The ISUComm Foundation Courses give students extensive practice in composing, revising, critical reading, active listening, and focused reflection—the kind of experience that will enable students to acquire university-level communication competence that extends to the rest of their coursework. Three hallmarks of ISUComm Foundation Courses are that students both produce and consume texts (and learn to do so with rhetorical principles in mind), reflection is an important part of their learning, and the creation of an ISUComm ePortfolio allows students to collect and examine their work–in this class and in others in the future.
In both English 150 and 250 you’ll want students to function well in three areas: analyzing, composing, and reflecting. In analyzing, they’ll focus on claims and evidence, on critical thinking, on active listening, and on deconstructing visuals. In composing, they’ll focus on assessing the rhetorical situation, gathering supporting information, determining a thesis or dominant impression, and adapting style and format to fit purpose and audience. In reflecting, they’ll focus on applying rhetorical terminology and identifying patterns in their communication processes to help them grow as communicators and critical thinkers.
| Analysis | Composition | Reflection |
To analyze WOVE communication materials, students will:
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To compose effective positions using a variety of WOVE practices, students will:
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To reflect on their development as communicators, students will:
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While English 150 and 250 courses have this goal in common, they have distinctive features. (See pp. 13-20 in the Student Guide.)
English 150 emphasizes essential writing strategies and uses readings primarily as models for developing those strategies. While focusing on the written, it also introduces students to some basics of oral, visual, and electronic communication.
English 250 emphasizes rhetorical analysis of readings and various kinds of academic writing, especially analysis (both textual and visual), and writing with sources (documented writing). It is often organized around themes that feature communication in civic discourse and/or different disciplines. Many sections participate in Learning Communities centered on disciplinary topics. Other sections, English 250H, are specially designed for Honors Program students, incorporating experimental topics, challenging readings, and customized activities. In English 250, you’ll help students integrate the WOVE communication modes: written, oral, visual, and electronic. You’ll also develop the audience modes that complement the WOVE composing modes, respectively: reading, listening, viewing, and interfacing.
Reader-Oriented Communication
Studying the situational relationships among audience, communicator purpose, and message is fundamental to English 150 and 250. Whether students are analyzing, composing, or reflecting, they should understand that rhetorical choices of substance, organization, style, and delivery are always consciously made within a specific context. Most of your assignments, therefore, should define (or ask your students to define) specific rhetorical problems and situations. In other words, your students should know to whom they are writing and why. Students should always be encouraged to compose for a specific audience, even if you as instructor are the designated audience.
The Composing Process
Along with using a rhetorical approach, you should explain to your students the dynamic tasks that comprise the composing process. (See pp. 36-37 in the Student Guide.) You’ll need to introduce methods of invention and situational analysis, encourage drafting and extensive revision, and enable students to develop their own processes and an explicit awareness of those processes. Students should be aware that their own composing strategies may vary from those of other students as well as from one assignment to the next. Perhaps most important of all, your students should learn through revision to be accountable for their ideas and committed to communicating a substantive and purposeful message to an appropriate audience.
“[Students] will need to question not only what happens on pages and screens and how what is on pages or screens asks readers to respond, but also how audiences come to consider certain texts as worth reading, how audiences learn and use the interpretive strategies (such as reading) that make some texts seem readily accessible and others not, and how texts are published and circulate so that we know of their existence in the first place. The pleasures of visual composition and rhetoric are many, and are of particular use when they help us see and consider how we have become and continue to be who we are.”
— Anne Wysocki
Cognitive Strategies
The communication activities that instructors assign in English 150 and 250 involve a variety of cognitive strategies: observing, inferring, concluding, summarizing, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and persuading. A key aim of both courses is to move incrementally, allowing assignments to introduce new cognitive strategies as well as to reinforce previous ones. Although these thinking skills need not be rigidly sequenced, the assignments should draw upon these skills and progress in level of difficulty.
Scaffolding
In the classroom scaffolding is the learning network a teacher builds, a structured web of selected concepts, interrelated activities, experimental practice, reflection, and feedback. Success is measured not by the individual node, but by the collective strength of the scaffold. Scaffolding learning is particularly valuable in ISUComm’s approach to communication pedagogy:
First of all, scaffolding reinforces the basic communication principles—concepts like stating a main idea and logically organizing evidence to support it—by tracing them through the individual modes. Students complete the same rhetorical task when they use sound, organized evidence to support a main idea in the content of an essay, a brochure, a poster, or an oral presentation, but they may not genuinely understand the principle until they see it translated into more than one mode and until they practice it firsthand.
Second, the WOVE modes themselves may require some scaffolding. Do you start with the more familiar modes, like writing, and move toward the less familiar? Do you teach main idea as thesis in written mode, then extend it to include dominant impression in visual mode, then test it with audience feedback in oral mode. While chunking might be introduced when teaching writing, perhaps in connection with the use of headings, its most striking use might be in electronic communication with web-page design. Determining the best path through the modes for your students will require thoughtful planning. Knowledge transfer is more likely to happen when instructors emphasize these general principles, using the same terminology across different modes or explicitly connecting similar elements across different modes.
Third, without deliberate scaffolding it would be easy to skew student learning more heavily in favor of analyzing for one mode, composing for another, and reflecting for yet another. You need to plan when these three performance competencies will be introduced and developed for each of the WOVE modes.
Fourth, scaffolding is key to developing cognitive competencies as well. Students need planned activities to nudge them beyond basic recalling and summarizing into more advanced tasks of comprehending, translating, and synthesizing.
Scaffolding forms may help you scaffold a whole course, a sequence of assignments, or a single assignment. Download sample scaffolding forms under the CyBox Downloads section of this site.
Transferring
Scaffolding allows students to build their skills and knowledge incrementally. It’s a proven method that aligns with the principle of knowledge transfer, the process by which students understand concepts and translate that understanding into performance.
Studies in the field of knowledge transfer have shown that there is little evidence that writing skills easily transfer from one context to another, that students are not usually conscious of how they use prior knowledge, and that they do not draw upon it without help. In essence, they often have to relearn concepts and skills they already know when they face new contexts. Since the overarching goal of composition classes is to arm students with skills and knowledge that will enable them to be effective communicators in their respective disciplines and future careers, it is incumbent upon instructors to create conditions conducive to transfer. Consistent attention to student reflection on their work, its processes, and their learning is a major part of transfer as articulating ones learning to oneself and others renders that learning transfer-ready.
In their 1992 article “Transfer of Learning,” D. N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon describe two types of knowledge transfer: low road (hugging) and high road (bridging). Both are important. Low road transfer describes situations where practice in a skill is directly applicable in another situation. For instance, students who learn how to use commas correctly can generally use them well no matter what the assignment is, often without conscious attention to the task. High road transfer describes situations where connections need to be made between contexts that are similar but require more analysis, sophistication, and conscious effort to achieve. For instance, students who learn to communicate effectively in one type of genre ought to be able to use similar rhetorical strategies to communicate effectively in another genre.
Conditions necessary for successful transfer include psychological issues like student confidence and motivation that are sometimes beyond the influence of an instructor. But there are relatively simple ways for instructors to provide a fruitful environment for transfer to happen. Giving explicit instruction about self-reflection and mindfulness, offering practice in inquiry about the activity of writing, using common rhetorical terminology across all assignments, helping students make connections with terminology they have used in the past, and making goals and motives explicit are practices that can yield good results.
Transfer can occur with carefully worded reflection prompts after major assignments, feedback on assignments, and in-class discussions that direct student attention to connections between different communication experiences and point their thinking toward what they may do in future situations. For example, these kinds of statements facilitate transfer: “These design elements will be important to remember when you need to create a résumé,” or “Decide which invention strategies worked for you in past assignments and then re-create them whenever you have a communication task.” Audience awareness is a key component to transfer.
There are also instances of “negative transfer,” situations where actions become automatic and formulaic and hinder a student’s full expression. The five-paragraph essay is an example of this. Instructors need to be aware of situations where they can help students break through those restrictions. What’s important is that students understand how to analyze the requirements of assignments, develop rich, full methods of expression using their own rhetorical strategies, and make connections and discoveries which will enable them to have confidence and ability in future situations.
To enable transfer, a goal in each mode should be that students will thoughtfully reflect upon their experiences:
After a writing assignment, students can reflect on what rhetorical processes they used that will transfer to future writing situations. They should discuss specific strategies they used as well as the genre they produced, looking forward towards ways those strategies might help them in future settings where genre expectations may be slightly different.
After an oral assignment, students can reflect on their ability to connect with their audience and on how style and approach in future situations will be dependent on audience.
After a visual assignment, students can reflect on the impact of the visuals they created and how the design principles they learned might be useful in future projects, as well as what they might do differently to communicate better.
After an electronic assignment, students can reflect on different formats and when they are appropriate. They can also reflect on how their skills and knowledge enabled them to reach their audience and how those abilities will be useful in the future.