One of the reasons why all the new students at universities in the U.S. have to take serial writing classes first is that they have to learn not only writing techniques, but also the way of thinking which enable them to go through studying ahead of them. In his essay The Politics of Remediation, Mike Rose mainly suggests three academic skills that are essential for college students. The importance of these skills can be more clear and profound by comparison with other three essays; Critical Thinking by bell hooks, What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College? by Patricia Bizzell, and The “Banking” Concept of Education by Paulo Freire. Rose discusses essential academic skills such as acquiring an academic language, critical literacy, and a problem-solving skill, all of which are required for college students for a variety of reasons and each of these skills is strongly connected to the points shown in hook, Bizzell, and Freire’s essays.
According to Rose, acquiring an academic language skill to be able to write and read is essential for new college students, which is also mentioned in Bizzell’s essay. In Rose’s essay, he illustrates one of his students called Lucia, who was Catholic from working class and had transferred from a community college. She was sent to a tutorial center because she could not understand what was said in the excerpts on her reading assignment. She did not know not only the vocabulary, but also the “frames of mind, predispositions, and background knowledge” (Rose 144). This is the first difficulty many college students encounter since most of the academic readings in the class are very different from the ones they are familiar with at home. According to Rose, many of them do not have enough experien...
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...h the most significant point of the matter. Creativity and application ability are necessary to acquire a problem-solving skill. All these academic skills are related each other. It does not work properly even if one of them is missing.
Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia. “What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?” Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. Eds. Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001. Print.
Freire, Paulo. “The “Banking” Concept of Education.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin, 1996. Print.
hooks, bell. “Critical Thinking.” Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. Print.
Rose, Mike. “The Politics of Remediation.” Living Languages: Contents for Reading and Writing. Eds. Nancy Buffington, Marvin Diogenes, and Clyde Moneyhun. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. Print.
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Lerych, Lynne, and Allison DeBoer. The Little Black Book of College Writing. Boston, New York:
2. Richard, Paul “Critical Thinking: Basic Theory and Instructions Structures,” Foundations for Critical Thinking. 1977. P