DOUGLAS COLLEGE

 

 

 

 

 

eee MAD HATTER 5
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ei. Students researched and wrote articles on business topics for
a journal devoted exclusively to their writing and published
by the college for community readers -- a "real" and demanding
audience.
3, students worked on these major projects in small groups, learning
Co commnicale with one another in a practical, goal-oriented
rather Chan merely social situation.

With these innovations in place, instruction in writing skills became
much more than just a schoolroom rehearsal of rules: instead, students
Saw instruction as practical help and immediately applicable advice
in coping with real-life writing tasks. Moreover, these innovations
generated a cluster of auxiliary tasks -- letters, memos, proposals,
progress reports -- necessary to accomplishing the major projects.
We didn't need to convince students that these forms of business
writing were important: the situation itself was teaching them the
Significance of these kinds of communication, and teaching them to
evaluate the effectiveness of their own efforts.

The results of the project have been decidedly positive. We observed
greater student motivation, an awareness of the relevance and value
of the assignment, and a marked improvement in performance. The
students' clients expressed enthusiasm and support for the project,
and, on the whole, indicated that the reports had addressed their
needs. The students themselves were proud of their reports and their
published articles. And they learned valuable lessons about the
kind of real-world cooperation and communication that produces
high-quality results. In all, our students found their "voice":
they ceveloped writing styles and Strategies in response to their
community's needs and they developed a sense of themselves as
articulate members of the community. Certainly, the project -- which
depended on cooperation between education and business -- has enhanced
the relationship between the college and the community it serves.

Although our approach was intensely practical -- we were responding
to an immediate and pressing pedagogical situation -- it was informed
by current theory about and research into speech styles and language
acquisition. Much of the work that is current in these areas
originated with Hymes' (1972) proposal that linguists analyze speech
not in isolation but as part of a "speech event" in a community's
life. His sSpeech-event model inspired many linguists and
text-theorists to focus on the social and pragmatic context of texts.
Our classroom application of these ideas has been particularly informed
by Wan Dijk (1977, 1980), and Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), as well
| as de Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981) and Yule and Brown's (1982)
syntheses of recent research and theory. Romaine's (1984) work on
language acquisition among adolescents provided further rationale
for our innovations, as did Shaughnessy's (1977) interpretation of
the obstacles facing the inadequately prepared student enrolled in
a writing class.

—— NSE