Praxis 2

A Critical Review on Remedial Writers

Recently, the assumption that successful writers think in a different manner compared to successful writers has been widely discussed by the basic and remedial writers. Mike Rose, in his article, Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism, examines the four main theories that helped shaping this type of considerations:

1.Field dependence-independence

2.Hemisphericity

3.Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

4. Orality-literacy theory

First, as the most researched of the cognitive styles, field dependence-independence theory was developed by Herman Witkin. Using the Rod and Frame and the Embedded Figures Tests, Wikin concluded that people who can be described as “field-dependent” tend to be more socially oriented and have trouble with analytical tasks in comparison to the field-independent ones. Regarding Witkin’s approach, Rose suggests that it is not certain what the tests are measuring and there are conceptual-linguistic issues. In other words, with his field-dependent-independent theory, Witkin led us to a deeper consideration of the interrelations of personality, problem solving and social cognition by revealing interesting perceptual differences. If we applied this notion to writing, then the discourse of field independents would be more analytical while field dependents discourse would be socially detailed. At this point, I believe it is important to note that distinguishing and characterizing people in the manner that Witkin did may lead us to discrimination among students. Since the tests are not so reliable in the sense that they are ambiguous, we cannot afford such a discrimination.

Secondly, hemisphericity refers to the idea that cognitive processing of people may be determined by the activity on the part of their left or right cerebral hemispheres. In fact, for some time neurologists claimed that damage to certain areas of the left side of the brain could cause speech disorder while damage to certain areas on the right could cause disorientation in human body. In that regard, hemisphericity theorists draw close attention to the neurological substrate of information processing and language production. Yet, some criticism has been made considering the theory’s method, subjects and conceptualization. “The idea of hemisphericity lacks adequate foundation and that, because of the assumptions implicit in the idea of hemisphericity, it will never be possible to provide such a foundation. The idea is a misleading one which should be abandoned.” According to the recent empirical studies of hemisphericity, it is more likely that invalid tests are being used and considering the discussions made I believe it would be appropriate to abandon the notion of hemisphericity.

Another important theory that Rose analyzes is Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. He developed a perceptive and non-behaviorist method to study cognitive growth and attempted to enunciate the changes in reasoning as children grow. As his approach on cognition is fundamentally mathematical, Piaget postulates four stages claiming that all children pass through them in the same order: Sensorimotor (from birth to age 2), preoperational (from age 2 to 7), concrete operational (from age 7 to 11) and formal operational (from age 11 to 15). Underlying the fact that Piaget’s tests are complex, Rose remarks the social conditions created when these tests were done. As referred to psychologists like Donaldson, the critical point here is to give children a chance to get familiar with the tasks and repeat the instructions to ensure children comprehend clearly what is being asked. As the one of the most controversial issues in Piagetian approach, training also plays a crucial in that sense. In my opinion, the most important aspect of Piaget's theory is that each cognitive stage is different, not just as a matter of degree, but rather a child's type of thinking is quite different depending on the stage it is in. Providing evidence for a qualitative difference between stages has not been comprehensively achieved.

The fourth and the final approach is the orality-literacy theory that is grounded on the studies of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Eric Havelock and Walter Ong. The theory is based on the notion that introduction of literacy into a society affects how people in that society thinks. The strong version of this theory suggests that writing transforms the cognition of people whereas the weak version claims that once literacy is introduced into society human cognition is extended rather than transformed. Still, this approach on literacy and its effects on people’s cognition is problematic. At this point, Rose distinguishes his critics into three parts: Firstly, he rejects the idea that literacy is the driving force of social-cultural change. Secondly, he considers Havelock’s claims on pre-alphabetic Greeks as speculative. He also corroborates his objection referring to the twentieth-century anthropological studies of the reasoning of primitive tribesmen. Finally, Rose advocates that the literacy backgrounds of people which end up in remedial education classes are much more complex than the orality-literacy theory suggests. In that sense, I believe that orality-literacy theorists give us compelling reflection on spoken and written language.

At the end of his article, Rose summarizes the main problems of the examined theories:

1.The theories end up levelling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition. The complexity of cognition is narrowed and the rich variability that exists in any social setting is reduced.

2. The four theories encourage a drift away from careful focus on student writing and on the cognitive processes that seem directly related to it.

3. The theories inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes that should be subject of our investigation.

Remedial writing students are usually considered to have a lack of understanding of the rules of formal written English which may demonstrate itself in non-traditional syntax, grammar, spelling etc. Although there are different theorists ranging from Shaughnessy to Rose debating on the remedial writing issue, indeed, I personally do not think that remedial students are inadequate in their literacy skills due to their lack of intelligence. I believe it is because of the inadequate education they have received due to some economic or maybe social limitations. Nobody can blame a student that cannot give social details in his/her discourse just because he/she is considered to be a field-independent by Witkin’s tests or some hemisphericity theorists characterized him/her as left sided.

Focusing on such differences, while potentially democratic and certainly instructive, can lead us to miss two points: (1) fundamentally, we all possess the means to use language to create meaning; we all participate in fundamental linguistic and cognitive processes by virtue of our common humanity and (2) human beings, given the right social conditions, are astoundingly adaptive, and to determine what works against this adaptability, we need to look at the social and instructional conditions in the classroom rather than assume the problem is to be found in the cultural characteristics students bring with them.