Annotated bibliography

Ball, Arnetha. "Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students." The English Journal 85.1 (1996): 27-36.

This article discusses various patterns in speech and writing unique to African American students. Ball argues that certain African discursive patterns, often identified as lacking academic language and criteria, actually reflect various requirements necessary for academic writing. Although these language patterns are often viewed as non-standard, they do take into account skills such as literary analysis and use of personal experience as evidence. Ball concludes that students can effectively draw on African and AfricanAmerican-based linguistic and rhetorical patterns and still meet the requirements for their expository writing assignments at the same time.

Gilyard, Keith, and Elaine Richardson. "Students' Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric." Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.

In their essay, Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson, “Students’ Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric,” apply SRTOL to composition classroom practices. They argue that SRTOL is still controversial because many teachers still believe that they should be “preparing so-called minority students for success in the market place, all while many of the most successful people in the market place are running off with fresh stacks of pretty little green ones accumulated to the advertising beat of hip hop” (38). Gilyard and Richardson describe and analyze their own study on fifty-two African American students who enrolled in an Afrocentric basic writing course. Researchers were looking specifically at rhetorical and modes of Africanized discoursed used in the student essays. For each student enrolled, a panel of writing specialists (from varied racial/ethnic backgrounds) scored their out of class essays. Like Smitherman’s 1994 study on NAEP high school students, the researchers found that “African American students who used more Black discourse scored higher than those students who did not” (45). Hence, Gilyard and Richardson conclude that African American rhetoric and discourse can serve as an opportunity for applying SRTOL to classroom practices.

Hollie, Sharroky. “Acknowledging the Language of African American Students: Instructional Strategies.” The English Journal 90.4 (2000): 54-59.

Hollie discusses how the Linguistic Affirmation Program (a comprehensive non-standard language awareness program designed to serve the language needs of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Hawaiian Americans, and Native American students who are not proficient in Standard English) is an effective program to teach Standard English without devaluing the languages students bring from home. The article also discusses six key instructional approaches to teaching Standard English to students whose first language is another language.

Juzwik et al. “Writing Into the 21st Century: An Overview of Research on Writing, 1999 – 2004.” Written Communications 23.4 (2006): 451-476.

In their article, “Writing Into the 21st Century: An Overview of Research on Writing, 1999 to 2004,” Juzwik et al. found that “[c]ontext and writing practices; multilingualism, bilingualism, and writing; and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems in contemporary writing research” (464). What is unclear in their study, however, is the proportion of those research studies that actually employ teacher-research as the primary methodology. From Juzwik et al.’s study, categories such as writing instruction and multilingualism/bidialectalism become very large categories that may account for a wide range of methodologies (including but not limited to teacher-research), contexts, and settings. Of the research categories studied between 1999 and 2004, how many studies were teacher-research? How might these categories have changed in the last five years, where we have seen a decline and teacher-research empirical work published in journals associated with composition studies?

DW 3a

For this task, I chose one of my assigned readings Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students to do a primary analysis. First, the main idea of this article is to share information on how some AAVE speaking students have successfully utilized their language abilities-the language of their everyday lives-within the context of their expository writing and to share principles that have guided the author in his or her work with language diverse students. Furthermore, the principles specifically refer to two ideas: one is the acknowledgement of the value in diverse voices and in cultivating a desire to actually "hear" those voices, another one is stimulating effects of the strategies successfully used by those AAVE speakers in writing classes for the promotion of academic composition studies. And these two ideas are what the author want to inform the audience eventually. To demonstrate those strategies and relate them to his or her ideas, the author used the voices and texts of actual AAVE-speaking students in and out of their school settings. Finally, the author draw a conclusion from the findings of those examples that integration of AAVE features in African American students' writings do not mean poor writing but untapped resources that English teachers could dig out to expand and improve the academic writing skills. Thus, it is obviously to see that this article is a empirical scholarship that revolved around a core concept of writing pedagogy, and supported by the implications of various successful composition strategies used by African American students in their different discourse communities.

As far as I am concerned this article does effectively make an argument about its role in composition studies. To achieve this, it introduced a general background of AAVE within composition studies field at first. Then, it evolved its main ideas from the brief introduction and supported them with the analysis of concrete and typical examples. And this is a very logical method as I thought. Moreover, I learned a lot from it, which I gradually knew why we should respect each other's language: Every language has its own strengths.