Date of Award

8-25-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Rhetoric and Writing

First Advisor

Huey Crisp

Abstract

Students in Basic Writing classes are separated from their peers who are mainstreamed into regular composition classes, stigmatizing them as having substandard skills. Preconditioned to question their ability to write, they arrive in class with zero confidence and varying degrees of ability to construct meaning. Students rely on their prior knowledge to fill in the gaps between texts. Their ability to accommodate and assimilate new information to their prior knowledge is dependent on their ability to link with it. Since semiotician Julia Kristeva first used the term intertextuality in 1967, there has been a great deal of interest in intertextuality, most recently in the complex and synergistic relationship among text, reader, and context. Teachers use intertextuality, whether it is recognized or not, when they ask students to relate one text to another. Recognition of this intertextuality, however, can increase connections between academic texts and texts outside of the classroom, including discourse community texts, workplace texts and family texts. The difference between what a student can do without help and what he/she can do with help is what Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist, called the "Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)." The ZPD emphasizes teacher-learner collaborations and negotiation by designing a curriculum that is located within the students' zone of proximal development. What a teacher wants to achieve, what processes they think students need to learn and how they will construct the curriculum to enable intertextual links will all depend in part on their theory of knowledge and understanding of intertextuality and ZPD. By improving our understanding of how students link information, we can improve our teaching in several ways. By studying instances in which students successfully used prior knowledge to develop their understanding of texts, we can design our curriculum to exploit that students' prior knowledge. By determining their zone of proximal development, we may be in a better position to collaborate and guide them into their future zone.

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