What use is blogging?

The blogging experience has been great for this class.  I don’t think I have ever done so much enjoyable, useful, low stakes writing as I have for this class.  Most importantly, the writings were useful to me as a student of comp theory.  The ones that were the most useful were those where I posted “take-aways” for a particular paper, chapter or book that we were working on in class.  This allowed (forced) me to engage more deeply with the texts, but also the product was a useful tool later in the semester when I had to go back to refer to that content when preparing papers.  A  second type of blog assignment, where we had to either post a plan-in-progress for our unit plan, or we had to discuss some topic related to the theory we were discussing that week, was also pretty useful. 

The social aspect of blogging is also nice, for some of the same reasons.  It was interesting and actually valuable to see what others thought were important points of our readings.  It was also nice to get to know the other students in an online context. 

One piece of advice I might give (and remember for myself) is that it might have been better if the instructor had reminded us from time to time why we were blogging these “take-aways,” summaries and  reader responses.  I sometimes got caught up in the moment with all the reading, so the information that I wrote about was sometimes not as useful to me as it could have been if I’d been able to keep my perspective, with the final project still far on the horizon.  By keeping the needs of the final unit plan in mind, I might have annotated and responded to the readings in ways that would have been more valuable at the end of the semester.

Argument for Integrated Reading and Writing

Dear English Department,

I think it would be in the interests of our students if we offered an integrated reading/writing course at the basic English level.

As of now, we are offering a reading course and a writing course.  In the last decade or so many composition researchers have convincingly argued that students will become better readers and writers if they are taught these subjects using an integrated methodology. 

In the literature, composition researchers have reported many beneficial effects of teaching reading and writing in an integrated classroom.  Goen and Gillote-Tropp (2003) state that understanding one process can help the learning of the other.  Sandra Stotsky (1984, as reported by Goen and Gillote-Tropp) has noticed that better writers not only tend to be better readers, but also tend to just read  more than poor writers.  Salvatori (1996) has noted that introspective reading has a stimulative effect on IRW students’ writing; furthermore, Petrosky (1982) has noted that practicing writing has improved his IRW students’ reading development.  McCormick (1994), however, has noted that if reading and writing are taught separately, these beneficial effects are lost.

Goen and Gillote-Tropp (2003) report that students who spent a year in an IRW course at San Francisco State University successfully completed the course and the CSU at a rate of 97%, 13% higher than students who attended a traditional course (84%).  Students in the SFSU IRW course also scored higher term final reading evaluations and writing than students in the traditional course.  Beside superior scores, students from the IRW course indicated in self evaluations that they felt more confident in their reading, writing and learning skill.  Further, these students passed second year reading and writing courses at a higher rate than those students who attended the traditional course (97% compared to 90%). In later years, these scores went up even higher, indicating a comprehensive and sustained improvement of student learning outcomes, and perhaps more importantly, student success.

I would like to think that my goal as a composition instructor is not only to get a student to read critically and write convincingly, but also to analyze the way that he or she thinks about the world.  McCormick states that reading should not just be something we do before we write, and writing should not just be something that we do after reading.  We, as instructors, should think of reading

…as an analogue for thinking about  one's  own and  others' thinking, about  how one's thinking  ignites and is ignited  by the thoughts of others, [and] justifies the presence of reading in composition classrooms not as  a pretext but as  a context for writing. (1994)

I hope you will seriously consider my recommendation to establish an basic skills integrated reading and writing course at our institution.  I truly believe it is the best for our students and their future.