2010 - Public Relations Society of America

In a separate publication (2010), Bauerlein wrote that high-school English teachers face a
stiff challenge in overcoming such attitudes in the digital age. “With the digital age, the English
teacher’s task has turned into Mount Everest,” he wrote. “Kids see and say more words than ever
before, but their texts and posts and e-mails have only made them less disposed to study the
medium. By the time they reach their senior year of high school, students have internalized a
sense of expression that teachers must labor mightily to dislodge. Their verbal intelligence has
been formed in a crucible of keyboards and “send” buttons, where language is all about
communication, not craft.”
The High School to College Transition
Substantial research demonstrates that high school graduates are not prepared to write at
the college level. According to Knudson et al. (2008), a growing number of incoming university
freshman need remediation in reading and writing before they can take university-level
coursework. This places a heavy burden on both the student and the university faculty. The
authors predict this trend will escalate throughout the country. In a separate study, Attewell et al.
(2006) found that the ranks of students needing remediation include large numbers of students
who successfully completed college preparatory tracks in high school.
This disconnect may be partially explained by a pair of 2006 studies by The Chronicle of
Higher Education. Here, researchers found that college professors are much more concerned
than high-school teachers about the writing abilities of freshmen. Nearly 44% of university
faculty members said that students are not well prepared for college-level writing, compared with
only 10% among high-school teachers. Conversely, only 6% of professors viewed students as
very well-prepared writers, while 36% of high-school teachers held this view.
Other critics have faulted the English instruction that some students receive in universitylevel
courses. In 2006, Miller wrote that at many universities, English 101 is now based on a
“postmodern” approach taught by composition theorists who are more concerned with process,
collaboration, and individual expression than with mechanics, paragraph structure, or studying
classic literary works. In Miller’s view, such an approach fails to prepare students to write in
upper-level classes and produces students who cannot conform to strict conventions of spelling,
mechanics, and usage required for career employment. Miller concludes that the postmodern
approach is founded on fallacies and produces poor results. “Hundreds of thousands of recent
college graduates today cannot express themselves with the written word,” wrote English
professor Stanley Ridgeley in the article. “Why? Because universities have shortchanged them,
offering strange literary theories, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and other oddities in the
guise of writing courses. They’ve offered everything, really, but the basics of writing.” In a
“back to basics” argument, Miller contends that college instructors should teach writing
strategies in class rather than having students work in groups, design and use systematic
grammar reviews, schedule frequent conferences with students, and require students to read and
write about classic literature.
California State University has attempted to diagnose and improve the writing skills of
high-school graduates with the California Early Assessment Program, a collaboration among the
university, the California Department of Education and the California State Board of Education.
The program provides California high school 11 th -graders with an early indication of whether
they are ready for college-level work in English and mathematics. Students who do not
demonstrate readiness can pursue more intensive high-school classes to prepare for college-level
work. Although the concept shows promise, Tierney and Garcia noted in 2008 that many
students, especially those from underrepresented and low-income groups, are failing the high-
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