Standard English in the process of writing college essays. In ESL classes this has included the use of both native language as well as ‘interlanguage,’ which is a Pidgin English with a grammatical structure often adapted from the native language, used to quickly implement new vocabulary. The difference between NSD and L2 learner usage of native language in the composing process, as documented by research, seems to exist along an axis between practical and emotional concerns. While Keith Gilyard and Judy Jordan point to the reduction in social stigma afforded by the use of familiar English dialects, Kasper notes how ESL teachers focus on building learner confidence by dealing first with matters of content in a more relaxed language and then adopting Standard English for matters of form (359). But these
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