Annotated bibliography by Cara Bailey
Smith, Alfred N. (1996). Using video and newspaper texts to provide topic schemata in the composition class. The French Review, 70(2), 167-179.
In this article, Smith presents a method for using authentic materials of varied genres to enhance the writing skills of his third-year L2 French students. Writing and composition are presented as communicative acts. As a result, Smith views composition as a process. Students, who enroll in the course despite diverse proficiency levels, are guided through a stratified system of writing which begins with engaging their interest and knowledge in a subject and progresses toward evaluation and feedback. Even the revision stage is designed to enhance future communication. With this in mind, Smith presents certain criteria for choosing a topic and the appropriate video and/or newspaper texts for students. Since students produce the most authentic writing when the subject incites “sufficient interest” (169), each of the chosen texts and subject matter stems from current resources on matters which will most relate to students’ daily lives, e.g. cars, food habits, or vacations. The instructor, then, begins each unit with activities, discussions, etc. which enable students to familiarize themselves with the vocabulary and concepts that they will use in completing the writing activity at the end of the unit. Finally, Smith lays out examples of how he structures the activities so that both the video and the newspaper article complement each other and so that students receive enough structured activities to produce a short essay of approximately 300 words.
By explicitly requiring certain key words (adjectives, etc.), students are encouraged to focus on their content over form. In keeping with the notion of writing and composition as a process, Smith’s devalues grammatical accuracy in the assessment of the final composition activity, as the form is only worth 1 point out of 3. Smith ultimately views his students’ demonstration of fluency, or the length of uninterrupted discourse, as the ultimate test of the benefits of structured writing based on authentic texts. One student wrote a composition of 326 words, and even while relying on vocabulary from the texts, the student was more than capable of expressing individual opinions on the prompt. By this example, Smith’s claim in favor of the structured writing assignment based on the newspaper article and video enhanced the student’s linguistic competence without demanding more than the individual was capable of producing. His conclusion that structuring the assignments builds students’ knowledge and hones the skills needed to produce extended discourse remains convincing. However, structure alone is not sufficient for students to create the best writing, as the example units and topics should reflect the students’ interests and daily lives, as well as their demonstrated proficiency levels. Perhaps in an upper-level L2 students in literature courses would largely be at the intermediate-mid to advanced levels, as Smith’s students are. In the organization of written assignments, instructors should, likewise, display attention to the topic schemata and the variation of textual models provided to students, as Smith does here, to further empower students to create the sorts of analyses often required as final papers.