ABSTRACT
At the opening convocation for the academic year, our community college president concluded his state-of-the-college address by announcing his goals for the coming year, one of which was to create a basic skills laboratory. As a dean with responsibility over the English basic skills program among other areas and as a basic writing researcher and teacher, my reaction was violent opposition to his proposal. First, I was opposed because of the complete change in our philosophy such a facility reflects: putting students at a computer with an online textbook to do grammar exercises is an outdated approach compared to our classes where reading and writing are taught with grammar instruction being accomplished in the context of those assignments. We do not use workbooks and do not value “seat time.” We offer students the option of a two-semester basic writing sequence of reading, writing, and critical thinking courses or an accelerated one-semester course. In these courses, students write primarily argumentative essays supported with information and citations from the nonfiction, full-length text and essay collections they are reading. One text we use because it tends to reflect our curriculum is Robinson and Tucker’s Text and Contexts. The goal of our basic writing courses is to prepare students to complete successfully a freshman composition course where they will write 8,000 words and read the equivalent of five, full-length, nonfiction texts. The freshman composition course transfers to both public and private universities as the first-semester course required for general education.
