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.

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In reading about the ineffectiveness of teaching grammar, what I mainly wonder about is how instructors are teaching it. There are many very bad ways to teach grammar, lord knows. In my view, whether or not it makes sense to teach grammar in first-year comp depends, like everything else, on the students in the class and what their needs are. As a TESOL-trained instructor with fifteen years of ESL teaching experience, I can say that students whose first language is not English have different instructional needs when it comes to learning writing than students whose first language is English. Both need to learn grammar, but need different instructional approaches to it.

In first-year composition, I rarely have time to focus much on grammar instruction, but when I do, I use sentence combining exercises. Interestingly enough, these are noted as the one “successful” method of teaching grammar in the article (which really makes me wonder what the other methods were.)

I find students enjoy the  puzzle-solving aspect to sentence combining. It is also a flexible activity that can be done in pairs or as group work or individually. I think it works because it is a more organic approach to solving sentence structure problems, in a context that draws from real-world revision skills rather than what we traditional think of as “grammar drills.”

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.

Research as Discovery – Disrupting the Norm?

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I take an interest-driven, curiosity-based approach to research instruction. My own research focus is on student interest as a driving mechanism of deep learning. Curiosity is the catalyzing drive.

Within the context of our Module topic, we begin by reading various source material (in a variety of genres) meant to augment understanding of our topic and to highlight a variety of perspectives. Then my students, from a place of curiosity, home in on a subtopic of interest, one which sparked particular questions in the reading annotation process. Students then undertake research to unravel some of those questions. They document in blog posts their interest, curiosity and questions, and the exploration for potential answers. The paper itself, as produced, is more about an advancement toward understanding, highlights the catalyzing text, the questions produced and why that information matters to the student. And then the student moves toward an articulation of a viewpoint based upon balancing the evidence. I think the most important part of that paper is what comes after the research, the student’s speculation of what how information unearthed creates valuable understanding, or perhaps, even more questions. Essai in French means “attempt” or “to try”. I think perhaps we have become so caught up in producing definitive answers (as cultivated in our own professional inquiries) that we have lost sight of the value of research which expands discourse and collaborative inquiry – the accent being more on generating authentic questions of value than on producing expected answers.

I think the hardest part of teaching research is helping students understand the value of their own critical questioning and how to activate that (often dormant) trait – to let their minds unravel their questions, target valuable inquiry, and to effectively pursue deeper understanding.

That being said, if you contrast what Graff and Kynard seem to assert about the disruption of traditional, deeply entrenched, research genre expressions, and then look at what we as researchers are expected to adhere to – the rigidity of our forms and vernacular, a divergence seems apparent. Afterall, it was drilled into us as grad students what constitutes research and research presentation. Academic writing in many colleges, especially Tier 1 schools (an elitist term, I know, yet set apart) the most revered form of academic writing, remains the traditional research paper, at least in exclusive Discourse Communities. The authority of our evidence is always scrutinized. On the other hand, a focus on self-evaluation, other than to consider classroom practices, is corralled to the memoir, or narrative essay. But to be published, we have our rules, don’t we, at least for the most part?

So, what do we teach our students? “Here is how stuffy academics write? But you may want to avoid that and stay true to yourself?” Or, do we say, everything depends on context and audience? What matters is providing deep critical insight, Or should we be looking to disrupt the most prevalent academic forms in which we immerse ourselves, as form of necessary revolt against an outdated template? Would we even be ‘allowed to’ – long enough to be heard and taken seriously?

Research as Unending Conversation and as Process

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When I teach research I tend to approach it both conceptually and practically, thinking through the latter as a way to anchor the former (since, as we’ve seen, students typically haven’t been introduced to the reasoning–the *philosophy*, if that isn’t too grandiose–behind research as a human endeavor, and instead treat it as yet another series of academic box-ticking exercises). I find that analogies with basic but universally meaningful activities work well. I’ll invoke, for example, conversation: “Imagine that you’ve just arrived at a party. The room is crowded, and you can’t say for sure how long people have been there, or whom you’re likely to meet. Everyone’s already formed their little conversational groups, with their drinks held in front of them and their elbows out, attention directed away from you. Your job is to find a conversation that interests you, gracefully enter it, and make a contribution that will somehow, however slightly, change its direction. When you leave later that evening, the party will continue indefinitely, but that single conversation will have been forever altered–just a bit–by your unique contribution.”

I find that this works well even at the outset of a course in explaining low-stakes assignments such as discussion posts, and that it then lends itself to reuse as we build toward longer, research-paper-style projects. Students all naturally understand what makes for a good conversation. They know that someone who simply parroted what another speaker had said or who expressed blanket disagreement without offering justification wouldn’t be considered a “good” conversational partner; they know that nuance and originality (not to mention some attention to rhetoric) are expected. When we move from concepts to specific assignments I like to break capital-R Research into at least four subsidiary “moments,” or cognitive moves. The first involves identifying a gap (we talk in 1101 about “curiosity” in this respect): where are the holes in our existing knowledge? Where’s the edge of the map? This is where intuition and even a sense of play can be important: I ask students to think about what they’re noticing, and why; to be sensitive to wrinkles and points of friction; to attend to hunches. The second step involves framing a specific, neatly bounded research question, to which I always attach at least three qualifications. A good question must be precise, practicable, and provocative. Our third step is the “methodology” discussion: where are you going next, what are you going to do, and how are you going to do it? Lastly, and once a nice big messy pile of information has been gathered, we ask ourselves about the best form (genre) in which to present our “new” knowledge. I explain that the classic undergraduate research paper is a very good genre (a very good form for its purposes), that its popularity is justified, but that it isn’t by any stretch the *only* way to present new knowledge.

At its best, this addresses the two principal shortcomings I’ve spotted in research-oriented courses: 1) students aren’t conceptualizing research in productive ways (or at all; this is the “why are we doing this and what’s the point” question); and, 2) students are hobbled by passivity (it’s been trained into them) and need to be prodded to take small, concrete steps consistently until they discover their own motivations.