Category Archives: Grammar

On “correct English” and “proper grammar”

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I want to start off by saying I am a big fan of Bad Ideas About Writing, and in fact I use some of its essays in my classes. That being said, I had some issues about the presentation of ideas in these two essays for two separate reasons. In the first, about “correct English” I still struggle with the idea that this is the entrenched viewpoint in composition classrooms, at least urban ones. So, I suppose it would be important to know where the author bases her perspective. The article, for me, had the air of an Illuminati expose, without enough attention to context and various Discourse Communities. I also found it intensely ironic that an author could be advocating for a deconstruction of “white middle class” rhetoric, while advocating for her position in “white middle class” rhetoric. Ultimately, I do believe in exposing our students to a variety of discourse structures, recognizing full well that our students come to us with their own firmly entrenched discourse literacies which have value and should be acknowledged, cultivated, and integrated into rhetorical analysis.

In the second article, I felt that the concept of teaching grammar, again, has to do with the purpose of teaching grammar. I tend to focus more on the generation of ideas, as teaching grammar independently of contextual application is problematic. I also find that the more rules introduced tends to stifle expression. Again, I had a head scratching moment as the author obviously learned grammatical construction for rhetorical consistency, and I wonder what that said about her own experience, especially considering her own attention to grammar and syntax.

Both articles beg a return to the driving question related to our composition class practice – what is our purpose in providing instruction in writing? I think the current trend, unless one is living an isolated existence, is to help students communicate, either academically or across genres. I think we do a disservice to our students in academic settings, if we do not expose them to academic writing and its conventions, while recognizing that such is contextual. I think further the trend is to expose students to a variety of multiliteracies while our own students expand our own understanding of expression.

Some links

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Hey! I will post the work for next week tomorrow.  For now:

Here is the link to Asao Inoue’s Address 

Also, we didn’t get to this, but I do want to clarify something Rebecca said in her response  which is that ESL students do often need grammar instruction.  This is an important point! Language acquisition is much different at this level.

The Ides of March

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“This semester, I have three classes of respectful students who absolutely cannot write. I have sent most to the Writing Center Or english tutors…..they are telling me that the people at the WCenter are not helpful even though they are well-intentioned. Same with the English tutors. Usually, I have a handful of really good writers who I team up with those who cannot. This semester I am not able to do this.”

“These students NEED help with English construction, spelling, everything! Critical thinking does not even play into it at this point. Have a lot of chinese students who are struggling with the English language anyway. Any advice?”

thanks

Professor @

I oversee a staff of writing tutors and an English as a Second Language (ESL) language and computer lab at BMCC. The above email is emblematic of an ever more common kind of referral to our tutoring center, similar to the one from Professor @, from many others across the disciplinary spectrum who include writing in their curricula.[1] Professor @’s classroom is imagined around monolingual Standard American English (SAE) as the medium of instruction and around native English-speaking (and White) students as the norm, whereas in fact, he is confronted with the reality of teaching three multilingual classes full of plural nationalities, races, languages, and cultures. What further struck me when I read Professor @’s message is the fact that this instructor simultaneously exhibits what might be called “monolinguistic deficit-model” assumptions about the writing of his multilingual students, yet also himself deviates from SAE in the language of his email. Were I to critique Professor @’s writing from a similar deficit-model of idealized SAE, I would note that the message includes sentence fragments, for example, and poor adherence to usage rules of punctuation and capitalization. Of course, writing tasks are situated and context-specific: email is informal and often hastily composed, and collegial familiarity might also frame this kind of code-switching in this correspondence. More troubling to me, though, is degree of unequivocality of Professor X’s monolinguistic condemnation of his students: three classes full of students who “absolutely cannot write,” and “NEED help with… everything!” Moreover, this is not a small percentage of aberrant students; they are most or all of Professor X’s students.

Professor @ is very likely a well-intentioned, dedicated educator, and his opinion of the multilingual students in his classroom is not an anomalous one, but rather represents a fairly ubiquitous attitude among faculty and tutors across disciplines. Moreover, his assumptions concerning his students almost certainly do not arise from hostility or indifference, but rather from hegemonic cultural and language-oriented notions that pervade both academic and public discourse. As educators, we all need to pause and reflect on the assumptions we bring into our classrooms when encountering multilingual students, including assumptions about the definition and nature of “correctness,” “critical thinking” and “language proficiency,” as well as what we mean when we say a student “cannot write.” These phrases may well be accurate descriptions of some of our students, from a certain vantage point. However, they may also be illustrative sketches of our own reflexive cultural and linguistic misapprehensions, as well as descriptions of our own struggles with rendering or effectively communicating complex pedagogies within classrooms in which the English language is the norm. This normative standard of monolingualism is not conducive to effective pedagogy within CUNY, or, for that matter, within any higher education environment that shares similar values of pluralism and linguistic diversity.

I Don’t Even Teach Grammar Anymore

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When I first started teaching, I thought that reviewing over student drafts would be less about guiding my students through ways to better clarify their ideas and more like the time I spent editing fellow classmates’ work throughout undergrad and grad school. This would look like helping them rephrase awkward wording and small typos that weren’t detectable by spell/grammar check that would make a work look unprofessional. Finding that blatant error after you have already submitted something like a final project or even a résumé just feels absolutely cringeworthy.

Of course, this all occurred before the rampant adoption of browser extensions akin to the AI-enhanced “Grammarly” and similar programs. I have had some students begrudgingly admit that they used Grammarly, sapling, and some others that I forget the name of. At first, these extensions seemed to let my students down quite a bit but it seems that they, both my students and these grammar AIs, have learned quite a bit about writing because now I feel like I rarely have to watch out for grammar fumbles. As that one Malcolm in the Middle meme portrays, “The future is now old man” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta41xU-tkFA.

In response to the reading, “There is One Correct Way of Writing and Speaking,” I felt similar to some of my colleagues comments and replies. The article felt outdated in ways such as Pattanayak’s word choices to describe what writing and speaking in the class feels like. Even if I assumed that the opening sentences were also part of the title which indicate exactly what the bad idea about writing that is being examined, at least in our population of english instructors, we no longer teach or encourage the one golden standard of “correct” english. Even I criticized that metaphorically her audience left the show a generation ago. We encourage all discourse communities and find that learning english in all of its forms is an enriching experience. However, it is important to remember that although now we accept different forms and styles of english, language is still being used as a powerful exclusionary tool against people of poor and/or working class backgrounds as well as new english speakers.

Grammar in context

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I never teach grammar on its own. When questions arise, or when I’m line-editing an essay, I try to make it clear that I’m addressing issues within a specific linguistic context. Nearly all of my courses (and if I’m limiting myself to basic composition classes, I’d say *all* of them) include some discussion of “code switching.” I don’t typically get into the linguistic nitty-gritty, but I find it helpful early on in a semester to explain a lay version of universal grammar and the evolved human capacity for language. Some version of this: Barring developmental disruption or brain trauma (to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas, say, which might induce aphasia), every human being will learn at least one language fluently, provided they’ve been brought up around other humans. That language will *always* be grammatically “correct,” because those grammatical switches will have been set through exposure to other humans. Spoken language is natural and “easy.” I like to really emphasize this next bit: By contrast, written language is a recent and rare phenomenon that requires training. Reading and writing are *hard*, and until recently, most people on earth didn’t have the privilege of acquiring those skills (we didn’t approach universal literacy in the West until just before World War I, and it’s been declining since). I think it’s important to acknowledge (and to explicitly give students permission to acknowledge) that it’s difficult (and, in some ways, unnatural) to think consciously about one’s own language use in the way that literacy demands. It’s like a muscle that requires deliberate attention to grow stronger. Most students have had this experience in other domains (sports, hobbies, etc.) and can see the analogy.

It can be helpful to show students that they’re already speaking grammatically, no matter what they might have been told. Thanks to its influence on pop culture, quick, recognizable examples can be had from AAVE (what used to be called “ebonics” in the 90s): ask students to think about conjugations of the verb “to be” or the regularity with which sounds are transposed in words such as “ask” (pronounced “aks”). They immediately catch on that these differences aren’t applied randomly but instead follow conventions that are just as reliable as any other grammatical rule. As far as spoken language goes, every last person in the class already implicitly recognizes and conforms to good grammar.

From there, it isn’t much of a jump to think about different rules and applications in terms of “code switching.” Pick your own motivational vocabulary: Students are expanding their expressive palettes by adding new linguistic modes, broadening their identities by soliciting membership in new language communities, etc. I find that they usually want and expect to be taught Standard American English (whatever that is), because they recognize it as one of the things a university education is meant to bestow and as a path to opportunity, for better or worse. I just try to do this self-consciously. As I said in one of my annotations, we’re trying to help students become better versions of themselves, not ventriloquists. The academic voices they employ in their papers (or other formal written material) won’t be the same voices they use at the local bar, but they’ll still be *their* voices, and ought to be different than those of the students sitting next to them.

Some Thoughts on Grammar

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I completely agree that teaching grammar by itself just does not work. I am old enough to remember being taught how to diagram sentences by nuns in grammar school and learning the rules of grammar at very young age. This no longer is done and our college students come to class with varying degrees of a grammar background. A first year writing class cannot fix all the problems.

We need to acknowledge that each class has some students who just want to slide by with a passing grade and others who really want to improve their writing for college and their future. Students who earnestly want to learn to write better appreciate learning more intricate rules. I introduce my entire class to the website Grammarbytes where they can work on their writing issues. The motivated students like the interaction and explanations.

There is nothing more discouraging than having a paper returned to students with marks all over pointing out the sentence errors. However, students need to know that one long string of words with no punctuation confuses the reader. I make a general comment at the end of paper.

I do think that students should be at least introduced to the rules of grammar as just like learning a sport, there are rules. Some students have it easier than others from their privileged upbringing. I would love to learn an easy way to integrate teaching the rules.

On Not Really Teaching Grammar

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I don’t really teach grammar. Sometimes when students write “something was done,” I comment, “done by whom? Avoid the passive voice” and link to Purdue OWL on the passive voice, but certainly not for entry-level undergraduate writers. If a sentence isn’t clear, I ask for clarification. I do sometimes comment that students should avoid fragments or run-ons, but I admit that I think a better practice would be to ask what the nounal clause in the fragment is doing, or to ask a student to break up a complex idea (code for a run-on, in this case). I tell students that grammar matters insofar as it helps aide clarity, and otherwise, it doesn’t matter very much. Reading their drafts aloud can help with this, I explain, as it can also help with sniffing out where their ideas lose or gain coherence or excitement. I do tell students to reread also, to ask family members, friends, roommates, and classmates to read, to take home extra peer review worksheets for these purposes, and to run spell-check, which, I explain, doesn’t catch everything and needs to be tended with a critical eye because it, too, is imperfect, but it’s a start. And everything needs to be read with a critical eye anyway. When I teach Hunter’s version of 1121, which they call 220, Introduction to Writing about Literature (and which doubles as a required course for English majors in addition to fulfilling Pathways gen ed requirements), I try to explain to students terms like “antecedent” and “pronoun” because these terms are useful to refer to the motifs we trace through a text, and sometimes I’ll explain “parallel construction” or “gerunds.” But I’m pretty likely too to just say “-ing verbs acting as nouns,” and I tell students that so long as they describe what they see in words that are clear to their readers, it doesn’t matter to me that they use so-called official terms for the literary techniques (so-called “devices”), methods, or grammatical practices they observe. They just need to make it clear to me what it is they are writing about. And grammar, and the words for it, are but one way to do that.

Thoughts on Grammar

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How do you teach grammar? How do you deal with sentence-level issues in essays?  Or any other thoughts on the readings.

 

Earlier in my teaching career, I would sometimes find college freshman had poor grasp of what I considered the absolute basics of grammar, and I would stop my syllabus midstream and conduct a grammar crash course. We’d literally start with parts of speech, then build up to clauses, independent vs. dependent, etc. It was extremely boring for me and for the students, but I reasoned that, somewhere along the line, they’d encountered a series of delinquent English teachers and now I was cleaning up the mess.

 

My views are different now, and align roughly with the views of Pattanayak and Dunn.

 

I think teaching grammar is both futile and besides the point. I frame grammar, or the idea of “standard English,” in terms of the students’ own linguistic powers. I explain that, by virtue of being humans, they are linguistic geniuses. The capacity for language develops unaided, undirected, in their brains as they grow. They can no more help learning to use language than they can help learning to walk or see. The human linguistic capacity allows them to wield all sorts of languages of varying similarities. Among these languages is the language they speak with their friends. Also among these potential languages is what’s known as “standard English.” I confirm what they already suspect: that standard English is largely artificial but, for simple pragmatic reasons, important to know. It’s part of contextualizing their education. I show them a video of linguist Noam Chomsky explaining that, among other things, most “grammar rules” are pure fabrications, often traceable to one particular teacher some centuries ago. Chomsky goes on to explain that what’s taught as standard English is, at root, a class- (and, therefore, race-) dictated set of conventions derived from the power possessed by ruling classes. His punchline is that, if roles in the United States were reversed, and African Americans owned the corporations and institutions, then African American English would be considered the language of science and business, and White English would be considered “a degenerate dialect that you had to get people out of so they’d be able to think.” Students tend to understand this once they have it pointed out.

 

As for sentence-level issues, I tend to ignore them. I used to put an x over every missed punctuation. Now I’ll just generally give a comment at the top of an draft along the lines of “a lot of incorrect commas” or “verb agreement issues.” I just find no practical purpose to correcting particular aspects of grammar. For one thing, students almost never go out and try to correct them. For another, grammar issues like these are relatively unimportant to improving student writing as compared with structural issues. A perfectly punctuated, perfectly conjugated paragraph that is structurally chaotic will make no sense to a reader, whereas a perefctly structuerd parargraph in whicch literaly evry woord wihth thrree or moer leters is mispeled can aktchually be quwite efective. Of course, if a student has extreme issues, like if their paragraphs are all single run-on sentences, etc., I’ll try to impress upon them that learning those standard English grammar conventions is going to greatly improve their prospects in certain types of jobs. Otherwise, I don’t know of any way to make a 19-year-old student with truly, disqualifyingly poor grammar go out of their way to teach themselves the accepted conventions — which is what such a case would require.

For March 15th!

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Hello, all.  Nice seeing you today! For next week, please:

  1. Read through each other’s blog posts for March 8 on research.  Drop a comment or two.  These are really worth the read!
  2. Read and annotate the two (very short) articles on Perusall about linguistic “correctness.”  One is on linguistic diversity, the other is on teaching grammar.
  3. Write a blog post here on Open Lab in response to those readings.  How do you teach grammar? How do you deal with sentence-level issues in essays?  Or any other thoughts on the readings.