Fall 2013 Teaching Goals

My ENG1010 Syllabus in progress

I’ve just finished drafting my syllabus for ENG1010 sections assigned this Fall 2013 semester. In putting together this syllabus, I’ve set myself a few goals for this semester’s basic writing courses:

Teaching Reading in Wayne State’s Basic Writing Classs

For the last month, I’ve been working on setting specific, research-based goals for teaching reading in the basic writing classroom. Teaching reading can be challenging because it is hard to access in the classroom: reading is something that really happens entirely inside the student’s mind, and we often can only access indirect measures of reading ability, such as written responses to questions, summaries, notes, etc. Nonetheless, reading is fundamental to the composition class. For example, in the basic writing class, two of our central genres are summary and response. These two ways of interacting texts are deeply rooted in reading abilities, and lie at the core of much academic writing.