Easing Students into Academia: popular culture in the CBI curriculum

One idea that sticks in my mind from my undergraduate course in science fiction is that in order to write SF, you need strange people, strange things or strange places; however, if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, the result is a confused reader. The position of first-year university students is analogous: too often they are having to write in new and challenging ways, referring to challenging texts about challenging ideas. To add to the challenge, many are doing so in their second language. Too much challenge in education is like too much strangeness in science fiction, and the result is the same: confusion, and often demoralisation. Obviously we want to challenge students but not to confuse them completely. As English teachers, we cannot afford to “dumb down” the texts our students study, or set overly-easy writing tasks; however slowly we build up to it, by the end of a firstyear English course, students should be able to read non-specialist academic texts and write a tolerable essay referring to them. However, there is a sense in which the English class can be “a sheltered context for the cognitive demands of new content” (Owens, 2002:45). In a content-based English course, we have the advantage of being able to choose the overall theme, which gives us some lee-way which would not available to someone teaching, say, Physics 101. As Genesee (1994:3) points out, content need not always be academic but “can include any topic, theme, or non-language issue of interest of importance to the learners.” Popular culture is one way to provide students with a familiar base from which they can tackle challenging reading and writing tasks; all things being equal, it is easier to comprehend an academic paper on, say, the physics of Star Trek or the ethics of soap operas than a similar paper on the physics of superconductors or the ethics of phenomenology. This is not to say that basing a course around popular culture means that students will only read popular texts. Consider the following: