Mohamad, Mutiara and Janet Boyd. “Realizing Distributed Gains: How Collaboration with Support Services Transformed a Basic Writing Program for International Students.” Journal of Basic Writing 29.1 (2010): 78-98. Print.

In “Realizing Distributed Gains: How Collaboration with Support Services Transformed a Basic Writing Program for International Students,” Mutiara Mohamad and Janet Boyd outline a program for improving basic writing that they piloted at Fairleigh Dickenson University in 2003. Mohamad and Boyd note that there are significant problems with college completion for ESL and developmental writers. For example, most ESL students end up taking many noncredit courses, causing a “long delay as they worked to complete their degree programs, which frustrated students and resulted in high attrition rates” (80). To address this inequality, the authors created a new developmental English track in which students who tested as “basic writers” (based on an essay read by two graders) and all ESL writers had to take one semester of English for Specific Purposes, which was a course with “language instruction relevant to a specific discipline or occupation (81). These basic writers are able to take this course for college credit while also taking other college classes, which benefits them in their major classes and reduces the stigma of remedial or developmental coursework (84).

During the development of this program, Mohamad and Boyd recognized that there would be great differences in proficiencies between members of the class. To deal with this problem, they decided to team up with Farleigh Dickinson’s writing center (known as the Metro Writing Studio) to allow students more one-on-one time with educators who could ensure student success (84). The Metro Writing Studio, which already existed on the campus, was set up to help support these basic writing students in a variety of ways. During time at the studio, students could choose to work on “written and spoken English” through work with tutors who assess and give advice to their writing and also in workshops that offer a variety of topics, from report writing to conversation workshops (86-7).

In some of the English for Specific Purposes classes, teachers set up their classes so students had to attend a minimum of fifteen hours of tutoring in writing each semester (87). The result of the collaboration between English for Specific Purposes and the Metro Writing Studio was greatly increased student writing performance. There was, first and foremost a “dramatic jump in these students’ … test scores from the initial placement test to the post-test,” and while a majority of students felt indifferent or annoyed with the requirement  to visit the Writing Studio for such a great number  of hours, after the course “91% of the students indicated that they would ‘definitely or maybe’ return voluntarily” (87-8). While the decision to use this model grew “organically out of a shared commitment to sustainable student success” (92), students at the college continue to show that they will self-select to get extra help (91). Therefore, collaborations between teachers and support services greatly enhance student success and allow them to have the autonomy to accomplish the difficult work faced by most basic and ESL writers (93).

I recognize that the concept of the Writing Studio comes out of the “Social Turn” model that was described by Janice Lauer in English Studies. During the 1980s, new theories of helping students in collaborative ways emerged. This involved students collaborating in the classroom, reading groups, peer review, and in places such as writing centers (121-22). Lauer also noted that the 1980s brought the emergence of Writing Across the Curriculum (125-26), which is something that Mohamad and Boyd address. At their university, they do not have a Writing Across the Curriculum model, so they envisioned their English for Specific Purposes as a way to implement such a model without taking up the time and resources it would take to implement this across multiple disciplines (78). Essentially, this was Farleigh Dickinson’s way of implementing the research and ideas that came out of an explosion of theory-building within composition as a discipline.

While Lauer’s research might tell us something about why such a model was implemented, it does not (and neither do the authors of this paper) explain how they funded this initiative. The university was able to hire an ESL coordinator, to help “facilitate cooperation and prevent fragmentation among services” and also eleven tutors per semester (85). These tutors are all provided with “paid professional development workshops that offer practical strategies for working with non-native speakers of English” (86). After seeing such an extensive creation of services specifically to help ESL English speakers, I have to ask: where does the money come from? I got my answer when I looked up more information on Farleigh Dickinson. Below, you will see the tuition breakdown between NOVA and Farleigh Dickinson. Students there are paying approximately $53,000 per year to attend school there. At NOVA, they pay approximately $5000 per year. How, then, can NOVA or other public colleges and universities with tight budgets compete with or at least offer a minimum amount of similar services to these schools? While I acknowledged in my last post that the writing center at NOVA has studied their outcomes and found them to be generally successful in helping students improve, I had a student tell me today that he tried to make a writing center appointment and was told that the center was fully booked for nearly three-and-a-half weeks. Unfortunately, the idea of mandatory writing center appointments, particularly fifteen hours per student, is not feasible at the average public college or university. Even getting students into a writing center one or two hours per semester may not be realistic.

While this article addresses excellent ways that writing centers can help ESL and developmental students improve their writing, major problems remain with how to equally serve such students at a variety of learning institutions.

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[Above, you can see a breakdown of the cost of NOVA versus an “average” private college. Farleigh Dickinson comes out way above even this large sum. When students pay an average of $5000 per year for tuition at a community college, benefits such as writing centers, shown to help improve student outcomes, become a luxury rather than a necessity. At what point does this become a discriminatory practice?]

Works Cited

Lauer, Janice. “Rhetoric and Composition.” English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline. Ed. Bruce McComiskey. Urbana: NCTE, 2006. 106-152. Print.

Mohamad, Mutiara and Janet Boyd. “Realizing Distributed Gains: How Collaboration with Support Services Transformed a Basic Writing Program for International Students.” Journal of Basic Writing 29.1 (2010): 78-98. Print.