Improving motivation with experience: The shaping of first year writers through social-epistemic pedagogy.

摘要

This dissertation is a two part exploration that first investigates the possibility that basic writers find themselves in basic writing courses as a result of poor experiences in high school, particularly in curriculums that asked them to read the same material year after year. My belief is that repetitive material has caused them to lose interest and the motivation to engage. This idea originated from my own poor experiences with high school English which resulted in my placement in basic writing. However, my motivation was changed as a result of an experience with one teacher during my first semester of college. This instructor had us read the creation stories from cultures around the world and in our essays we would reflect on how those stories were still shaping us in the contemporary world. The use of personal experience in my work renewed my motivation. As I advanced in my career as a student and later as a teacher observing and talking with my own students, I came to believe that the motivation to read was lost prior to college, which in turn created writing problems and affected the ability to write college level essays during the time of placement. In order to find whether or not these students' experiences were like mine, I conducted a case study in order to explore the lives of a small group of writers.;The second part details three attempts I made to improve the reading and writing motivation of these students. First, I attempted to make the classroom atmosphere student oriented rather than lecture based. Second, I chose essays that deal with everyday issues to which the students can relate such as body image, television, clothing and music. Finally, in regard to what they wrote, I created broad essay topics that provided an unlimited choice for topics and the opportunity for students to borrow from their personal experiences yet made the topics related enough to the readings so that the student could incorporate sources into their written work.