The Writing Curriculum – Goals, Objectives, Student Learning Outcomes

The writing curriculum is ultimately designed to help students achieve the ability to write texts that are acceptable in humanities and social science research. Level 3 begins with a focus on the paragraph level and helping students to understand that writing is a process of creation and revision, including planning, writing, editing, and revising. At this stage, objectives include being able to write definitions, basic information, and narrative. Writing a definition involves supporting the definition with examples, comparisons, and opinions; past time narratives require command of chronological organizers. Descriptive writing requires using details for support and the cohesion devices that support such writing.

Level 4 introduces more concepts regarding providing support for a thesis statement in terms of data and outside references to support points that the writer wishes to make. Functions include explaining, evaluating, and summarizing. Student writing topics include writing clear, organized instructions; writing a memo; writing detailed explanations of ideas and concepts; and making an evaluation based on accepted criteria. Students are asked to use a variety of types of evidence to support their evaluation. Finally, some assignments might require students to summarize and respond to reading passages. Sentence-level grammar highlighting simple, compound, and complex (embedded) sentence types are highlighted at this level, even though they may be introduced in Level 3.

Level 5 progresses to the level of a research paper, including the mechanics of references and appropriate rhetorical patterns. This is a typical essay that is described, for example, in Atkinson and Ramana-than’s (1995) account of IEP writing classes rather than the type of essay written in freshman composition classes. The typical IEP writing class essay focuses on developing a thesis statement, followed by paragraphs organized along the lines of topic sentences and supporting ideas, and ending with a concluding paragraph. It also includes details of citing references in text and providing a reference list at the end of the paper. Essays that are developed according to particular organizational patterns include: comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and ‘argumentative’ essays, which means proposing and supporting a point of view. Optionally, students could write classification essays and/or process analysis essays.

The Grammar Curriculum – Goals, Objectives, Student Learning Outcomes

The grammar curriculum was designed to support the other curricula at various levels. In that sense, the idea to provide students and teachers with a set of grammar points that might come up for ‘focus on form’ (singular). This notion is in contrast to a grammar syllabus that ‘focuses on forms' (plural), which Long (2007, pp. 121-122) describes thus: ‘Focus on forms attempts the impossible: to impose a pre-set, external linguistic syllabus on the learners, riding roughshod over individual differences in readiness to learn’. In contrast, Long (2007, p. 122) defines ‘focus on form’ as follows:

Focus on form . . . involves briefly drawing students’ attention to problematic linguistic targets, when certain conditions are met, in context, in an otherwise communicatively oriented lesson. It can help learners “notice” items in the input (in the sense of Schmidt, 2001, and elsewhere) that otherwise may escape them, as well as mismatches between the input and deviant forms in their output, especially where there is no resulting communication breakdown that might serve the purpose.

In other words, rather than teaching a set of step-by-step grammar points in each class that the learners are supposed to learn and create a system with, the grammar curriculum is used to assist in noticing form in general and to serve as a resource for in-class corrective feedback when the appropriate opportunity for feedback arises. The grammar curriculum is also designed to raise awareness of structures that the learners have been exposed to either before attending the IEP or as support for the rhetorical patterns that they will need in the course of their other classes. The development of grammatical accuracy in speaking and writing classes uses the grammar points that are covered at each level (simple sentence structures and principal parts of speech). More generally, the goals are to develop spoken and written fluency in communicative situations using the target grammar points, improve listening comprehension of texts including the target grammar structures, and develop the ability to identify and such structures in reading texts. Finally, and very importantly for the advanced students, they should develop the ability to monitor their own errors in speaking and writing and be able to correct them.

Thus, at Level 3, examples of verb phrase structures that are reviewed include the contrast between simple past and present, present/future-time modals to express ability, requests, possibility and necessity, adverbial clauses of time, and gerunds and infinitives. For noun phrases, articles are reviewed, as well as basic quantifiers. At Level 4, for verb phrase grammar, the challenging topics of event aspect and tense are reviewed, along with passive. In noun phrases, relative (adjective) clauses including subject and object relatives and ‘where’ and ‘when’ clauses are covered. At Level 5, review for verb phrase grammar includes more complex

The IEP at the University of Pittsburgh 33 and nuanced work with modals, unreal conditionals, embedded clauses (noun clauses), and passive. For noun phrases, articles, adjective order, and quantifiers are reviewed.

To sum up, if students have been in a grammar class, the teacher can more easily make reference to important metalanguage and awareness on the part of the student to speedily draw a student’s attention to their output at the right moment. This approach is part of the whole view of methods. Although some researchers would not be in favor of explicit teaching about grammar, more recently, some research has shown that contrastive teaching that compares the LI system to the L2 system can be beneficial (McManus & Marsden, 2017, 2019). Such recent research findings lend support to the IEP view that final conclusions have not been reached with regard to explicit instruction of grammar points. Thus, even if only some students can benefit from explicit instruction in grammar, they should be provided with such opportunities to learn from it.