The End of Composition Studies

Acknowledgments

xv Acknowledgments THE MAJOR ARGUMENTS IN THIS BOOK may have begun to take shape in my mind as early as the s, when I attended a workshop on reading for public school teachers conducted by Frank Smith. I had taken a break from teaching, but Smith had just published Psycholinguistics and Reading, and his ideas were a hot topic at the time. When my wife offered me the opportunity to attend the workshop with her, I readily accepted. During the workshop, Smith was very much the neutral, objective scholar and researcher, laying out the theories and models, the studies and evidence, for how children learn to read. His conclusions caused a ruckus among the assembled teachers. For all practical purposes, Smith concluded from his exhaustive research that children teach themselves to read. While he did not explicitly downplay the role of schooling and explicit instruction, Smith clearly implied that instruction in reading was not as important in the learning process as most of the teachers in the room thought. As the outrage bubbled up in the room, one teacher rose to her feet and asked Smith directly, “What then are we teachers supposed to do?” Smith looked her in the eye and said in all sincerity something like this: “I don’t know. I am a researcher. I can only tell you what we know about how people learn to read. Teaching is your job, and I would never presume to tell teachers what to do.” My sense was that most of the teachers in the room found this answer infuriating. Smith may very well have been deliberately disingenuous. In Psycholinguistics and Reading, he provides teachers with some broad principles for how to help students learn to read, but his prescriptions are notoriously simple and unprogrammatic. Smith suggests that teachers offer students opportunities to read and that they make the process easy. In two later volumes , Comprehension and Learning and Writing and the Writer, he would offer the same advice about the teaching of writing. Since attending Smith’s workshop, I have taught in a public middle school, at a community college, and at two major research universities, and at each institution I have been struck by the discrepancy between what we know about learning to read and write and the institutional structures we have in place in order to teach students to read and write. So it may very well be that this book has been lurking in my subconscious for thirty years. I hope that I have captured something of Smith’s style in this book: his ability to lay out clearly the evidence of how children become literate and his willingness to promote the implications of that evidence wherever it may lead him. I wrote much of this book while on sabbatical from my duties as an associate professor at Kansas State University. By the time of the sabbatical, I had done most of the reading, note taking, photocopying, fact finding and pondering about the major issues I deal with here, and I had composed a rough draft of a few chapters. All I needed to complete the project was the time to sit at the computer and sweat blood until the words came. I am grateful to the university and to the College of Arts and Sciences for giving me that time. I would also like to thank two of the reviewers of this manuscript: Joseph Harris and Stephen North. Both of them gave the book a careful reading and a wonderful mix of praise and criticism. In response to their advice , I cut considerably, added a chapter, and tried to anticipate a number of counterarguments. The book is much better because of their help and advice. Portions of chapters  and  were previously published in “Practice, Reflection, and Genre” in Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition, edited by Robert Tremmel and William Broz. Copyright ©  by Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc. Published by Boynton/ Cook Publishers, a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, Inc., Portsmouth New Hampshire. Other parts of this book—parts of the introduction and chapters  and —were also previously published, in “Curriculum Design for First-Year Writing Programs” in The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators, edited by Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter . Copyright ©  and published by Longman/Addison Wesley Educational Publishers. And finally, the figure “Structure of the Writing Model” in chapter  is from the groundbreaking article by John R. Hayes and Linda Flower, “Identifying the Organization of...