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These
criteria were adopted on 4/28/2000 by the University of Hawai‘i Systemwide
Standing Committee on Written Communication.
Criteria for courses that satisfy the written component of the
University of Hawai‘i General Education Written
Communication/Communication Skills/English Communications Requirement
As of 4/28/00, approved courses include
English 100 (all campuses), English as a Second Language 100 (UHH, UHM
prior to F00, KapCC, and LCC), English 101 (UHM), English Language
Institute 100 (UHM F00-present).
The introductory writing course focuses
on preparing students for writing they will do both as college students
and as citizens who make contributions to the larger public discourse.
While in the introductory writing course, students learn–through
recursive writing processes, teacher and peer response, reading, and
research–to develop complex ideas in a variety of genres and for
differing audiences. They synthesize personal experience and knowledge
with ideas they encounter as they read and discover as they write.
Instruction proceeds according to the assumptions, teaching practices,
and learning goals described below.
The writing requirements vary for the
campuses throughout the system. On all campuses, students must complete
the written communication requirement during their first 24 credits or
take appropriate prerequisite courses. Course titles1 and
descriptions vary but the course content conforms to the guidelines
below. All campuses also require writing-intensive (WI) courses to be
completed in the subsequent year(s); instruction in these courses
follows a single set of UH System guidelines.
Written Communications/Communication Skills/English
Communications Guidelines
Assumptions
Teachers and students work from the
following assumptions, which are embodied differently in the
practices of different teachers.
- Writing is the work of individuals in
communities, linking the past and present, the private and public.
At the college level, communities are represented by academic
disciplines, which use different kinds of writing to advance and
codify their knowledge, to carry out their work, and to serve their
members.
- Writing is intellectual work. Learning
to write involves learning to develop complex ideas in various
genres for various audiences.
- Writers integrate complex ideas from
academic and serious public discourse with their own experiences and
knowledge.
- Writing involves making decisions
about audience, appropriate conventions, and language; students
learn to make such decisions and to understand the implications of
those decisions for their readers.
- Writing is both personal and social
and adapts itself to individual contexts such as self-reflection and
to social contexts such as collaborative projects.
- Writing is achieved through the
processes of response and revision, in which peers and teacher give
students reactions to their compositions; writers may use these
responses for revision.
- Publishing or sharing writing deepens
and improves student interest in writing.
Teaching Practices
Throughout the course, teachers
- Encourage students to think of
themselves as writers who engage in reflection and self-assessment.
- Emphasize inventing, drafting,
revising, editing, and proofreading as recursive elements of writing
processes.
- Help students understand the
rhetorical concerns of writing situations, audience expectations,
and appropriate writing strategies.
- Respond to student writing to
facilitate revision at all stages of the writing process.
- Share with their students their own
experiences as writers both in and out of academic settings.
- Provide opportunities for students to
interact with one another and to work collaboratively.
- Communicate with students regarding
progress, opinions, and questions using various forms such as
journal responses and e-mail.
- Interact with students in conferences
and in group and class discussions.
- Provide instruction in basic research
activities.
- Help students find pleasure and
satisfaction in the aesthetic, intellectual, and persuasive
dimensions of writing, so they will understand writing’s worth for
their personal and professional lives in college and beyond.
- Follow the assessment practices
described in the CCCC’s "Writing Assessment: A Position
Statement" (http://www.ncte.org/positions/assessment.html).
Learning Goals
As they complete the course, students
- Write well-reasoned compositions that
reveal the complexity of the topic they have chosen to explore or
argue.
- Read for main points, perspective, and
purpose; evaluate the quality of evidence, negotiate conflicting
positions, and analyze the effectiveness of a text’s approach, in
order to integrate that knowledge into their writing.
- Choose language, style, and
organization appropriate to particular purposes and audiences.
- Synthesize previous experience and
knowledge with the ideas and information they encounter as they read
and discover as they write.
- Use sources such as libraries and the
Internet to enhance their understanding of the ideas they explore or
argue in their writing; analyze and evaluate their research for
reliability, bias, and relevance.
- Use readers’ responses as one source
for revising writing.
- Use standard disciplinary conventions
to integrate and document sources.
- Edit and proofread in the later stages
of the writing process, especially when writing for public
audiences. Control such surface features as syntax, grammar,
punctuation, and spelling.
Basic Requirements
Students are expected to write a
minimum of 5,000 words of finished prose. This total is generally
divided into six to nine papers. As the guidelines suggest, the
instructional emphasis is on the student’s writing; assigned
reading serves the purpose of the assigned writing.
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