Chapter 1: Teaching English Composition in College
The course is supported by two distinct arguments, sometimes advanced separately, more often combined in varying proportions. The first of these is practical: The course exists to provide immediate therapy for students whose academic future is clouded by their inability to manage the written form of English with reasonable ease, precision, and correctness. According to this argument the course must remedy deficiencies of high school training in English and develop each student's writing skill to the level of competence required by college work. This is the "service" concept of the course. (2)
The other argument supporting freshman English is not practical but liberal. This argument assumes that the primary purpose of the course is to focus the student's attention on fundamental principles of clear thinking and the clear and effective written expression of that thinking and to give him disciplined practice in applying the principles. This kind of intellectual training, it is argued, is essentially in any system of liberal education and is rigorous enough to merit inclusion without apology in a college or university curriculum; it is something that should have been begun in the lower schools but could not by any means have been disposed of there. (4)
In part because of these varying views of the essential purpose of the course, freshman English has assumed an enormous variety of forms from once campus to another. But there are other reasons, too, for its diversity. One is that the course in many colleges and universities is staffed primarily by graduate students and junior instructors who, though they are expected to carry out departmental policy towards the course in their classrooms, have little or no voice in determining this policy. The content and structure, for better or worse, are likely to be determined by the preferences of the director of the course or the department chairman, who usually does not teach the course (or if he does, teaches special sections of bright students). Being somehow insulated from the way their policies work out in most classrooms, the administrators are more free to indulge their particular professional interests or apply their pet theories. (4)
...forever beyond the reach of many people (7)
College professors have always been generous of advice to their high school colleagues, telling them what they should be doing that they are not and what they are doing that they should not be. Lately, moved by the general concern for improving American secondary education in the missile age, they have been even freer with their suggestions and have made them more specific. (8)
The deficiencies of high school English courses and textbooks and of the professional preparation of many high school teachers of English have now been made a matter of public concern, and rightly so if any large-sclae improvement is to be brought about. But what about the college English courses that nearly half of all high school graduates will take as freshmen? How good are these courses? How well are they being taught? What is in them? What are their announced purposes? What forms do they take? Do they avoid the weaknesses and errors for which college English teachers have blamed English courses in the secondary schools? (8)
The Data:
The syllabuses were all for the academic year 1960-61.
...the director of the study made an effort in 1961-62 [to visit] eighteen selected institutions, checking on the reliability of the syllabuses. (9)
Anyone reading this many syllabuses or visiting this many freshman English programs--or even a fraction of the number---would almost certainly be struck by at least three main weaknesses of the course as it is now constituted. First, he would be impressed by the confusion exhibited in the course--a widespread uncertainty about the aims, a bewildering variety of content, a frequent lack of progression within the course. Second, he would notice a variety of administrative adjustments and precautions that indicated little confidence in teh expertness of those who teach it. And finally, he wold notice that the textbooks for this course are for the most part less rigorous and less scholarly than those for other college freshman courses. (10)
In the most general terms, the principal aim of freshman English is usually said to be the improvement of the student's ability to read and write, the assumption being that these two skills necessarily go hand in hand. (10)
And if the particular college does not have a separate literature requirement, the statement of aims usually includes teaching the student "to read literature with understanding and appreciation." (10)
...ironically, most of the confusion in freshman English stems from differing notions of how writing ought to be taught. The most diverse content may be dumped into the course on the grounds that it will help the student learn to write better. (10-11)
Often there appears to be little real difference between the kind of content and writing assignments found in the freshman course and those with which the student has grown all too familiar during the three or four years before he entered college--topic sentences and the uses of the apostrophe, sentence outlines and the subject-verb agreement, papers to be written on "My Favorite Teacher," "A Happy Vacation," "My Most Embarrassing Moment." (13)
Although there are exceptions, especially in smaller colleges, the freshman course is most commonly assigned to graduate students who teach part-time while working toward an advanced degree and to junior instructors newly out of graduate school or recouping their finances by a few years of full-time teaching between the master's degree and the doctorate. The latter are found most commonly where no advanced degree in English is offered. The former flourish at almost very university that offers a doctorate in English and at many institutions where only a master's degree is available. (13-14)
On many campuses freshman English has been a subcollegiate course, one that is clearly more appropriate to the high school than to an institution of higher education. In intellectual rigor it has too often been inferior to other freshman courses. Most English departments have regarded it as a kind of therapy that they perform without enthusiasm, and they have made it into a narrowly practical how-to-do-it course with few if any intellectual pretensions. (14)
Because of the kind of course that freshman English has become as a result of these circumstances, the best minds in the profession have rarely concerned themselves with it or its problems. Few first-rate men have taken the trouble to write textbooks for freshman English. (14)
Under either plan this one year of English will be, for most students, the only required work in the subject. The second semester is, then, more often than not the terminal course, and with this in mind a little over two-thirds of the English departments operating on the semester plan require the reading of literature in this term to ensure that all students will have at least a minimal exposure. The writing tends mainly to be analysis and criticism of the literature. (23)
In the second term, three-fourths of the freshman programs require a long paper, and a little more than half of these ask for the usual "library" paper. (24)
The great majority of young people entering college each fall can expect to do a lot of impromptu writing in their freshman English classes. A few colleges, in fact, require all themes to be written in class, and many require half. The mean would probably be at least a third. ...These paper always count more heavily than those written outside of class. The explanation is that class papers are the only ones that the instructor can be absolutely sure are the result of every student's unaided labor. (25)
The special variety of freshman English course called "Communication" (sometimes "Basic Communication") is distinguished from the usual composition course by its primary focus on the process of communication, often in a fairly sophisticated way, and on the four "communication skills," reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The typical course of this sort is oriented more toward the social sciences than towards the humanities. The orientation of the composition course is the reverse. The communication course is concerned more with the accuracy of verbal expression and less with its esthetic qualities. The composition course tends to be equally concerned with both. (25)
But for the most part, except for the surviving communication courses, freshman English programs do not attempt to give formal instruction in oral discourse. (26)
Freshman English in the nation's colleges and universities is now so confused, so clearly in need of radical and sweeping reforms, that college English departments can continue to ignore the situation only at their increasing peril. (26)
Chapter 2: English Composition at Dartmouth College
The literature instruction in Dartmouth's Enlgish 1 and 2 is expertly conducted. The instruction in composition, though enjoying almost ideal conditions of class size and teacher load, often is impaired by the limitations that the prevailing patter of graduate study in English has imposed on the staff, who have been trained to teach literature and not composition. In laboring under this handicap, Dartmouth is by no means alone; to a large extent every college English department in the nation suffers from it. (72)
Chapter 3: Trends in Freshman English
In all of these changes, one can detect the outlines of a pattern emerging. 10 or 15 years ago it was usual to find at, say, a state university a full-fledged remedial course (often conferring credit); a lengthy "review" of grammar, usage, and mechanics in the first semester of the regular freshman course; and a writing clinic or laboratory. The marginal student was most carefully attended to and nursed along as far as he could be induced to go; it was much less common to find the superior student being given a comparable amount of attention. Today and colleges where there has been the greatest improvement in the caliber of entering freshman, it appears that the remedial course is the first to go; then the regular freshman courses freed from the "review of fundamentals"; next the writing clinic is dropped; and in a few instances freshman composition itself has in effect disappeared, being replaced by course in literature with a certain amount of required writing. It seems likely that this is the way most four-year institutions are now headed, and they will move in this direction just as fast as the caliber of their students will prevent them to. (93-94)
The changes already mentioned in freshman English courses are evidence of some adjustments to these changed conditions, but so far there is little sign of a really searching reevaluation of the English courses of the freshman and sophomore years and the relation to the English curriculum of the schools. If college English departments continue to delay such a reassessment of their own horses, there likely within less than five years to find themselves in the unaccustomed position of having major changes forced upon them by the lower schools. (96)
But when one takes a close look at the freshman English courses which nearly half of all the young people graduate from high school will take, it becomes painfully evident that the muddle in the college course is scarcely better than the one the college teachers have to deplored in high school English courses, with the sobering difference that so far almost nothing is being done in the colleges to reform the freshman course. There is no widespread impulse to think through afresh the premises and purposes of this course (or perhaps one should say to think them through for the first time); to match it with instruction in the high schools and make it the end link in a chain instead of an isolated phenomenon; to anticipate prepare for important changes that are imminent in the English curriculum schools; to offer instruction in prose composition at an intellectual level compatible with college or university study. Instead, college English departments seem increasingly willing to abandon the responsibility for giving systematic construction and composition just as soon as a majority of entering freshman show themselves able to observe a minimum standard of correctness and written English--as though near correctness were all that one should try to teach in a composition course, as though correct writing were necessarily the same as good writing. (98-99)
There are quite many things wrong with freshman English in college as with English in high school, and it is just as urgent that something be done about them. Some of the weaknesses of the college course are undoubtedly the result of having to remedy (or try to remedy) efficiencies earlier instruction. But most of them arise from a vast uncertainty about aims, about content, about methods--the same uncertainty that has afflicted the teaching of English in high school. (99)
