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The First-Year Composition Requirement Revisited: A Survey

2001; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/358628

1939-9006

M. Moghtader, Alanna Cotch, Kristen Hague,

Writing and Handwriting Education

In his 1974 College Composition and Communication article The Composition Requirement Today: A Report on a Nationwide Survey of Four-Year Colleges and Universities, Ron Smith appraised the status of first-year composition on the one-hundredth anniversary of college composition and the twenty-fifth anniversary of CCC. In this article, Smith presented survey findings he gathered about the state of the writing requirement in four-year colleges and universities in the United States. 'As we settle ever further into 1974, the centennial year of Freshman English:' he wrote, nothing should be more appropriate than a to see if all the celebrants have shown up and in what costumes (138). Twenty-five years later, it seems appropriate to take a similar look around at the status of the first-year composition requirement-to see just where we stand and, perhaps, to ahead toward where we are going. Anticipating this opportunity in the spring of 1998, we set out to replicate Smith's study. Our research objective was to determine whether the status of first-year composition had changed since Smith's 1973 study and, if it had, to get a sense of the contours of that change.