Introduction to ENG 101

  1. What Is ENG 101?
  2. Why Is ENG 101 Important?
  3. What Do We Do in ENG 101?
  4. What Are ENG 101 Learner Outcomes?

What Is ENG 101

ENG 101 is built around domains of writing knowledge (Anne Beaufort) that professional writers draw from when writing for various audiences and rhetorical situations. These knowledge areas also transfer across contexts:

  • Rhetorical Knowledge: writers rely on their understanding of how rhetorical situations work. Knowledge of how exigences, rhetors, audiences, and constraints shape how we read and write is important. According to the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) websiteLink: "Texts are dynamic and respond to the goals of the writer(s), goals of the reader(s), and the wider rhetorical context, which may include culture, language, genre conventions, and other texts. In order to write effectively, students need to think rhetorically, understanding that all aspects of writing—from voice, to organization, to stylistic conventions—are affected by the rhetorical situation. Practices that assist students in developing rhetorical thinking include: genre analysis (comparative analysis of multiple examples of a type of text), rhetorical analysis of a text (examining arguments in disciplinary texts to learn the rhetorical patterns of argument in a given discipline), and peer review."
  • Writing Process Knowledge: writers use their understanding of the writing process to brainstorm, plan, draft, peer-review, discuss, revise, and edit their work. Writing studies research continually demonstrates the value of process knowledge and how writers transfer it across contexts. According to the Writing Principles from the WAC website Link: "For high-stakes writing (writing that will be graded), the writing process is long and complex, with the writer revising in response to developing ideas, reader feedback, and a deeper understanding of the rhetorical situation. Scaffolding students’ writing processes often leads to student writing that displays an increase in the depth of thought, awareness of audience, and attention to style and editing. Practices that assist students in developing an effective writing process include: class discussion of writing as a process, peer review of early drafts, teacher feedback to early (ungraded) drafts, and the assignment of reflective cover letters turned in with final drafts that detail the writer’s process."
  • Genre Knowledge: writers rely on their experiences writing and knowledge of different genres and how they structure and form content in different ways for different purposes and audiences. The different types of genres and forms you will encounter across courses, contexts, and disciplines will be rhetorically situated in specific ways and require different writing processes. According to the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) website, "Effective writers are those who have learned to write across a variety of rhetorical situations, for a variety of audiences, and for a variety of purposes. Learning-to-write assignments are often higher-stakes assignments that require the writer to write with attention to the conventions of a rhetorical context (i.e. within the genre and discourse conventions of a specific community) and to move through a multi-draft writing process. Learning-to-write (LTW) assignments include academic genres (i.e. research reports, argumentative essays, analyses, annotated bibliographies) as well as civic genres (i.e. letters to the editor, proposals, reviews, blogs).
  • Writing as a tool for learning: The most important value of writing is its ability to aid in learning and to act as a learning tool. According to the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) website, "Writing has long been recognized as enhancing the learning process. Writing makes thinking visible, allowing learners to reflect on their ideas. Further, writing facilitates connections between new information and learned information, and among areas of knowledge across multiple domains." One of the most important theories for evoking writing as a learning tool is writing-to-learn theory. "In practice, writing-to-learn (WTL) activities are informal, ungraded, and designed to focus on a particular learning outcome. WTL activities include double-entry (or dialectic) journals, freewriting, observation journals, reading responses, online class blogs, and class wikis."
  • Discourse Community Knowledge: writers rely on their understanding of standards and conventions when writing for certain communitities, purposes, and audiences. Students will encounter many different writing practices and literacies across courses, contexts, and disciplines that have been constructed for a specific group of people.
  • Content Knowledge: writers rely on an understanding of a discipline or field's knowledge to write for a specific community. Without an understanding of the knowledge-making practices a community depends on to write, members of a community will struggle to write and read well, and connect with the community (Beaufort, p. 3).

Whay Is ENG 101 Important?

ENG 101 will provide you with foundational writing knowledge based on research and expertise so you can make insightful and coherent decisions about how to write across contexts. Expectations for writing built on myth lead to frustrated writers. The CWU English department's Writing Program believes that knowing what writing is and does leads to better writers and writing. Students benefit from developing writing knowledge they can use as a travel guide for writing across disciplines. Learning more about Beaufort’s domains for writing knowledge expands the understanding of how writing functions across disciplines and contexts, how all writing is rhetorically situated, and how writers actually write for real communities and purposes. The English department's ENG 101 curriculum meets all of the AWI learning outcomes, and our learning outcomes align with the research on teaching writing and with the best practices from the leaders in the field of writing studies.

ENG 101 Learner Outcomes

To design our learning outcomes, we followed the statements and principles for developing writing programs and curriculums from the Writing Program Administration, the National Center for Teaching English, the Conference of College Composition and Communication, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Administration. Current research in writing studies proclaims that writing instruction and composition pedagogy should be teaching students how to transfer what they learn and know about writing across disciplines and contexts so that they have the best chance to apply what they learn to the writing they will do in and outside of the university. According to the Writing Program Administration (WPA) “Statement and Principles” for teaching writing, writing courses should focus on teaching students’ "rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, writing process knowledge, knowledge of conventions and genres across disciplines, and multimodal and multimedia literacies."

Outcome 1: Identify and analyze how a variety of print, digital, and multimodal texts are rhetorically situated, locating their purposes, claims, evidences, biases, intended audiences, and constraints.

For this outcome, students conduct rhetorical analysis assignments that explore the purpose, audience, bias, and evidences of a variety of texts. Student learn how to read and identify the rhetorical situation for a variety of texts. Students practice using writing and multimodality to respond and react to different types of primary and secondary source material. Students completr papers, reading responses, analysis responses, and multimodal projects using narrative rubrics.

Outcome 2: Read, summarize, analyze, and synthesize a variety of college-level print and multimedia sources to support and respond to a variety of ethical and objective writing goals across contexts.

For this outcome, students write annotations that summarize a variety of print and multimodal source material. Students write annotations with rhetorical commentaries. Students complete reading synthesis and analysis assignments. Students will complete assignments that summarize, analyze, and synthesize source material. Students conduct video and multimodal analysis. Students complete papers, participate in workshops, and complete multimodal projects using narrative rubrics.

Outcome 3: Collect secondary and primary source materials for a variety of writing goals and evaluate and analyze those materials for currency, thoroughness, reliability and reasoning. Collect primary source materials about individual writing habits.

Students will analyze source materials from across contexts, analyze and summarize research results, collect examples of writing across contexts for analysis, investigate literacy and writing influences, and collect sources from databases and the library to develop multimodal and writing projects. Students conduct interviews and create observation materials. Students complete writing journals and reflections. Students will complete papers, reading responses, projects that incorporate primary and secondary source material. Students will collect research about their writing process and analyze it.

Outcome 4: Define writing coherently across contexts, express ideas in coherent sentences and paragraphs, and practice drafting, revising, editing, reviewing, and discussing coherent writing.

Investigate how the writing process functions across contexts. Analyze writing communities across disciplines and write reports of findings. Write analysis papers about how writing functions across contexts. Drafting and peer review activities. Brainstorming Graded ePortfolios that evaluate writing process over the quarter. Graded writing to learn assignments. Graded papers, reading responses, annotations, draft workshops, group work, and multimodal projects using rubrics. Graded peer-reviews.

Outcome 5: Cite and document source material for a purpose, context, and audience, utilizing an appropriate and expected style manual, guidelines, and writing conventions.

Drafting and peer reviewing activities and workshops that address style guidelines and conventions. Citation and mechanics workshops. Students will practice citing sources for a purpose. Rhetorical citation activities and workshops. Graded assignments for contextualized citation practices. Graded citation workshops and assignments. Graded papers that interject research throughout the quarter.

Outcome 6: Design flexible writing plans and heuristics for writing across contexts that accommodate a variety of purposes, audiences, and constraints.

Designing heuristics for writing across contexts and disciplines. Investigating the complexity of writing across contexts. Practicing writing several different types of genres to learn how to adapt our writing goals and needs across contexts. Reflection assignments that examine how well students can apply what they learned about writing. Metacognition activities and assignments. Graded ePortfolios that examine students’ writing process and products holistically, across the quarter.

We also relied on the Statements and Principles for developing writing programs and curriculums from the Writing Program Administration, the National Center for Teaching English, the Conference of College Composition and Communication, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Administration. Current research on teaching writing argues that writing instruction and composition pedagogy should provide students more practice in the following areas:

What Do We Do ENG 101?

ENG 101 uses the WPA framework for rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills for college success to design lessons, assignments, discussions, and activities. “Based in current research in writing and writing pedagogy, the Framework was written and reviewed by two- and four-year college and high school writing faculty nationwide and is endorsed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project.”

The CWU English department supports the development of our students' habits of mind and metacognition. A habit of mind refers to ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and that will support students’ success in a variety of fields and disciplines. The Framework identifies eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing:

  • Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world.
  • Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
  • Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
  • Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
  • Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
  • Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
  • Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
  • Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

The ENG 101 curriculum will also develop your metacognition. Eleonora Papaleontiou-Louca (2003) notes that metacognition:

  • "encourage the student to ‘think aloud’
  • focus his/her attention on understanding the way she/he thinks and the problems she/he has to solve;
  • ask not only for the results, but also for the procedure of thought and the strategy followed;
  • teach strategies for overcoming difficulties;
  • place each subject among its relevant ones and find connections among them;
  • encourage the student to generate questions before, during and after the elaboration of a subject;
  • help the student to perceive entities, connections, relations, similarities and differences;
  • enable the student to become aware of the criteria for assessment."

You will practice metacognition throughout the quarter and your instructor will ask you to reflect on your learning throughout course. At the end of the term you will create an ePortfolio and write a reflection memo about your learning experiences in the course.

Works Cited on This Page

  • Papaleontiou-Louca, Eleonora. (2003). The concept and instruction of metacognition, Teacher Development, 7(1).
  • Beaufort, Anne. (2007). College writing and beyond: A new framework for university writing instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Print.