Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California's Public Colleges and Universities

Part III: Strategies for Implementation

Implementing an intellectually challenging curriculum and enacting an inquiry-based pedagogy to prepare students for college present enormous challenges; certainly, high school teachers cannot assume this implementation alone. Those who agree with the gist of our recommendations need to discuss this document with colleagues who claim that college faculty don't understand the culture of overcrowded and underfunded high schools, in which many of the pervasive problems of our society, such as poverty and racism, take their toll.

Other readers, doubtless, will say that the habits of mind that we promote are simply beyond the reach of vast numbers of students in today's schools. Moreover, some may find our recommendations for more nuanced awareness of English language learners' needs well-meaning but naïve.

We acknowledge our optimism but not our naivete. Task Force members have all seen teachers, students and parents overcome daunting odds by working together and with allies. We have seen extraordinary collaborations across grade levels and institutions that change people's lives. We believe that a sustained collective effort by high school and college educators to raise expectations and deepen resources to support student learning will make a difference. We affirm the role of California schools in enhancing democracy, and we believe that literacy skills serve as the foundation for greater equity.

Moreover, we hope that all educators, in all segments, will practice the habits of mind and the skills and competencies described in this document across all disciplines. Students whose teachers model active reading, writing, speaking, and listening practices will be better prepared for college reading and writing assignments and class participation.

How can faculty and public school educators work together to address literacy?

We recommend imaginative and practical professional development as a central component of improving literacy education. If high school teachers and college faculty form partnerships to analyze student writing and the assignments they give across the curriculum, and together develop critical reading strategies for all content areas, we can make progress. If we explore together the influence of high-stakes tests and state standards on pedagogy, we can improve instruction. When these meetings are jointly organized and led, pervaded by a sense of mutual exploration, they will benefit both groups by refining our understanding of how responsibility for literacy education should be distributed across departments and between institutions.

To implement our recommendations concerning reading and writing, local schools and districts can create institutes similar to the California Subject Matter Projects, such as the California Writing Project, and the California Reading and Literature Project. Participants meet to examine how teachers in a school can coordinate reading and writing assignments, develop common rubrics, and explore their own writing as a component of a vibrant program for students. Regular professional development opportunities can include presentations by classroom teachers and college faculty about their own research efforts. These seminars and workshops can inspire practical and positive change.

Colleges and universities also need to provide incentives to faculty to join partnerships with schools with the expectation that they will improve college teaching. University faculty can teach more effectively if they understand their students' previous high school experiences.

Finally, for our recommendations in this report to be useful, educators should resist treating them as prescriptions. This document is an expression of an ongoing dialogue among educators; we anticipate such continued dialogue will result in its frequent revision.

What can high school students and their teachers do to foster the habits of mind that lead to student success?

Successful students learn that membership in an academic community depends on their engagement with complex ideas and not just with their own experience. Consequently, high schools should offer students opportunities to enjoy collective intellectual work, and colleges should sustain that practice.

By the same token, just as they must pursue collective intellectual work, successful students must also assume a measure of responsibility for their own learning. In short, they must discern crucial values of the academic community:

• the value of coming to class with questions about the assigned reading;
  

• the value of meeting deadlines;
  

• the value of going to faculty office hours to discuss assignments;
  

• the value of taking notes in class as a means to facilitate both retention and discovery;
  

• the value of listening to and respecting others' points of view in order to engage in critical debate; and
  

• the value of exercising civility and eschewing rudeness.

If high school students are encouraged to generate critical responses to what they read, see, and hear, and to develop a healthy skepticism toward their world and the texts through which they read it daily, they will not be overwhelmed by college assignments. If they are taught to formulate those responses into a cogent hypothesis and to organize their development of that hypothesis with precision, to consider audience and choose language appropriate to it, to evaluate and marshal evidence, to refute the opposition, and to conclude with a purpose in mind, they will be well-prepared to use these critical skills for further study. What seems clearly essential is a renewed emphasis on the intimate connections between thinking and reading and writing.

If high school students are taught to revise essays, with a sense of re-seeing their argument, and if they are taught to be open to astute criticism and evaluation from other readers of their work, their first-year college courses can enhance and develop these requisite abilities.

If high school students acquire the habit of mind that hard work devoted to writing a paper or to understanding a complex text has a distinctive pleasure and should not be avoided, they will be able to challenge themselves and the world around them and to derive satisfaction from their meaningful efforts. Learning should be a positive endeavor filled with surprise, and students' attitudes regarding reading and writing should nurture their personal and public identities. College faculty are eager to invite students into the beauty of learning, and we must nurture this possibility throughout students' educational careers.

Are there additional strategies to promote the reading-writing-thinking connection?

Yes. High school students who embrace reading and writing as tools for learning (about their own lives and about academic subjects) are equipped to take advantage of what college offers them. We must teach our students to be active makers of meaning and teach them the strategies all good readers employ: to think critically, to argue, to compare, to own an idea, and to remember. For example, high school students who seek out others' views by reading journal articles and doing interviews in order to develop their own positions will have the predisposition to value multiple points of view. And teaching reading strategies and close reading of all literary and non-literary texts will teach our students to honor precision and to learn inference.

The current emphasis on high stakes testing and the inevitable concern about "teaching to the test," prompts two observations:

First, we affirm the 1995 Resolution of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The organization stated, in part, that

NCTE has repeatedly warned that a preoccupation with large-scale standardized testing leads to distortion and reduction of this curriculum and to unwise expenditure of public funds that could be better spent on teaching programs. Be it therefore

Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English reaffirm its opposition to narrowly conceived standardized tests of isolated language skills and decontextualized information.

Second, we acknowledge that public pressures may induce some teachers to focus all instruction on features of a test; but we assert that if the appropriate connections are made between reading-writing-critical thinking, throughout the curriculum and in all classroom work, students acquire the abilities needed to confront any standardized test.

How can all discipline faculty work together to reinforce the reading skills students have begun to acquire?

All teachers in high school and college, not just English teachers, should make a concerted effort to reinforce reading strategies. They should remind students "how" to read for comprehension; how to find the position of the author; how to check his/her credentials; how to embrace many ideas in one's head; how to connect to prior knowledge as they read; how to question the text; how to predict where the author might go; how to identify appropriate evidence for the argument posed; how to keep track of the sequence of points used in the development of a single argument; how to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; how to mark a text; how to take notes; and how to identify a hierarchy of information or evidence. Disciplinary faculty are encouraged to seek out reading professionals. For example, some community college discipline faculty collaborate with reading specialists to have their students' reading abilities assessed during a class meeting early in the semester; depending on the results, some students may be given additional assistance or referred to campus resources. All students in that class, however, have a clear sense of how their abilities correspond to the reading demands posed by the class. This strategy might be easily replicated in the high school setting.

Teachers in all disciplines must also help students develop effective critical reading strategies. Merely assigning additional reading without instructional guidance will not lead to improved reading abilities. Faculty should provide study questions that guide students through unfamiliar texts, formulate short reading quizzes, and promote discussions about the reading. All of these mechanisms will lead to improvement of student critical reading competencies.

What might be done to nurture students' writing abilities?

Writing is a skill that develops slowly, and its development requires consistent practice, response, and reinforcement. Because students receive no more than one or two terms of college-level writing instruction, college or university writing courses are most effective when they build on a solid foundation of high school preparation.

Once college-bound students reach the last two years of high school, their teachers should engage them in writing tasks that demand analysis, synthesis, research, and critical thinking skills to extend students' writing abilities. Informal responses, summaries, and personal experience essays, especially if they lack strong analytical components, do not alone adequately prepare students for assignments they will encounter in college. High school teachers should also move students beyond formulas such as the five-paragraph essay that artificially structure ideas into a preconceived format and hence discourage critical thinking. Of course, students can learn to write from a restrictive, reductive formula (always do X in an introduction, always use Y number of sentences per paragraph, always conclude by repeating the main ideas, etc.), but that writing is often listless and flat. If few intellectual connections are made between the ideas in the paper and the student writer, there is no ownership. In order to provide students practice in writing prose that is clear, accurate, and compelling-prose expected of college writers-teachers must require that students augment personal experiences with examples from outside information and knowledge, much of it culled from their reading.
The sorts of writing entering college students are most prepared to produce-brief summaries, personal experience essays, informal responses, or short answer essays-are all tasks that essentially report or summarize information or observations. Although useful foundations, these basic sometimes narrative tasks do not necessarily require higher order thinking and therefore do not by themselves require students to analyze information and arguments or to synthesize ideas and information from several sources- the two most frequently assigned college writing tasks. As analysis and synthesis engage students in the critical thinking that lies at the heart of the college educational experience, it is essential that high school teachers prepare students to undertake these tasks; otherwise, their students will be disadvantaged when they enter college and may require remedial or developmental writing instruction.

Besides engaging in writing tasks that require synthesis and analysis, students preparing for college need to learn and practice language features of academic English. These features include grammatical conventions of standard written English, complex sentence structures, punctuation conventions, and vocabulary appropriate for different kinds of writing. Students need to understand the ways in which written English differs from spoken English. When students do not receive corrective feedback on their language problems and adequate opportunities to work on editing their writing prior to entering college, they often find it very difficult to change patterns of errors that have characterized their writing for many years.

Language features of academic written English are, in general, best taught in the contexts of actual reading and writing assignments. Rather than learning rigid rules-a set of writing do and don'ts-students can investigate how language is used in real texts. For example, they might examine what kinds of writing do or do not typically use contractions or first person "I." They could discuss why writers might choose certain kinds of structures to express ideas and what effect they have on readers; in this way they come to see grammar as a resource for communication and not only as a source of errors. Students could also consider how grammatical accuracy and appropriate vocabulary promote better interaction between writers and readers.

In addition to solid instruction in English classes, students also need writing instruction and practice in classes in other disciplines; a strong writing-across-the-curriculum emphasis during high school will prepare students for the similar across-the curriculum writing expectations they will encounter in college. Finally, high school teachers can emphasize the truism that most academic writing responds to other writing, and that we earn a place in an ongoing academic dialogue only by engaging others' ideas as we form our own.

How can high school faculty emphasize writing throughout the curriculum and help students view writing as a recursive process?

English language arts teachers (primarily) bear the burden of teaching students how to write, and consequently students generally learn how to write about literature. If they are to be prepared for college writing demands, high school students need to be assigned writing tasks-and be given instruction in writing-in every course. Only then will they understand the wide variety of writing tasks required of educated citizens, the relationship between audience and expression, and the potential of writing itself as an aid to learning. The more exposure students have to writing, the more comfortable they will become with it, the more willing to use it for all its purposes. In addition, the writing students do for each class will complement and even improve the writing in all other classes.

Many high school teachers may be reluctant to assign writing because they have large classes and little time, or because they don't feel qualified to teach writing, or because they don't see how writing fits into their curriculum. Professional development in teaching writing across the curriculum can help dispel some of these reservations. And although not all assigned writing must be read with the same level of intensity, if students are to master the kinds of writing required in college, they require extensive practice and equally extensive feedback on their work. Moreover, a wide variety of assignments that require students over time to review, to reconsider, to reformulate and reorder, to revise genuinely rather than make small editorial changes, will help students understand that writing is always and in all disciplines a recursive and not a linear process.

Though it is true that reading students' writing takes time, seeing writing as a process makes this task less daunting because it allows teachers to respond to selected stages of student work, thereby breaking up a formidable volume of writing into manageable segments. High school discipline faculty who do not currently assign writing may be surprised-and delighted-to learn that research from writing-across-the-curriculum practitioners indicates that teachers who use writing are more pleased with their students and with their classes, and that students' learning increases. (See Appendix E for resources on this topic.) Implementation of strong writing-across-the-curriculum programs in high schools statewide can help prepare high school students for their writing requirements in college.

How can we work together to ensure the special needs of English language learners?

Secondary and postsecondary educators can determine how best to meet the diverse needs of California's second language learners who seek to acquire sophisticated academic English language competence. However, educational institutions must first identify the backgrounds and address the fundamental language needs of individual L2 learners. Schools should take care not to group all L2 learners together as "ESL students." The reality is that many long-term immigrant residents and many American-born second language learners enter our community colleges and universities needing academic English instruction that differs from the instructional needs of their native English speaking peers. Any additional language instruction required of L2 students before they are admitted to college level English courses is designed to promote their academic success, not to hinder it.

Institutions must promote an understanding that specialized instruction for L2 students is not remediation. All in the classroom benefit when teachers and student peers see L2 students as having language differences, not deficiencies. To this end, high school curricula, like those in colleges and universities, could offer courses for all students that address linguistic and sociolinguistic issues. Of particular importance are understandings of (1) the processes of second language acquisition, and (2) the diverse forms of English used in everyday life. Work in these areas will foster appreciation of California's rich language heritage.

Expectations regarding L2 students' performance have been at the forefront of recent California debates concerning standards and requirements for students exiting secondary schools. ESL specialists agree that minority language students should not have separate standards. However, they stress that the K-12 system has the potential to bring all students into eligibility for admission to postsecondary institutions only if L2 students receive appropriate and extensive language preparation.

For this reason, it is critical that secondary and postsecondary educators carefully assess their L2 students' academic performance, then work together to identify areas in which minority-language students need more intensive preparation. Such assessment necessarily includes an examination of students' critical reading and writing abilities, as well as the listening comprehension and speaking skills so instrumental in college success. Therefore, districts and administrators making decisions about assessment instruments are cautioned against selecting any testing approach that does not use multiple measures to examine students' abilities. Through carefully orchestrated articulation efforts, the secondary and postsecondary segments can collaborate in developing coursework, programs, and instructional strategies that promote university eligibility and success for California's L2 population.

In summary, there are two objectives for successful L2 programs:

• identification of the special needs of these students through assessment of reading, writing, listening, and speaking; and
  

• collaboration across segments to design and provide well-founded and carefully structured instruction to address problem areas, with strong competency, not mere adequacy, as the desirable outcome.

How can we prepare students for the use of technology in their college classes?

College and university faculty are sensitive to what is known as the "digital divide"-the ability of some schools and districts to provide rich technological opportunities for students' research and presentation purposes, while other schools and districts cannot. Yet, to be successful in college, students must enter with basic technological skills that include word-processing, e-mail use, and the fundamentals of Web-based research. All students should have access to computers. Technology is used in colleges and universities from the beginning of first-year classes; and while it is no longer cutting-edge, and while technology is not in itself critical thinking or writing or research, it is a means to critical thinking and writing and research that is engaging and important. Therefore, in keeping with the idea that we need to be teaching students how to learn, technological skills and students' critical appraisal of them should also be taught across the curriculum.

Conclusion

In order to help college-bound students acquire the skills and habits of mind that academic literacy requires, we need to sponsor greater dialogue among teachers and faculty in different disciplines and, just as important, among high school and higher education faculty. For students to appreciate how central academic literacy is for their success in college and university courses, we need to enrich and animate reading and writing instruction across subject boundaries. For students to embrace the challenge of becoming critical thinkers, reflective and insightful readers, imaginative and compelling writers, and articulate listeners, they must experience the satisfaction of developing critical literacy that can emerge from cumulative, sustained, and inspiring teaching.

The work of this Task Force has been enormously rewarding to its members, in part because we engaged the best aspects of academic community. We sought diverse views, respected and nurtured critical agreement and supportive disagreement, and exercised our analytical habits of mind and our imaginations. We hope that this report makes it possible for greater numbers of students and teachers to participate in the rewards of our collaborative intellectual work.