FoolsCap

The results of the diagnostic essays I asked my CBS students to compose:

            Overall, the products of the diagnostic in-class essay were encouraging.  Every student was able to produce at least one substantial paragraph of writing.  Although I had planned to allow students one full hour to compose the diagnostic essay, student questions about the demands of the assignment took some time and I was only able to offer students forty to forty-five minutes to complete the essay.  This information might seem of little relevance to understanding the products of the exercise, but I think it is important to keep in mind the limitations under which students were working when drafting these essays.

Not only are these limits part of the rhetorical situation behind these writing samples, but it is interesting, for my purposes, to note how substantial a piece of work a student can produce in a limited amount of time.  I had been planning on including an essay exam in the Fall 1010 course, so seeing here how students respond to a writing prompt when given limited time to compose a response is instructive.  Furthermore, I want to emphasize these time limits as a sort of overall caveat to any of the comments that follow.  While I am confident that all of our students responded to the best of their ability, the scene of writing here is neither organic nor optimal, so students who produced work of less-evident sophistication cannot and should not be dismissed as incompetent writers; given a longer period of time to draft, revise, and edit the same prompt, we can safely assume that all of the diagnostic essays would show marked improvement.

Caveats aside, the results, as mentioned are encouraging.  Of the thirteen essays collected, none exhibited major faults in use of the English language or in basic English grammar or sentence structure.  I emphasize the fact of English grammar here for multiple reasons.  First, although I had been instructed that these were not ESL students, CBS’s emphasis on the need to instruct these students in appropriate written forms of academic discourse—specifically as opposed to the blend of Spanish and English language discourses many of these students participate in at home—left me with some concerns as to the level of basic skills these students possessed; as it turned out, however, my doubts in this regard were unwarranted.  Second, one of the students spoke with me personally after the subsequent class session to voice some concerns about an upcoming assignment.  She was afraid, she said, of not being able to complete the assignment because English was not her first language; she was concerned that the difficulty of composing in English would inhibit her from completing the work.[1]  If other students share similar fears, they have not yet expressed them; I hope, of course, that between myself and the peer mentors we will be able to address this student’s concerns and find ways to address her needs.[2]

Above the grammar and sentence levels, most students again exhibited a satisfactory level of performance at the paragraph design level.  Most of the essays collected here displayed an understanding of basic concepts of paragraph composition: one main idea per paragraph, each paragraph starting with a topic sentence, and the first line of each paragraph beginning with an indentation.  At this level, we can begin to see where students might need instruction.  Although many students accurately used each paragraph to develop one main idea or connected series of thoughts or events, there were a number of essays in which parts of the essay which may more properly have been divided into separate paragraphs were instead run into one or more paragraph units.  I can conjecture some reasons for this.  As we will shortly see, this could stem from unfamiliarity with the conventions of essay form.  Alternatively, there may have been confusion over the genre appropriate to the writing prompt: the prompt was described as a “short essay about a literacy event from your own experience.”  The question, then, becomes whether students understood “short essay” here as a conventional, multiple-paragraph essay of brief length, or as a “short essay” answer typically found in examinations.  Regardless of causes, I hope to be able to offer some instruction on paragraph design with one of the exercises scheduled on the syllabus.

It is at the level of essay form that the greatest gap between levels of achievement becomes apparent.  To look more closely at this, I divided the essays into two groups: one in which the use of conventional essay techniques (multiple paragraphs, paragraph breaks clearly signaled through indentation, use of transitions between and within paragraphs) was apparent, and one in which such techniques were either absent or haphazard.  I further opted not to question the content of the essays in this step of the analysis, nor to look specifically at how students developed theses or arguments.  My main concern here was whether students exhibited an understanding of essay form—that is, whether students could produce a piece of writing that recognizably looked like an essay, setting aside (for the moment at least) whether they were using the form accurately or effectively.

Curiously, the divide was almost exactly half; of the thirteen essays collected, seven fell into the first group and six fell into the second.  Each group, of course, varied within itself as to the level of achievement evident; in the first group (recognizable essays) the main points of deviation were whether students used transitions to signal connections between ideas and how they tied their supporting details and ideas to the main point of their essays.  In the second group (those not readily recognizable as meeting essay conventions) such variation was far broader.  Among these students, some essays used complex sentences and transitions between sentences and thoughts while other students used primarily simple, declarative sentences with few transitional cues.

Finally, the content of several of these essays is worth noting, given the larger aims of CBS and the SEP.  Roughly a third (five of thirteen) of these students wrote about the acquisition of a new language and the attendant difficulties of socialization.  While in some of the essays the students do not describe what John Trimbur defines as a literacy event,[3] these essays are nonetheless an interesting window into the different discourses these students occupy.  For those students to whom English is a second language (the majority of students in this particular set), the events described in their essays were typically narratives of isolation, of being divided from larger social groups by the barrier of language.  For other students, who described learning Spanish as an act of ancestral exploration, acquiring the second language was a significant accomplishment.  Further students described the experience of growing up in a bilingual household as an advantage to their own development and a skill with which they can assist recently emigrated family and friends more effectively assimilate into American culture.