| Popis: |
"What's wrong with the five-paragraph theme?" I suppose I can best answer the question with another question: What's wrong with ajunior tennis racket, a student-model flute, and a bicycle with training wheels? The answer is, "Nothing is wrong with any of these things, including the fiveparagraph theme, as long as one understands their purposes." And the standard five-paragraph theme (FPT) fulfills its purpose very well. As it is usually taught, the FPT requires (1) an introductory paragraph moving from a generality to an explicit thesis statement and announcement of three points in support of that thesis, (2) three middle paragraphs, each of which begins with a topic sentence restating one of the major ideas supporting the thesis and then develops the topic sentence (with a minimum of three sentences in most models), and (3) a concluding paragraph restating the thesis and points. This highly structured format for essay writing provides for effective inculcation of concepts such as unity, coherence, and development. I have no problem, then, with the form or its teaching. My desire is to explore the issue of how students perceive the FPT and the role of teachers in molding that perception. Over a decade ago I learned of the efficacy of the FPT through an "experiment" at an openadmission junior college where I taught in north Georgia. The University System of Georgia obligated all students to demonstrate their basic literacy before receiving a four-year degree. The writing part of this basic literary test consisted of a single essay upon a choice of unannounced topics such as "Name a modern-day hero or heroine and explain why you think the individual qualifies." (If you guessed that we received scores of essays about "Mother," you are absolutely right.) English faculty members representing area institutions met together to grade the essays, holistically assigning scores ranging from 1 (student must try again) to a near-mythical 4. Since seventy-five percent of the entering students at our junior college placed into at least one remedial course, the state essay presented a considerable challenge. When my colleagues and I discovered that the FPT helped our students improve their woefully inadequate theme-writing skills on several fronts, we standardized our program around it, codifying our approach when several of us collaborated upon a departmental textB.A.S.I.C. Writing (1976, Aubrey Kline, Thomas Nunnally, and Earl Payne, Dubuque: Kendall/ Hunt). Our curriculum clearly influenced the success rate of our students. For while the average SAT score for our college hovered in the lower third of the thirty-plus state institutions, our students' group success rate on the essay put us in the top five to seven schools. Our students were weak in diction, ideas, and literary experience, but in a sea of rambling papers, our group of bland but planned essays rose to the top. But our anomalous success rate did not hold. |
