Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer

Abstract

I agree with Professor Emig, and her work as well as that of Mina Shaughnessy has led me to ponder the relationship of writing and the processes of analysis and synthesis to the teaching of basic writers. In general, my study of basic writers-their strategies, processes, and products2-leads me to believe that they have not attained that level of cognitive development which would allow them to form abstractions or conceptions. That is, they are most often unable to practice analysis and synthesis and to apply successfully the principles thus derived to college tasks. In short, our students might well perform a given task in a specific situation, but they have great difficulty abstracting from it or replicating it in another context. Let me offer one concrete example to illustrate this point. Asked to read ten consecutive issues of a comic strip, choose one of the major characters, and infer the basic values of that character from the information provided in the ten issues, typical basic writing students find it almost impossible to articulate anything about the values of characters unlike themselves. In short, they have problems drawing inferences or forming concepts based on what they have read. Instead, they tend either to describe the characters or, more typically, to drop the comic strip character after a few sentences and shift to what they see as their own values. When I first began teaching basic writers, their response to this type of assignment gave me the first hint of how their difficulties were related to cognitive development. In Thought and Language, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky identifies three basic phases in the ascent to concept formation: the intital syncretic stage, in which word meaning denotes nothing more to the child than a vague syncretic conglomeration of individual objects that have . . . coalesced into an image; the thinking in

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