“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 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.

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.