Some Similarities and Differences Between Compositions Written by Remedial and Non-Remedial College Freshmen / Elizabeth B. House and William J. House.

The essays composed by 84 remedial and 77 nonremedial college freshmen were analyzed for some features proposed by Mina Shaughnessy as being characteristic of basic writers. The students were enrolled in either a beginning remedial class (098), a class at the next level of remediation (099), or a regular English class (101). The essays were analyzed for total number of words written; for sentence faults; for spelling errors by number and type, as defined by Shaughnessy; for features she described as "s" inflection errors; and for traditional indices of syntactic maturity: T unit length, clause length, and clauses per T unit. To equate differences in paper length, errors were calculated per 50 words written. The results showed that the only characteristic that clearly distinguished between the three groups was mean number of words per essay. No significant difference was found in the frequency with which any of the errors examined appeared in remedial 099 and in nonremedial 101 essays. Between the 098 students and the other groups, variations did occur in number and kind of misspellings and in several errors that appeared to be dialect related. No significant differences were found between the three groups in T unit length, clause length, or clauses per T. However, a significant difference in T length was found in papers written by students at the very top and bottom of the sample (those scoring over 500 or below 300 on the verbal SAT). (FL)

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