Students need more
By Joy Marsella
reading and writingI'VE just finished reading more than 100 short essays, written by incoming first-year students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. These essays were written in response to the writing placement exam, which is used to place students into the appropriate category of instruction.
The exam calls for the writing of two essays -- one based on personal experience and the other responding to a brief article. Nearly all the writers were graduates of local public high schools.
My task was to determine whether the writers would be required to sign up for either supplemental or remedial writing instruction. I came away from the experience convinced that our public high school students are not getting enough reading and writing practice.
These students' texts had problems with coherence. This appeared in both the overall structure of their arguments and also, more glaringly, in the reasoning within the paragraphs.
I believe the reasoning errors in the reading-based essay were caused, in large part, by an inability to read well. Two patterns emerged.
A first group of writers read the article and pulled from it a portion of the more complex argument. They worked with that, ignoring the rest of the argument. Their inability to understand and capture the nuances of the argument led them to oversimplify or miss entirely the points with which they were supposed to grapple.
The second group took an idea, sometimes one that was tangential to the main argument, and wrote using their own experience, never dealing with the text to which they were supposed to respond. Their oversimplifications, distortions and misrepresentations convinced me that they hadn't understood what they were reading.
What accounts for these problems? I'm convinced that they arise because students don't get enough practice reading and writing before they come to the university.
This is not necessarily the fault of their teachers, who I believe do a good job given the constraints under which they work. Gail Ann Lee, a friend who teaches at Mililani High, tells me that English teachers there carry a teaching load of around 150 students. I made calls to several other public high schools on Oahu and the Big Island, and these confirmed that 150-1 is a typical student-to-teacher ratio.
A teaching load of this size makes it impossible for teachers to work closely with students to help them develop as readers and writers. We must change this situation if we are to expect improved levels of literacy.
We must make this change across the curriculum, for we realize that students must have reading and writing practice in all disciplines in order to engage in the wide variety of responsibilities they will face as adults.
I propose that the DOE guarantee every high school student at least one class per semester -- in any subject -- with no more than 15 students and with at least 50 pages of reading per week and 50 pages of writing per semester. It is understood that the school would provide students with their own texts, so they can be read at home.
When I asked the English 100 students I am teaching this semester if they had done this much reading and writing in any of their regular high school classes, they said no. Two students, however, had approached this amount of reading and writing in an advanced placement English class.
Our professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of English, recommends that a teacher should handle no more than four classes of 20 students. Private schools in Hawaii come close to meeting this goal. It is no wonder their graduates perform better on the various tests used to measure literacy achievement.
We must ask our state leaders and decision-makers to provide classroom contexts where students and teachers have the books and time to carry out this complex work. I hope that candidates for governor, the Legislature and the Board of Education will seriously engage this issue.
Joy Marsella is a professor of English at the
University of Hawaii at Manoa.