ENGLISH 200: INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
Campus Writing and Speaking Program
Faculty Seminar Report
Fall 2001
Prof. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Department of English
English 200 is a general-education course at Gables University that meets the social-science requirement for undergraduate students. It has an enrollment cap of thirty students and generally fills each time it is offered. Although a few students in the course are English majors, most are majoring in other departments or plan to do so. Unlike many literature courses, this one takes a somewhat more scientific approach to language, first covering the main components of language (its sound system or phonology, its word system or morphology, its syntax and semantics, etc.) and then, in the second half, moving into more applied areas such as child language development, dialect variation, pragmatics, gender and language, and the history of English. The course is taught in a mixture of short presentations, discussions, small-group work (including work on linguistic problems).
Before the Seminar: The version of the course that I brought to the Seminar and which I had taught for about seven years did not do much with writing and speaking. Students usually took three hour-long in-class tests and a comprehensive final exam. They did write two summaries of outside readings, and these were the only papers in the course. In those summaries, they had to locate an article in the professional linguistic literature, read it, and then write a 2-3 page summary or synthesis in which they captured the main ideas of the article and, optionally, included a paragraph at the end in which they commented on or made a judgment about the reading, or related it to their own thinking or to the course. I had no formal scoring guide for these summaries--just a half-page handout in which I described them and gave information mostly in the form of do's and don'ts: make sure your reading is scholarly enough, make sure you include the full citation at the top of the page, etc. In retrospect, I graded these very subjectively and erratically, usually just writing a few comments in the margins and coming up with a score. I was almost always disappointed with many of the summaries.
I came to the Seminar without very many ideas about how to improve my students' writing, without any ideas at all about how to have my students give oral presentations, especially in a class of 30, and with only old habits guiding my grading of the students' work.
Seminar Focus: I spent much of the Seminar focusing on three main areas concerning writing and speaking: (1) how to include more informal writing as a way to help students to learn the material; (2) how to improve my use of the summaries, which I have decided to leave in the course, and how to grade the summaries more consistently; and (3) how to incorporate one relatively informal, stand-up oral presentation without taking lots of time away from the usual coverage. Below, the link will take you my course overviews. Highlighted links under the main assignments will then take you to each of these main areas I worked on: the summary papers, a "learning log" (which is how I chose to incorporate lots of informal writing), and what I call "micropresentations," which are short (3-5 minute) oral versions of the summary papers (each student does two summaries but presents only one of them to the class). I have also included a link to some study tips I developed for the exams, with special focus on how to write short answer questions.
In addition to new guidelines and suggestions for all these writing and speaking activities, I also spent considerable time developing clear criteria for evaluation. These are in the form of scoring guides included as links at the assignments section of the overview page. The students receive these scoring guides before they begin their work, and in the process of running peer-group conferences on the drafts of the summaries, I key my revision-guide questions to the scoring guide criteria.
With the help of graduate assistant Claire Dimmesdale, I spent most of my time developing a unique "sample summary." This is an actual summary of a student from a previous class. The main page contains only the summary itself. Then five linked pages (one for each of the five evaluation criteria) opens to reveal highlighted words or phrases. When students pass their cursor over these highlights, pop-up windows appear with evaluative comments tied to the criterion under consideration. By posting this sample on my Web site, my students were able to see a scored summary and learn how the criteria led me to the grade I gave that summary.
I am now in the process of gathering evaluative information from the class about these improvements. So far, I have heard only positive responses to the helpful material, and very few negative comments about the amount of writing and speaking that I now include in the course. At first blush, I think the enhancements are improving the quality of my students' learning.