Rethinking Remediation

Written Communication Apr 1989

GLYNDA HULL ; MIKE ROSE

Abstract

Each year a large number of students enter American higher education unprepared for the reading and writing tasks they encounter. Labeled “remedial,”“nontraditional,”“developmental,”“underprepared,”“nonmainstream,” these students take special courses and participate in special programs designed to qualify them to do academic work. Yet, we do not know very much about what it is that cognitively and socially defines such students as remedial. This article describes a research project on remediation at the community college, state college, and university levels designed to provide such information. We focus on a piece of writing produced by a student in an urban community college, examining it in the context of the student's past experiences with schooling, her ideas about reading and writing, the literacy instruction she was receiving, and her plans and goals for the future. Our analyses suggest that the student's writing, though flawed according to many standards, demonstrates a fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—how human beings continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways.

Journal: Written Communication
Published: 1989-04-01
DOI: 10.1177/0741088389006002001
Open Access: Closed
Topics: two-year college multimodality

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (9)

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HULL (1999)

What's in a Label?

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GREENE (1995)

Making Sense of My Own Ideas

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NYSTRAND et al. (1993)

Where did Composition Studies Come from?

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Horner (1992)

Rethinking the “sociality” of error: Teaching editing as negotiation

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Cites in this index (2)

Hull (1987)

The Editing Process in Writing: A Performance Study of More Skilled and Less Sk…

Research in the Teaching of English
Perl (1979)

The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers

Research in the Teaching of English

Also cites 6 works outside this index ↓

10.2307/748020

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10.2307/356486

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10.17763/haer.55.2.v30pl5j823545780

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10.2307/747293

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10.2307/747446

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10.1016/S0022-5371(80)90230-3

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CrossRef global citation count: 79 View in citation network →