미국 ‘Writing About Writing’ 교육의 특성과 몇 가지 교훈

This paper deals with the “Writing About Writing(WAW)” which emerged as a new model of first year composition education in USA recently. Through this new model Korean first year composition(FYC) education can gain several lessons. WAW began in 2007 by Downs and Wardle in the USA . They published a paper“, Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions (Re)Envisioning “First -Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies” and through this article, Downs and Wardle insisted that first year composition education is not effective and that teaching of writing theory is more effective. This is because current FYC focuses on growing critical thinking toward social issues, even though the FYC was initially created to help writings in specific majors. WAW is based on Russell’s Activity Theory. Basically, Activity theory disagrees writing with no particular content, i.e. General Writing Skills Instruction. Every writings has individual specialty based on the contents, and the circumstances. For this reason, general writing and academic or public discourse cannot be existed. Therefore, from Acitivity Theory’s perspective, it is only possible to write about specific major fields and contents. In this paper, detailed explanation about WAW’s curriculum is given. WAW provides writing scholars’ papers as reading references, and students carry out Assignments based upon them. Assignments have two notable characteristics. One is known as a Reflective Assignment which allows students to literally reflect on individual literacy experience, and the other is known as a Research Assignment, which lets students to have researches on literacy activities. Through this curriculum, students are able to transfer their writings to writing in major field. This paper suggests some lessons from WAW’s features as this paper goes through them. First, deeper understanding of the correlation and the connectedness between writings’ contents and contexts in FYC is needed. Second, Instructors tend to forget FYC’s initial goal, and replace the initial goal by their own individual goals. Lastly, we often assume that there might be a learning transfer in FYC. This paper expects to have an opportunity to reflect on Korean’s FYC through WAW education.