Ray Wallace and Susan Lewis Wallace

Several decades ago Walter Ong noted in a landmark essay that a writer's audience was always a fiction, and in many ways these words have become more prophetic and, alas, ironic in college composition classes concluding this century. Ong's essay, of course, dealt with audience considerations, and the supposition that writers "invented" an audience for their writing, had to imagine a fictional audience responding to their writing, and had to understand what this fictional audience would and would not comprehend from their writing. What many composition theorists took from this insightful reasoning was that a writer's drafting strategies would gradually clarify a real audience's needs. Implicit in this compelling argument was, of course, an awareness of audience. Unfortunately, today our composition classrooms are full of many shiney, well-scrubbed, expensively clad, functional academic illiterates who have not the first idea of what it is to be considered a reader, let alone think about how a reader (fictional or not) might respond to their attempts at written communication.

We preface this discussion by noting that not all our students fall into this category--many students have already discovered the joy and importance of reading, many read daily newspapers and have subscriptions to several weekly and monthly periodicals, many use the public and high school libraries regularly, and many view a visit to a bookstore as both entertaining and educational.

However, this chapter discusses what for us is an alarming increase in the number of students who are functionally and culturally illiterate and how these students impact both our composition pedagogy and our expectations for their success. The label "illiterate" is a strong one, and we recognize this from the outset; therefore, we do stipulate for this particular discussion that the focus here is the academic illiteracy of many of our students. We deal with a sizable population who after twelve years of education cannot read eighth-grade materials with even the most basic comprehension levels, form sentences correctly, and still. have no clear idea about how (and why) to construct an essay (or even a letter). Many of these same students demonstrate an alarming lack of basic factual knowledge about their local, state, regional, national, or international environment. Many of our students have never read a novel, and never read a newspaper or magazine. Many of our students watch five or six hours of television a day, never attend a cultural event (unless forced to for academic credit), and have never been exposed to the joy of learning and had the importance of this learning explained to them. Many of our students have in fact seen those without much formal "book-learning" succeed in employment opportunities. Many of our students have no idea how many states there are in this country, cannot accurately talk about their own culture's history, or cannot find locations on a state, national, or world map.

Every semester we are faced with the task of teaching writing to nonreaders, and unfortunately, composition theory, so clearly developed by scholars so far removed from our classrooms, has not responded to this situation very well. Instead, it seems readily apparent that the students these theorists write about, design overly politicized pedagogical theories and techniques for, and very occasionally teach in their selective admissions doctoral-granting institutions have very little in common with our academically unsuccessful students.