I spoke with another colleague from this class. It appears that neither of us has a crystal clear idea what is expected from this assignment. I thought this was basically 20 min of me explaining grammar a la lecture. She seemed to think this was a lesson with activities for students. I didn't remember hearing that; perhaps I missed that.
I told her I've been teaching grammar for so long, I'd much prefer to teach something new to me, where I'm learning something. I mentioned sentence building, since that's at least sentence level. I said I wasn't sure that would wash, since it's not about addressing student grammar errors. She said she thought mine was a great idea, and that she planned to steal it! I said I'd send my thugs to break her knees.
The biggest question is audience. We learned the folly of teaching grammar to FYE students because there are so many types of students in one class, each with his/her specific grammar needs; what's fascinating for one is baffling to another or just overkill and boring the yet another.
If sentence building is not an option, I would like to teach something to AUGMENT their writing, not merely explain why it's broken and repair it. Working with idiomatic expressions would be fun, but I'm not sure where to begin.
I think I might be able to humor myself by focusing on a list of confusing count/noncount words that deserve special attention. For example, sometimes "crime" is noncount, sometimes it's count. Why?
Similarly, the use of any/some often needs some explanation.
Do you want some coffee? No I don't care for any.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Week 10, Post 1: Case Study Brainstorm
On one hand, I'm happy to be able to pinpoint who my case study is about; on the other, I'm unhappy to report that I don't have a simple, strong story to tell, in part because it's still unfolding.
My tutee Lulu has missed two out of six tutorials, so she's looking more and more unlikely as my study subject.
My tutee Luigi is showing promising signs of increased motivation and improvement. He's showing up a bit more organized, less apathetic and his writing is looking up, even if his teacher has little praise for him (I disagree with her lack of praise and her focus on minutiae).
However, the story unfolding is less clear than I thought it was a couple of weeks ago. At that time, I thought this might be a story about helping Luigi with organizational skills and in focusing on the prompt, which he was often vague about. At this time, I'm thinking the story (if there is one simple story buried in all of this) is how to motivate Luigi to believe in himself as a successful writer, and/or to equip him with a clear model of what a good essay looks like.
As I wrote in my tutoring report, it's still not clear, though, if he's the clever writer I think he is (just too unmotivated to really edit his paper), or whether he's a decent writer with really mediocre editing skills, especially since he's failed to implement the ideas we discussed for his revisions two weeks ago, and now the teacher is complaining, generally, about exactly the organizational points I brought up back then. It may be that we're just asking too much too soon from him.
My hunch is that he needs a Bartholomae & Petrosky bootcamp of deep reading immersion and deeply personal writing to wake him up to the deeper possibilities of the reading/writing connection. The truth is doesn't read much, never has. So realizing his full potential may take some time.
My tutee Lulu has missed two out of six tutorials, so she's looking more and more unlikely as my study subject.
My tutee Luigi is showing promising signs of increased motivation and improvement. He's showing up a bit more organized, less apathetic and his writing is looking up, even if his teacher has little praise for him (I disagree with her lack of praise and her focus on minutiae).
However, the story unfolding is less clear than I thought it was a couple of weeks ago. At that time, I thought this might be a story about helping Luigi with organizational skills and in focusing on the prompt, which he was often vague about. At this time, I'm thinking the story (if there is one simple story buried in all of this) is how to motivate Luigi to believe in himself as a successful writer, and/or to equip him with a clear model of what a good essay looks like.
As I wrote in my tutoring report, it's still not clear, though, if he's the clever writer I think he is (just too unmotivated to really edit his paper), or whether he's a decent writer with really mediocre editing skills, especially since he's failed to implement the ideas we discussed for his revisions two weeks ago, and now the teacher is complaining, generally, about exactly the organizational points I brought up back then. It may be that we're just asking too much too soon from him.
My hunch is that he needs a Bartholomae & Petrosky bootcamp of deep reading immersion and deeply personal writing to wake him up to the deeper possibilities of the reading/writing connection. The truth is doesn't read much, never has. So realizing his full potential may take some time.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Week 9, Post 6: HELP! (Drawing a Blank!)
Find examples of the sentence level issue that you're going to focus on in your 704 lesson plan. You can work from your tutees writing or you can work from any of the essays that we've looked at this semester. What kind of lesson activities might you do with a class of students to help them with this grammar issue?
I know we discussed this (briefly) in class last week. I know I'm to plan out and give a 20 minute (??) grammar lesson. But I'm blocked because a) I'm finding no inspiring grammar issues in our sample essays, nor in my tutees' essays -- at least, nothing that would sustain my interest to rant for 20 minutes of my hot air. Is this a lecture?
That's a hell of a long time to harangue about minutiae, no? Especially after we've spent nine weeks discussing (and agreeing?) that grammar, if it's dealt with at all, should never -- or very, very, very RARELY -- be taught at the group level. Nearly EVERYTHING we've read and discussed has concluded that error analysis is of ZERO benefit and that students IGNORE it -- UNLESS it's IN CONTEXT and MEANINGFUL.
I have taught mini-lessons in ESL for many years, but even at that level, I would avoid something as unruly as a 20 minute lecture. Inevitably, some students will find it fascinating (and forget it), while others will be baffled (but not admit it), while others will already understand it (and resent it).
Then, if we're to address the most common errors our tutees make, I don't see the point. Most of these grammar points are mundane, like subject/verb agreement, which they've known for years, but, for whatever reason, they fail to apply. Perhaps they need to be shown the usefulness of the APPLICATION or the importance. Other, more "exotic" points, like subordinate clauses, will tend to befuddle and bore more students than they aid, I'll wager, especially if the topic's presented out of context.
From my experience, what would be much more creative and beneficial, would be an APPLICATION of a grammar point to a particular activity or game. But a 20-min. lecture just for the heck of it? Hmmmm?
So, I'm really confused about the point of this project, and about how to proceed!
I welcome anybody's input!! Thank you!
I know we discussed this (briefly) in class last week. I know I'm to plan out and give a 20 minute (??) grammar lesson. But I'm blocked because a) I'm finding no inspiring grammar issues in our sample essays, nor in my tutees' essays -- at least, nothing that would sustain my interest to rant for 20 minutes of my hot air. Is this a lecture?
That's a hell of a long time to harangue about minutiae, no? Especially after we've spent nine weeks discussing (and agreeing?) that grammar, if it's dealt with at all, should never -- or very, very, very RARELY -- be taught at the group level. Nearly EVERYTHING we've read and discussed has concluded that error analysis is of ZERO benefit and that students IGNORE it -- UNLESS it's IN CONTEXT and MEANINGFUL.
I have taught mini-lessons in ESL for many years, but even at that level, I would avoid something as unruly as a 20 minute lecture. Inevitably, some students will find it fascinating (and forget it), while others will be baffled (but not admit it), while others will already understand it (and resent it).
Then, if we're to address the most common errors our tutees make, I don't see the point. Most of these grammar points are mundane, like subject/verb agreement, which they've known for years, but, for whatever reason, they fail to apply. Perhaps they need to be shown the usefulness of the APPLICATION or the importance. Other, more "exotic" points, like subordinate clauses, will tend to befuddle and bore more students than they aid, I'll wager, especially if the topic's presented out of context.
From my experience, what would be much more creative and beneficial, would be an APPLICATION of a grammar point to a particular activity or game. But a 20-min. lecture just for the heck of it? Hmmmm?
So, I'm really confused about the point of this project, and about how to proceed!
I welcome anybody's input!! Thank you!
Week 9, Post 5: Tutee Fruity?
Really, I could have sworn we did this exact blog last week and discussed it in class. See Week 8, Post 3.
N'est pas?
N'est pas?
Week 9, Post 4: In the Blender
In your second blog synthesize the readings into a single set of issues:
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects?
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
How does this group of articles tie to the articles in the previous round of presentations?
So Your Point Is?
Taken together, the readings tell us that some students, especially Black students, enter the classroom with a very low self-confidence in general and regarding home dialect in particular. This may be because previous teachers or other authority figures or family members have ridiculed their speech. This may be because there is a general barrier between Black people and White people, especially when the latter assume authority roles. These issues have a great potential to add fuel to these students' affective filter, nullifying any efforts to help them.
What To Do?
From the literature, it's clear that, to reach out to Black students who are struggling to perform, a teacher must make much greater efforts to acknowledge them and how they identify with language. To a limited degree, ethnographic interviews can level the playing field for all classroom cultures. The next step is to recognize students who need extra help and to conference with them ASAP, being careful to strike a balance between showing compassion, but not "singling them out," which could be construed as denigrating them. If all this fails, it may be necessary to make special time for such students, to speak to them about personal matters, to learn what sorts of family orientation, or other social issues may be impacting their effort to progress.
Where Is This Going?
It's wise to keep abreast of the ongoing controversy surrounding these students because it's such a delicate issue, with many key Black figures taking sides on both sides of the scrimmage. In addition, there appears to be much ongoing research to draw from for teachers interested in breaking through the affective filters.
In Class?
The decision whether to discuss these topics with the whole class would probably depend on the number of Black students in class. For example, if most of my students are Black, we would discuss these issues, perform ethnographic exercises and journal about the topic. On the other hand, if the class is 99% White, as may be the case at Iowa State, whole-class discussion would probably alienate the minority 1%, so one-on-one conferencing with that student would be warranted.
Looking Back?
This batch of articles continues to spread the word that Black students, sincere as they may be in their goal to succeed at college, are educationally handicapped in many cases, as compared to the White majority: they struggle more with language, with self-esteem, with connecting to the "conversation." They're often deeply conflicted in their desire to both succeed in school and to maintain their identity withing the Black community. Indeed, some (consciously or unconsciously) willing sabotage their own academic futures in order to nurture this ambivalence.
This group of articles is rather mixed in its remedies. Articles like Fordham's further the notion that nothing short of total social revolution, along with a complete overhaul of the White psyche, will ever narrow the "achievement gap" between the races. Coker's paper sees the problems as largely caused by the White machinery, but praises Black students for their creative maneuvers in coping with college. The Gonzalves and Wallace/Bell articles make a very fair assessment of the situation, noting that, while many White educators are trying to serve these students fairly, the situation is like a mine field, and sometimes even the best intentions garner bloody results. Far from making ineffectual blanket statements, as Fordham's do, these last two articles provide creative methods and case studies illustrating White educators' effectiveness with struggling Black students.
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects?
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
How does this group of articles tie to the articles in the previous round of presentations?
So Your Point Is?
Taken together, the readings tell us that some students, especially Black students, enter the classroom with a very low self-confidence in general and regarding home dialect in particular. This may be because previous teachers or other authority figures or family members have ridiculed their speech. This may be because there is a general barrier between Black people and White people, especially when the latter assume authority roles. These issues have a great potential to add fuel to these students' affective filter, nullifying any efforts to help them.
What To Do?
From the literature, it's clear that, to reach out to Black students who are struggling to perform, a teacher must make much greater efforts to acknowledge them and how they identify with language. To a limited degree, ethnographic interviews can level the playing field for all classroom cultures. The next step is to recognize students who need extra help and to conference with them ASAP, being careful to strike a balance between showing compassion, but not "singling them out," which could be construed as denigrating them. If all this fails, it may be necessary to make special time for such students, to speak to them about personal matters, to learn what sorts of family orientation, or other social issues may be impacting their effort to progress.
Where Is This Going?
It's wise to keep abreast of the ongoing controversy surrounding these students because it's such a delicate issue, with many key Black figures taking sides on both sides of the scrimmage. In addition, there appears to be much ongoing research to draw from for teachers interested in breaking through the affective filters.
In Class?
The decision whether to discuss these topics with the whole class would probably depend on the number of Black students in class. For example, if most of my students are Black, we would discuss these issues, perform ethnographic exercises and journal about the topic. On the other hand, if the class is 99% White, as may be the case at Iowa State, whole-class discussion would probably alienate the minority 1%, so one-on-one conferencing with that student would be warranted.
Looking Back?
This batch of articles continues to spread the word that Black students, sincere as they may be in their goal to succeed at college, are educationally handicapped in many cases, as compared to the White majority: they struggle more with language, with self-esteem, with connecting to the "conversation." They're often deeply conflicted in their desire to both succeed in school and to maintain their identity withing the Black community. Indeed, some (consciously or unconsciously) willing sabotage their own academic futures in order to nurture this ambivalence.
This group of articles is rather mixed in its remedies. Articles like Fordham's further the notion that nothing short of total social revolution, along with a complete overhaul of the White psyche, will ever narrow the "achievement gap" between the races. Coker's paper sees the problems as largely caused by the White machinery, but praises Black students for their creative maneuvers in coping with college. The Gonzalves and Wallace/Bell articles make a very fair assessment of the situation, noting that, while many White educators are trying to serve these students fairly, the situation is like a mine field, and sometimes even the best intentions garner bloody results. Far from making ineffectual blanket statements, as Fordham's do, these last two articles provide creative methods and case studies illustrating White educators' effectiveness with struggling Black students.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Week 9, Post 3: The Breakdown
In your blog, first summarize each individual reading in a few bullet points:
What is the genre of the article: Is it a study? A theory piece? A pedagogy piece? A historical piece?
Who’s the audience for the article?
What points is the author making? What’s the authors purpose in making these points?
How might you summarize the article in a few sentences?
How does this article tie to articles in the previous round of presentations?
Gonsalvez
This is a study.
The audience is post secondary educators who deal with inter-racial faculty/student issues, specifically those with African-American males.
The author seems determined to help bridge the relationship gap between White comp teachers and African-American males, particularly. The point is to avoid the potential pitfalls -- 1. failing to address writing problems early on, 2. the ensuing frustration, 3. assuming too much about the student -- and, to the importance of going beyond the usual teacher-student conference, to cultivate a real relationship with him.
Compared to the first group of articles on Students' Rights, this was extremely fair and balanced in its presentation, much more productive in its positive suggestions, and not the least focused on home dialect as the being the magic bullet. Similar to the other papers, though, the Gonzalvez study highlights the sensitive issues race brings up for both teacher and student; like the other papers, the onus is on the White educator, not the student, to go above and beyond the norm to give Black males extra help.
Coker
This is a study.
The audience could be any college educators interested in insights into the psyches of Black women in college and their struggles to adapt.
The goal seems to help educators understand their Black female students. The paper covers key reasons these women went on to university, the challenges they face and their means of coping.
Like the articles last week, the focus here is largely on Black perceptions and Black assumptions about prejudice. Most of the findings focused on the assumptions these Womanist students made about being marginalized by White instructors, though they never spoke to the teachers to ascertain any information; assumptions were made and inferences followed. For example, if a student felt her opinion in class discussion wasn't given adequate credence, her conclusion was that this was because the teacher was a racist or because he lacked the compassion to give her special attention, since she was an older, re-entry student. Unlike the article above, or those last week, Coker's attention is on the Black females' on-campus survival skills, rather than placing the responsibility on White educators.
Wallace/Bell
This is a study.
The audience would appear to be post secondary educators who are open to affecting change on behalf of Black students.
The article draws attention to the peculiar issues faced by Black students at a predominantly White college campus. Specifically, the article underscores problems of (unintentional) racism encountered by Black students, their coping mechanisms, and what faculty can do to assist these students.
Like last weeks' papers, this one addresses challenges in dealing with home dialect and the dubious goal of teaching SE to the unwilling. Unlike those papers, the Wallace/Bell article takes neither side: "..simply respecting students' home cultures and requiring them to learn new discourse practices is...not a sufficient answer" (323). The authors maintain that teachers need to be as interested in community literary practices as we expect our students to be about acquiring SE (while some ethnographer/linguists tout this technique for promoting "co-researching," Wallace & Bell fail to mention this, and argue for it merely for its fairness).
Ultimately, English faculty prodded to become "advocates for educational equity in higher education."
Fordham
This is a historical piece (?).
The audience is anyone interested in Fordham's earlier piece on Capital High students. Her thrust seems more sociological/anthropological than the previous article, which centered on classroom language, home dialect and Ebonics.
Chiefly, Fordham defends her previous paper, laments it's misappropriation and explores related interpretations of the term "acting White."
Essentially, Fordham seems to set herself up as a one-woman army fending off affluent Blacks, well-meaning Black students in her college class, powerful figures in the Black community (Bill Cosby), as well as myriad misunderstanding and opposing researchers and journalists (Time, NY Times, etc). Ultimately, in her pursuit of "the elimination of the Black-White achievement gap" (235), she echoes her earlier article: "one major reason black students do poorly in school...(is their) inordinate ambivalence and affective dissonance in regard to academic effort and success" (236).
Like her earlier article on Capital High, the gist of this article is, despite an avalanche of opinion within and without the Black community (and logic?), the great obstacle to Black advancement is the White machinery that keeps all Blacks enslaved.
My issue with Fordham's logic is this: She attacks the White machinery that prevent Blacks from success; she attacks the Black machinery that judges other Blacks if they (try to) succeed; yet, she also denies that, as Bill Cosby says, the problem in the Black community is within, not without. How can this be? At the very least, by her own admission (above), "ambivalence" about success is at the core of the problem, both on a cultural and individual level. Once this attitude is clarified, most of your obstacles will have been eliminated.
What is the genre of the article: Is it a study? A theory piece? A pedagogy piece? A historical piece?
Who’s the audience for the article?
What points is the author making? What’s the authors purpose in making these points?
How might you summarize the article in a few sentences?
How does this article tie to articles in the previous round of presentations?
Gonsalvez
This is a study.
The audience is post secondary educators who deal with inter-racial faculty/student issues, specifically those with African-American males.
The author seems determined to help bridge the relationship gap between White comp teachers and African-American males, particularly. The point is to avoid the potential pitfalls -- 1. failing to address writing problems early on, 2. the ensuing frustration, 3. assuming too much about the student -- and, to the importance of going beyond the usual teacher-student conference, to cultivate a real relationship with him.
Compared to the first group of articles on Students' Rights, this was extremely fair and balanced in its presentation, much more productive in its positive suggestions, and not the least focused on home dialect as the being the magic bullet. Similar to the other papers, though, the Gonzalvez study highlights the sensitive issues race brings up for both teacher and student; like the other papers, the onus is on the White educator, not the student, to go above and beyond the norm to give Black males extra help.
Coker
This is a study.
The audience could be any college educators interested in insights into the psyches of Black women in college and their struggles to adapt.
The goal seems to help educators understand their Black female students. The paper covers key reasons these women went on to university, the challenges they face and their means of coping.
Like the articles last week, the focus here is largely on Black perceptions and Black assumptions about prejudice. Most of the findings focused on the assumptions these Womanist students made about being marginalized by White instructors, though they never spoke to the teachers to ascertain any information; assumptions were made and inferences followed. For example, if a student felt her opinion in class discussion wasn't given adequate credence, her conclusion was that this was because the teacher was a racist or because he lacked the compassion to give her special attention, since she was an older, re-entry student. Unlike the article above, or those last week, Coker's attention is on the Black females' on-campus survival skills, rather than placing the responsibility on White educators.
Wallace/Bell
This is a study.
The audience would appear to be post secondary educators who are open to affecting change on behalf of Black students.
The article draws attention to the peculiar issues faced by Black students at a predominantly White college campus. Specifically, the article underscores problems of (unintentional) racism encountered by Black students, their coping mechanisms, and what faculty can do to assist these students.
Like last weeks' papers, this one addresses challenges in dealing with home dialect and the dubious goal of teaching SE to the unwilling. Unlike those papers, the Wallace/Bell article takes neither side: "..simply respecting students' home cultures and requiring them to learn new discourse practices is...not a sufficient answer" (323). The authors maintain that teachers need to be as interested in community literary practices as we expect our students to be about acquiring SE (while some ethnographer/linguists tout this technique for promoting "co-researching," Wallace & Bell fail to mention this, and argue for it merely for its fairness).
Ultimately, English faculty prodded to become "advocates for educational equity in higher education."
Fordham
This is a historical piece (?).
The audience is anyone interested in Fordham's earlier piece on Capital High students. Her thrust seems more sociological/anthropological than the previous article, which centered on classroom language, home dialect and Ebonics.
Chiefly, Fordham defends her previous paper, laments it's misappropriation and explores related interpretations of the term "acting White."
Essentially, Fordham seems to set herself up as a one-woman army fending off affluent Blacks, well-meaning Black students in her college class, powerful figures in the Black community (Bill Cosby), as well as myriad misunderstanding and opposing researchers and journalists (Time, NY Times, etc). Ultimately, in her pursuit of "the elimination of the Black-White achievement gap" (235), she echoes her earlier article: "one major reason black students do poorly in school...(is their) inordinate ambivalence and affective dissonance in regard to academic effort and success" (236).
Like her earlier article on Capital High, the gist of this article is, despite an avalanche of opinion within and without the Black community (and logic?), the great obstacle to Black advancement is the White machinery that keeps all Blacks enslaved.
My issue with Fordham's logic is this: She attacks the White machinery that prevent Blacks from success; she attacks the Black machinery that judges other Blacks if they (try to) succeed; yet, she also denies that, as Bill Cosby says, the problem in the Black community is within, not without. How can this be? At the very least, by her own admission (above), "ambivalence" about success is at the core of the problem, both on a cultural and individual level. Once this attitude is clarified, most of your obstacles will have been eliminated.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Week 9, Post 1: quiz
Take-home quiz:
What is the STROL resolution? Why was it introduced? And how has it played out over the past 40 years?
What main criticisms of SRTOL?
What are the main criticism of the the notion of "Standard English"?
In the English classroom, what tensions might dialect speakers experience when they have to write in "standard English" and what can English teachers do to reduce those tensions?
What are some of the strategies that AAVE speakers use to navigate/negotiate their identity in an environment where standard English is "forced" upon them?
The Students' Rights to Their Own Language resolution (CCCC) says that each cultural group has a right to know, study about and feel proud about its culture and accompanying dialect, and to be aware that SE is by no means superior to other dialects.
It was introduced along with the spirit of the 60s civil rights to try to ensure that the rights provided by civil rights legislation would not be Jim Crowed into meaninglessness, since it's a widely held notion that a culture's honor and dignity begins with upholding its language.
The impact over the years has been to isolate one group against the other, essentially, breeding some degree of pride for the Black community and, at the same time, much unrest within and without.
Criticisms of SRTOL say that it gives students a false sense of security, since it tends to leave uncorrected some communication behaviors that can invite future obstacles. As far as the overall school curriculum, teaching Ebonics or any other language in the classroom, other than the standard discourse spoken by the teacher is totally unprecedented. For example, if a student wanted to learn a computer language, he would not be permitted to communicate in a computer language of his own choosing. Also, historically, the classroom is the place where we are corrected; this is practically a definition of the classroom; Ebonics, though says that the student is always right and is above correction. Other criticisms hold that Ebonics shames teachers, it "dummy-down"s the curriculum, creates more stereotypes and, finally, increases segregation.
The criticisms of SE are: a) that SSE and SWE are roughly equivalent, b) standardization is possible, c) that SSE is the language of the workplace, d) that SSE is or should be the language of the classroom.
Many minority students grow up feeling conflicted about their own dialects, whether it's Jamaican patois or AAVE. Many such students feel inferior because their family or perhaps previous teachers spoke ill to them about their speech or writing. At the same time, many people in these peoples' communities denigrate each other for language and many other such "low class" trappings. These neighborhoods also boost the notion that NOT speaking home dialect equals "gettin' above your raisin'," e.g. "selling out" to "the man."
By following some of the techniques in Shafer's article and by carrying out ethnographic studies, students can learn to embrace their own language and culture with pride.
Some students, sadly, subvert their own personalities or cultures, "losing" themselves in a false identity in an attempt to please teachers and other gatekeepers. Other students, like Korie, flat out rebel against school in general, saying things like, "I don't do no book reports," even if rebel-without-a clear-cut-cause attitude has no specific agenda, even if it ends up damaging the student and his future. Others, like Maggie, live in a kind of denial, telling themselves that they never need to speak non-AAVE, although, in fact, they do so unconsciously with teachers and other officials. Still, other students, like Norris, adopt a kind of "camouflage," putting on a "crazy" act to deflect the heckles of his Black neighbors, befriending dangerous toughs at school, whom he uses for protection, all the while remaing true to his long-term goal of college-bound success, and speaking SE as best he can.
What is the STROL resolution? Why was it introduced? And how has it played out over the past 40 years?
What main criticisms of SRTOL?
What are the main criticism of the the notion of "Standard English"?
In the English classroom, what tensions might dialect speakers experience when they have to write in "standard English" and what can English teachers do to reduce those tensions?
What are some of the strategies that AAVE speakers use to navigate/negotiate their identity in an environment where standard English is "forced" upon them?
The Students' Rights to Their Own Language resolution (CCCC) says that each cultural group has a right to know, study about and feel proud about its culture and accompanying dialect, and to be aware that SE is by no means superior to other dialects.
It was introduced along with the spirit of the 60s civil rights to try to ensure that the rights provided by civil rights legislation would not be Jim Crowed into meaninglessness, since it's a widely held notion that a culture's honor and dignity begins with upholding its language.
The impact over the years has been to isolate one group against the other, essentially, breeding some degree of pride for the Black community and, at the same time, much unrest within and without.
Criticisms of SRTOL say that it gives students a false sense of security, since it tends to leave uncorrected some communication behaviors that can invite future obstacles. As far as the overall school curriculum, teaching Ebonics or any other language in the classroom, other than the standard discourse spoken by the teacher is totally unprecedented. For example, if a student wanted to learn a computer language, he would not be permitted to communicate in a computer language of his own choosing. Also, historically, the classroom is the place where we are corrected; this is practically a definition of the classroom; Ebonics, though says that the student is always right and is above correction. Other criticisms hold that Ebonics shames teachers, it "dummy-down"s the curriculum, creates more stereotypes and, finally, increases segregation.
The criticisms of SE are: a) that SSE and SWE are roughly equivalent, b) standardization is possible, c) that SSE is the language of the workplace, d) that SSE is or should be the language of the classroom.
Many minority students grow up feeling conflicted about their own dialects, whether it's Jamaican patois or AAVE. Many such students feel inferior because their family or perhaps previous teachers spoke ill to them about their speech or writing. At the same time, many people in these peoples' communities denigrate each other for language and many other such "low class" trappings. These neighborhoods also boost the notion that NOT speaking home dialect equals "gettin' above your raisin'," e.g. "selling out" to "the man."
By following some of the techniques in Shafer's article and by carrying out ethnographic studies, students can learn to embrace their own language and culture with pride.
Some students, sadly, subvert their own personalities or cultures, "losing" themselves in a false identity in an attempt to please teachers and other gatekeepers. Other students, like Korie, flat out rebel against school in general, saying things like, "I don't do no book reports," even if rebel-without-a clear-cut-cause attitude has no specific agenda, even if it ends up damaging the student and his future. Others, like Maggie, live in a kind of denial, telling themselves that they never need to speak non-AAVE, although, in fact, they do so unconsciously with teachers and other officials. Still, other students, like Norris, adopt a kind of "camouflage," putting on a "crazy" act to deflect the heckles of his Black neighbors, befriending dangerous toughs at school, whom he uses for protection, all the while remaing true to his long-term goal of college-bound success, and speaking SE as best he can.
Week 9, Post 2: Shafer & Grandma
My Take
I very much enjoyed Shafer's pre-writing presentation/exercises. He has his students look at the various uses of language -- to control women, to control Black people, for example. Studying the way language is used, especially to manipulate people, is fascinating and can be empowering, particularly for young people who have never considered such media manipulations. Shafer's end goal, apparently, is to drive home the Ebonics agenda, and it's at this point that Shafer loses me. I'm all for honoring our students individually and culturally. But, unless I'm teaching an all-African American class, I have no reason to believe I would spend a great amount of time studying Ebonics, any more than I would focus on the patois of Filipinos and Brooklynese and Redneckese.
The hardest part of Shafer's paper to take seriously presents one of his students' ranting about the latest oppression: White kids co-opting Ebonics, the result of which is degrade it (!) into a "more crass, less disciplined language," because, above all, Ebonics is known for its discipline. Really?
Bottom line, if I had a very mixed class, I would definitely work some ethnographic studies into the course to ensure that all my students feel proud of their own culture and history before launching into the "wonders" of Standard English. Of course I would. Not to do so would be to avoid the elephant in the room, complicating or barring any real language instruction and acquisition.
My Arkansas Grandma
My real misgivings about AAVE being legit stem from the fact that most people I've met who have trouble switching to Broadcast English (or whatever you wanna call this here stuff we talk, us White folks) are typically hamstrung by poor education in general. That goes for my Arkansas grandma (God rest her soul) and all my Arkansas kin, for that matter. These people are the salt of the earth; they would give their life for a stranger. Get 'em a-jawin', though, and they're liable to say, along with Jed Clampit: "Ya gotta get nekked to warsh yasef." Fine. But is that a legitimate dialect or a lack of education? I would lean to the latter. I think most folks would. I know Blacks, Latinos, East Indians, Russians and Japanese, etc., who tend to speak a certain speech (language or dialect) at home and a different speech with the general public. The difference is that they are consciously able to make the switch. Others, like my grandma, never knew the difference, which is why I would chalk that up to a lack of education.
Then again, I could be wrong. Aside from the AAVE tendency to drop the verb to be, my Arkansas grandma's dialect was about 90% the same as AAVE, so maybe my grandma was perfectly justified. She simply spoke a version of Ebonics, so who am I to judge?
I very much enjoyed Shafer's pre-writing presentation/exercises. He has his students look at the various uses of language -- to control women, to control Black people, for example. Studying the way language is used, especially to manipulate people, is fascinating and can be empowering, particularly for young people who have never considered such media manipulations. Shafer's end goal, apparently, is to drive home the Ebonics agenda, and it's at this point that Shafer loses me. I'm all for honoring our students individually and culturally. But, unless I'm teaching an all-African American class, I have no reason to believe I would spend a great amount of time studying Ebonics, any more than I would focus on the patois of Filipinos and Brooklynese and Redneckese.
The hardest part of Shafer's paper to take seriously presents one of his students' ranting about the latest oppression: White kids co-opting Ebonics, the result of which is degrade it (!) into a "more crass, less disciplined language," because, above all, Ebonics is known for its discipline. Really?
Bottom line, if I had a very mixed class, I would definitely work some ethnographic studies into the course to ensure that all my students feel proud of their own culture and history before launching into the "wonders" of Standard English. Of course I would. Not to do so would be to avoid the elephant in the room, complicating or barring any real language instruction and acquisition.
My Arkansas Grandma
My real misgivings about AAVE being legit stem from the fact that most people I've met who have trouble switching to Broadcast English (or whatever you wanna call this here stuff we talk, us White folks) are typically hamstrung by poor education in general. That goes for my Arkansas grandma (God rest her soul) and all my Arkansas kin, for that matter. These people are the salt of the earth; they would give their life for a stranger. Get 'em a-jawin', though, and they're liable to say, along with Jed Clampit: "Ya gotta get nekked to warsh yasef." Fine. But is that a legitimate dialect or a lack of education? I would lean to the latter. I think most folks would. I know Blacks, Latinos, East Indians, Russians and Japanese, etc., who tend to speak a certain speech (language or dialect) at home and a different speech with the general public. The difference is that they are consciously able to make the switch. Others, like my grandma, never knew the difference, which is why I would chalk that up to a lack of education.
Then again, I could be wrong. Aside from the AAVE tendency to drop the verb to be, my Arkansas grandma's dialect was about 90% the same as AAVE, so maybe my grandma was perfectly justified. She simply spoke a version of Ebonics, so who am I to judge?
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Week 8, Post 2B: My 2 Cents on "Balancing" Classroom Dialects
The Immersion Question
As sensitive an issue as this is, and as personally confused/divided as I am about it, my first reaction is to seek employment where this is not such a hot political topic. My misgivings arise because, having taught ESL for a number of years, I've taught in classes that had both many languages and many dialects as well, and, while I made a conscious effort to validate the language and culture of each individual in my class, the focus of the course was on English immersion. In fact, on a number of occasions, my more impatient pupils simply protested any discussion or acknowledgement of any language in the classroom beside (SE) English. All this furor about Students' Rights to their home dialect appears to run counter to all the substantial research and pedagogy supporting language immersion in the L2.
The Justice Question
Beyond this, the issue of classroom justice comes up. If I have five students who use AAVE at home, another five who speak Hmong, another five who speak Spanish, another five whose family are Cajun, etc., all of this takes the spotlight off of the subject at hand, and seems to turn it onto home dialects. How are we to find the time to address all of these dialects? I understand how ethnographic activities, or even private journals, could be a step toward satisfying the Students' Rights issue, but, to spend a lot of time on this seems foolhardy, since our schools are falling behind the task of education already. To read prominent linguists suggesting anything like a "balance" smacks of the "equal time clause" of the FCC. Anyone who's familiar with the many pressures already facing classroom teachers would likely find such "balance" of dialects impractical, if not ludicrous.
The Efficacy Question
Which brings up a most critical point. While Signithia Fordham and friends decry the over-valuing of SE as anything beyond just another dialect, and while there's research to support the notion that badgering students about every grammar/pronunciation offense is counter-productive, still, I've yet to see the research that proves that, minority students who've been freed from the yoke of persnickity classroom SE transform into stellar students. If this were the case, I feel the majority of educators would jump on that bandwagon today. Bottom line: are we doing all of this to improve public relations or is this a proven way to improve SE acquisition?
As sensitive an issue as this is, and as personally confused/divided as I am about it, my first reaction is to seek employment where this is not such a hot political topic. My misgivings arise because, having taught ESL for a number of years, I've taught in classes that had both many languages and many dialects as well, and, while I made a conscious effort to validate the language and culture of each individual in my class, the focus of the course was on English immersion. In fact, on a number of occasions, my more impatient pupils simply protested any discussion or acknowledgement of any language in the classroom beside (SE) English. All this furor about Students' Rights to their home dialect appears to run counter to all the substantial research and pedagogy supporting language immersion in the L2.
The Justice Question
Beyond this, the issue of classroom justice comes up. If I have five students who use AAVE at home, another five who speak Hmong, another five who speak Spanish, another five whose family are Cajun, etc., all of this takes the spotlight off of the subject at hand, and seems to turn it onto home dialects. How are we to find the time to address all of these dialects? I understand how ethnographic activities, or even private journals, could be a step toward satisfying the Students' Rights issue, but, to spend a lot of time on this seems foolhardy, since our schools are falling behind the task of education already. To read prominent linguists suggesting anything like a "balance" smacks of the "equal time clause" of the FCC. Anyone who's familiar with the many pressures already facing classroom teachers would likely find such "balance" of dialects impractical, if not ludicrous.
The Efficacy Question
Which brings up a most critical point. While Signithia Fordham and friends decry the over-valuing of SE as anything beyond just another dialect, and while there's research to support the notion that badgering students about every grammar/pronunciation offense is counter-productive, still, I've yet to see the research that proves that, minority students who've been freed from the yoke of persnickity classroom SE transform into stellar students. If this were the case, I feel the majority of educators would jump on that bandwagon today. Bottom line: are we doing all of this to improve public relations or is this a proven way to improve SE acquisition?
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Week 8, Post 4: Sentence-Level Lesson Plan
Find examples of the sentence level issue that you're going to focus on in your 704 lesson plan. You can work from your tutees writing or you can work from any of the essays that we've looked at this semester. What kind of lesson activities might you do with a class of students to help them with this grammar issue?
As I review our syllabus, I note that 33.3% of my grade hangs on this lesson plan. It's disturbing, but, though I recall lots of in-class discussion about the case study, I'm afraid I need to ramp up my game as far as a sentence-level lesson plan. Since I don't recall discussing it, I'll have to speak to Mark about it specifically to ascertain exactly what's expected.
LATER...
So, since I went to Tuesday's class and Mark explained this assignment in general terms. Apparently, we're to present a 20-30 lesson of sentence-level grammar (our imaginary audience is our tutees?). After my years in ESL, this should not be a major struggle. The challenge comes, first, in choosing a subject that maintains my, and others', interest (even for 5 minutes), then, too, in somehow keeping everyone's eyelids open for such a long period. Is it cheating to distribute toothpicks beforehand?
Actually, this is a very curious assignment, following as it does from Mark's very informative workshop last Thursday on teaching grammar without even speaking about grammar, that is, a more inductive method. Now, though, we'll be lecturing for 20-30 minutes on grammar? Hmm.
Still, in order to really address this prompt, I'll need more information. When we spoke about the details of this project, Mark said it would all be unfolding gradually, with "very rigid guidelines," though he offered to email me the info. I told him not to bother, but now I think I'd like to have as complete an overview as possible as soon as possible. Ya feel me?
As I review our syllabus, I note that 33.3% of my grade hangs on this lesson plan. It's disturbing, but, though I recall lots of in-class discussion about the case study, I'm afraid I need to ramp up my game as far as a sentence-level lesson plan. Since I don't recall discussing it, I'll have to speak to Mark about it specifically to ascertain exactly what's expected.
LATER...
So, since I went to Tuesday's class and Mark explained this assignment in general terms. Apparently, we're to present a 20-30 lesson of sentence-level grammar (our imaginary audience is our tutees?). After my years in ESL, this should not be a major struggle. The challenge comes, first, in choosing a subject that maintains my, and others', interest (even for 5 minutes), then, too, in somehow keeping everyone's eyelids open for such a long period. Is it cheating to distribute toothpicks beforehand?
Actually, this is a very curious assignment, following as it does from Mark's very informative workshop last Thursday on teaching grammar without even speaking about grammar, that is, a more inductive method. Now, though, we'll be lecturing for 20-30 minutes on grammar? Hmm.
Still, in order to really address this prompt, I'll need more information. When we spoke about the details of this project, Mark said it would all be unfolding gradually, with "very rigid guidelines," though he offered to email me the info. I told him not to bother, but now I think I'd like to have as complete an overview as possible as soon as possible. Ya feel me?
Week 8, Post 3: Projecting My Case Study
Look back at your tutoring reports thus far and flesh out a few possible outlines or brainstorms for your case study. By now you should be at the stage where you can say something like:
"If I decide to write my case study on this student, it'll probably focus on self-management issues -getting organized, coming prepared, looking at the syllabus - and the strategies that I'm using to help the student."
"If I decide to write my case study on the other student, I'll probably focus on grammar editing strategies - I'll outline the strategies that we try over the course of the semester and chart our successes, her progress in becoming an independent self-editor."
Luigi
If I decide to write my case study on Luigi, most likely, I'll be covering self-management -- getting organized, coming prepared, understanding the writing prompt, knowing precisely what the teacher's looking for -- along with the outlining and essay structuring techniques we've discussed.
Lulu
If I decide to write my case study on Lulu, I'll be addressing both the essay structure methods and the sentence level grammar review we've been covering, since, as a non-native speaker and writer of English, we're having to tackle many issues at once.
"If I decide to write my case study on this student, it'll probably focus on self-management issues -getting organized, coming prepared, looking at the syllabus - and the strategies that I'm using to help the student."
"If I decide to write my case study on the other student, I'll probably focus on grammar editing strategies - I'll outline the strategies that we try over the course of the semester and chart our successes, her progress in becoming an independent self-editor."
Luigi
If I decide to write my case study on Luigi, most likely, I'll be covering self-management -- getting organized, coming prepared, understanding the writing prompt, knowing precisely what the teacher's looking for -- along with the outlining and essay structuring techniques we've discussed.
Lulu
If I decide to write my case study on Lulu, I'll be addressing both the essay structure methods and the sentence level grammar review we've been covering, since, as a non-native speaker and writer of English, we're having to tackle many issues at once.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Week 8, Post 2A: Students' Rights in a Nutshell
In your second blog synthesize the readings into a single set of issues:
What do we, as writing teachers, need to know from these articles as a group?
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects?
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
Feel free to do this in the form of "10 take-away points."
1. Students' Rights is an extremely sensitive, volatile and political issue. As such, it should be dealt with delicately, humanely and directly.
2. While some students who feel studying and using SE and its concomitant culture is contrary to their own dialect and culture, other students actually tend to ignore their own culture in order to fit in, thereby denying their own voices. As teachers, we need to do what we can to ensure that this tragedy does not occur.
3. While many take for granted that SE is the form of English in its ideal form, many linguists and educators see it as just another dialect. (Many feel SE doesn't even exist; it's just some ideal). We should be careful not to assign it too much credence.
4. On the other hand, it's the language of prestige and success. We want to give our students every opportunity to learn and use SE.
5. Many educators, linguists and anthropologists feel a student's identity is intrinsically connected to his home dialect. It's vital, therefore, to respect students' home dialect; we should never denigrate it or speak of it as an obstacle to learning SE. SE should be seen as one more dialect of many acceptable dialects.
6. Many linguists agree that the ideal means to learn SE is by using the home dialect as a springboard.
7. Where possible, students should conduct ethnographic research to study some of the contributions their dialect brings to the general American culture.
8. Students can write narratives that speak about how they became aware of race, class, gender differences.
9. Students can create skits dramatizing the inappropriate use of dialect.
10. Bottom line: it's vital to present SE along with a creative and dignified look at other dialects and how they function.
What do we, as writing teachers, need to know from these articles as a group?
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects?
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
Feel free to do this in the form of "10 take-away points."
1. Students' Rights is an extremely sensitive, volatile and political issue. As such, it should be dealt with delicately, humanely and directly.
2. While some students who feel studying and using SE and its concomitant culture is contrary to their own dialect and culture, other students actually tend to ignore their own culture in order to fit in, thereby denying their own voices. As teachers, we need to do what we can to ensure that this tragedy does not occur.
3. While many take for granted that SE is the form of English in its ideal form, many linguists and educators see it as just another dialect. (Many feel SE doesn't even exist; it's just some ideal). We should be careful not to assign it too much credence.
4. On the other hand, it's the language of prestige and success. We want to give our students every opportunity to learn and use SE.
5. Many educators, linguists and anthropologists feel a student's identity is intrinsically connected to his home dialect. It's vital, therefore, to respect students' home dialect; we should never denigrate it or speak of it as an obstacle to learning SE. SE should be seen as one more dialect of many acceptable dialects.
6. Many linguists agree that the ideal means to learn SE is by using the home dialect as a springboard.
7. Where possible, students should conduct ethnographic research to study some of the contributions their dialect brings to the general American culture.
8. Students can write narratives that speak about how they became aware of race, class, gender differences.
9. Students can create skits dramatizing the inappropriate use of dialect.
10. Bottom line: it's vital to present SE along with a creative and dignified look at other dialects and how they function.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Week 8, Post 1: Students Rights vs. SE
In your blog, first summarize each individual reading in a few bullet points:
What is the genre of the article: Is it a study? A theory piece? A pedagogy piece? A historical piece?
Who’s the audience for the article?
What points is the author making? What’s the authors purpose in making these points?
How might you summarize the article in a few sentences?
Jenny Cook-Gumperz
* This is a pedagogy and theory piece.
* The audience is college English instructors and researchers on basic composition, especially where students' L1 is not SE.
* The author's intent is to investigate why some students are especially challenged in the transference of spoken language (specifically AAVE) to written language (specifically, academic SE). Her intention is that the reader expand his view of how he defines literacy.
*Through a series of ethnographic interviews centered on a single participant, Wanda, Cooks-Gumperz highlights the complexities of melding one's own culture and dialect with the newly assumed dialect of academic SE. She finds the potential for AAVE students, attempting to succeed in school, to ignore their own culture, their own voices and to write "what the teacher wants rather than struggle to make her own understandings part of what is expressed on the page" (344).
Signithia Fordham
* This is a pedagogy piece. By this, I hope to distinguish it from the above pedagogy style in that it's far less scholarly. In fact, because of the incendiary language, it seems the author has designed her paper to be a sort of political pamphlet.
* The audience is English educators and researchers, including those encompassing secondary and post-secondary; it also addresses a broader audience, including anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and teacher/theorists in ethnic studies. Considering the political tone of the piece, I believe her audience could well be all Black Americans as well.
* After what appears to be a very limited survey at a single high school in Washington, D.C., the author draws conclusions about all Black Americans, namely that a) AAVE (Ebonics) is the dominant discourse for 80% of all Blacks, b) most Blacks adhere to this and avoid SE, c) this is because of the potential for backlash withing the Black community for those using SE, d) this even at the risk of academic and financial failure, f) even if they are unconscious of their motivations, Blacks withdraw, whenever possible, from connection with SE and White values, g) though she indicates Blacks are unaware of their impetus, nonetheless, she attempts to assign their withdrawal (above) to a mass political movement, which she terms "guerrilla warfare."
*Fordham admonishes educators and researchers that the sidelining of AAVE (Ebonics) by the dominant White culture belittles the power of this dialect as an instrument of "rhetorical resistance that nurtures the liberation of a people and reinforces their Black identity" (12). She makes an appeal, apparently aimed at her Black audience, to "lease or rent" SE, but never to use it wholesale, especially in the presence of an exclusively Black gathering.
Huntington Lyman & Margo A. Figgins
*This is a pedagogy piece. Like the above, it's conveyed with little or no evidence from research, but leans on opinions of colleagues who agree; like Fordham's piece (though a bit more restrained), it reads like a tract more than a scholarly paper.
* Like the above article, this one is aimed at scholars, educators all Black Americans and anyone already sympathetic to the students' rights movement.
* The authors a) deny that Standard English exists, b) deny that, if it does, it's wrong to call it better than other dialects, c) that identity is tied up in language, d) that minimizing or ignoring other dialects damages people (no real causal indication how this works), e) that, to inspire students to find their own voices, we need to acknowledge their dialects and its contributions to American culture.
* It's suggested that, in addition to teaching SE -- "how the rich and powerful talk" (41) -- teachers need to recognize dialects, too; the authors offer a handful of practical techniques to do so, largely borrowed from Heath's ethnographic approach from Ways With Words.
Barbara L Speicher & Jessica R. Bielanski
* This is a theory and pedagogy piece, far less inflammatory than the preceding two articles, though heavily political all the same.
* The audience, according to the extensive citations, is educators, theorists and highly educated political sympathizers.
* Speicher and Bielanski bring up four assumptions about SE. These assumptions are: a) Spoken SE and written SE are largely equivalent, b) spoken and written codes are amenable to standardization, c) SE is the language of the workplace and social mobility, d) SE is, or should be, the language of the classroom. The authors refute the first two assumptions, protest the third as racist and decry the last one for its lack of efficacy.
* Their argument is that, to linguists, all dialects are equal, like Lyman an Figgins, it's impossible to call SE better than other dialects. That most people, even those who don't use it, think SE is the superior dialect, is most frustrating. The defeat of the Ebonics movement in Oakland, largely at the hands of powerful Blacks like Jesse Jackson, indicate a bias by the media in failing to publish dissenting opinions by important linguists.
What is the genre of the article: Is it a study? A theory piece? A pedagogy piece? A historical piece?
Who’s the audience for the article?
What points is the author making? What’s the authors purpose in making these points?
How might you summarize the article in a few sentences?
Jenny Cook-Gumperz
* This is a pedagogy and theory piece.
* The audience is college English instructors and researchers on basic composition, especially where students' L1 is not SE.
* The author's intent is to investigate why some students are especially challenged in the transference of spoken language (specifically AAVE) to written language (specifically, academic SE). Her intention is that the reader expand his view of how he defines literacy.
*Through a series of ethnographic interviews centered on a single participant, Wanda, Cooks-Gumperz highlights the complexities of melding one's own culture and dialect with the newly assumed dialect of academic SE. She finds the potential for AAVE students, attempting to succeed in school, to ignore their own culture, their own voices and to write "what the teacher wants rather than struggle to make her own understandings part of what is expressed on the page" (344).
Signithia Fordham
* This is a pedagogy piece. By this, I hope to distinguish it from the above pedagogy style in that it's far less scholarly. In fact, because of the incendiary language, it seems the author has designed her paper to be a sort of political pamphlet.
* The audience is English educators and researchers, including those encompassing secondary and post-secondary; it also addresses a broader audience, including anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and teacher/theorists in ethnic studies. Considering the political tone of the piece, I believe her audience could well be all Black Americans as well.
* After what appears to be a very limited survey at a single high school in Washington, D.C., the author draws conclusions about all Black Americans, namely that a) AAVE (Ebonics) is the dominant discourse for 80% of all Blacks, b) most Blacks adhere to this and avoid SE, c) this is because of the potential for backlash withing the Black community for those using SE, d) this even at the risk of academic and financial failure, f) even if they are unconscious of their motivations, Blacks withdraw, whenever possible, from connection with SE and White values, g) though she indicates Blacks are unaware of their impetus, nonetheless, she attempts to assign their withdrawal (above) to a mass political movement, which she terms "guerrilla warfare."
*Fordham admonishes educators and researchers that the sidelining of AAVE (Ebonics) by the dominant White culture belittles the power of this dialect as an instrument of "rhetorical resistance that nurtures the liberation of a people and reinforces their Black identity" (12). She makes an appeal, apparently aimed at her Black audience, to "lease or rent" SE, but never to use it wholesale, especially in the presence of an exclusively Black gathering.
Huntington Lyman & Margo A. Figgins
*This is a pedagogy piece. Like the above, it's conveyed with little or no evidence from research, but leans on opinions of colleagues who agree; like Fordham's piece (though a bit more restrained), it reads like a tract more than a scholarly paper.
* Like the above article, this one is aimed at scholars, educators all Black Americans and anyone already sympathetic to the students' rights movement.
* The authors a) deny that Standard English exists, b) deny that, if it does, it's wrong to call it better than other dialects, c) that identity is tied up in language, d) that minimizing or ignoring other dialects damages people (no real causal indication how this works), e) that, to inspire students to find their own voices, we need to acknowledge their dialects and its contributions to American culture.
* It's suggested that, in addition to teaching SE -- "how the rich and powerful talk" (41) -- teachers need to recognize dialects, too; the authors offer a handful of practical techniques to do so, largely borrowed from Heath's ethnographic approach from Ways With Words.
Barbara L Speicher & Jessica R. Bielanski
* This is a theory and pedagogy piece, far less inflammatory than the preceding two articles, though heavily political all the same.
* The audience, according to the extensive citations, is educators, theorists and highly educated political sympathizers.
* Speicher and Bielanski bring up four assumptions about SE. These assumptions are: a) Spoken SE and written SE are largely equivalent, b) spoken and written codes are amenable to standardization, c) SE is the language of the workplace and social mobility, d) SE is, or should be, the language of the classroom. The authors refute the first two assumptions, protest the third as racist and decry the last one for its lack of efficacy.
* Their argument is that, to linguists, all dialects are equal, like Lyman an Figgins, it's impossible to call SE better than other dialects. That most people, even those who don't use it, think SE is the superior dialect, is most frustrating. The defeat of the Ebonics movement in Oakland, largely at the hands of powerful Blacks like Jesse Jackson, indicate a bias by the media in failing to publish dissenting opinions by important linguists.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Week 7, Post 3: Picky, Picky!
Analyze "Pot Legal," "Weird Friday," "Spelling" and "Introductions" to find examples of the following "spoken language interference." Look for:
Phonology (e.g. difference between our sound system and writing system)
Morphology (e.g. the need to correctly encode word endings and word parts in writing)
Syntax (e.g. difference in the grammar of spoken utterances and written sentences)
Semantics (e.g. differences in the types of words and meanings that we use in speaking and writing)
Pragmatics (e.g. differences the way we construct our message and get it across to listeners/readers.)
Gaffs, flubs, boo-boos...there's no shortage of oopsy-daisies in these writing samples. Rather than analyze each sample for all five errors or compile by error category, I decided to take a choice line or two from each sample to discuss. I found some samples a tad more compelling to write about than others (thus, the absence of "Spelling" in my post here)...
1. "Weird Friday"
While it's possibly the most conversational in its flow, "Weird Friday" is rich with SLIPS. One of my favorite is the following. The writer's mother asks him where he'd like to go, and he tells her:
So I replied, "I don't know mom were ever you want you is the one that is driving."
This line feels very honest (even if it's tough to read) in that this student is writing the way he speaks. It's missing commas before and after the object; these are Phonology errors. The object, mom, ought to be in caps; another Phonology error. Writing wherever as were ever breaks two rules -- one for spelling (where) and one for breaking up a compound word; for both causes, were ever should be classified a Phonology issue. After want, we need a period to conclude the main idea, plus a capital Y: two more Phonology flaws. There are two sentences here, but the writer's trying to pack them into one. This is what we call a run-on sentence; as a sentence boundary issue, we'd label this a Syntax error. In the second sentence, the verb are is incorrectly converted to the third person is, making it a Morphology gaff. The use of that for a person is another Syntax error, since the appropriate choice is who.
2. "Introductions" (A)
It's not always easy to tell how to classify an error. In fact, sometimes there's more than one way to skin a morpheme. For example, in "Introduction," we find:
Sandra was attending my class in Mexican Lit. at Venice High School...
Something smells fishy, but why, exactly? My ESL background forced me to teach plenty of simple past vs. past continuous, so I have a hunch what's at issue here. Ideally, past continuous is used when we need to distinguish one action in the past from another that had already begun. For example,
I arrived late, just as the pastor was delivering his closing words.
We also use past continuous in a more casual way to speak about past activities (whose terminations are less important than the action):
So, yesterday, I was so busy: I was running around town, buying groceries, picking up my kids, smoking crack...
In the sample sentence above from "Introductions," Sandra's attendance is an action unaccompanied by a second action, so using past continuous, not simple past, goes unjustified. Also, this is a sample writing for a class, so a breezy, casual voice seems inappropriate. For both of these reasons, the incorrect tense form marks it a Morphology error. At the same time, it smacks of vernacular, so we could call it a Semantic error, too.
3. "Introductions" (B)
Another "chatty" style issue in the same sample gives us this couplet:
Everyone knew who was Gerardo. Loves to meet people and make friends.
The noun clause "who was Gerardo" works fine in some other languages (Spanish, German), but English requires the verb to follow the noun in this case. We should chalk it up as a Morphology error, but many people of non-SE background speak this way on a regular basis (it may count as a distinct dialect), so we could also say it's a Phonology error as well.
The second sentence, Loves to meet people and make friends., is one of the few fragments in these samples; it lacks a noun. As such, it's a sentence boundary error or Syntax error. Because of the inappropriately casual style, this marks it a Semantics issue as well.
4. "Pot Legal"
Krauthammer's article says most student errors tend to be Phonological, especially spelling and punctuation (59%, according to Connors and Lundsford). Because of this, "Pot Legal" is a bit more unusual and, to me, much more interesting. Particularly fun are sentences lacking like this:
Gray is a man who has already had his success in life and for that reason he wants to smoke mariguana legally.
It makes you wonder: does Gray, a politician, want to legalize pot for his constituents, now that he has enough clout to pull off such controversial shenanigans? Or has he always been riding around with Cheech and Chong in that funky van, blowing reefer? Is he now going to show up to work with red eyes and giggling -- only legally?
All snickers aside, this qualifies as a Pragmatics error, due to its general lack of coherence. Oh, and mariguana (is this a variation on iguana?) is misspelled, a blaspheme against Phonology.
And now that I, Jehova Almighty, have lain judgements and hurled lightning bolts, I stride off into the sunset...
Phonology (e.g. difference between our sound system and writing system)
Morphology (e.g. the need to correctly encode word endings and word parts in writing)
Syntax (e.g. difference in the grammar of spoken utterances and written sentences)
Semantics (e.g. differences in the types of words and meanings that we use in speaking and writing)
Pragmatics (e.g. differences the way we construct our message and get it across to listeners/readers.)
Gaffs, flubs, boo-boos...there's no shortage of oopsy-daisies in these writing samples. Rather than analyze each sample for all five errors or compile by error category, I decided to take a choice line or two from each sample to discuss. I found some samples a tad more compelling to write about than others (thus, the absence of "Spelling" in my post here)...
1. "Weird Friday"
While it's possibly the most conversational in its flow, "Weird Friday" is rich with SLIPS. One of my favorite is the following. The writer's mother asks him where he'd like to go, and he tells her:
So I replied, "I don't know mom were ever you want you is the one that is driving."
This line feels very honest (even if it's tough to read) in that this student is writing the way he speaks. It's missing commas before and after the object; these are Phonology errors. The object, mom, ought to be in caps; another Phonology error. Writing wherever as were ever breaks two rules -- one for spelling (where) and one for breaking up a compound word; for both causes, were ever should be classified a Phonology issue. After want, we need a period to conclude the main idea, plus a capital Y: two more Phonology flaws. There are two sentences here, but the writer's trying to pack them into one. This is what we call a run-on sentence; as a sentence boundary issue, we'd label this a Syntax error. In the second sentence, the verb are is incorrectly converted to the third person is, making it a Morphology gaff. The use of that for a person is another Syntax error, since the appropriate choice is who.
2. "Introductions" (A)
It's not always easy to tell how to classify an error. In fact, sometimes there's more than one way to skin a morpheme. For example, in "Introduction," we find:
Sandra was attending my class in Mexican Lit. at Venice High School...
Something smells fishy, but why, exactly? My ESL background forced me to teach plenty of simple past vs. past continuous, so I have a hunch what's at issue here. Ideally, past continuous is used when we need to distinguish one action in the past from another that had already begun. For example,
I arrived late, just as the pastor was delivering his closing words.
We also use past continuous in a more casual way to speak about past activities (whose terminations are less important than the action):
So, yesterday, I was so busy: I was running around town, buying groceries, picking up my kids, smoking crack...
In the sample sentence above from "Introductions," Sandra's attendance is an action unaccompanied by a second action, so using past continuous, not simple past, goes unjustified. Also, this is a sample writing for a class, so a breezy, casual voice seems inappropriate. For both of these reasons, the incorrect tense form marks it a Morphology error. At the same time, it smacks of vernacular, so we could call it a Semantic error, too.
3. "Introductions" (B)
Another "chatty" style issue in the same sample gives us this couplet:
Everyone knew who was Gerardo. Loves to meet people and make friends.
The noun clause "who was Gerardo" works fine in some other languages (Spanish, German), but English requires the verb to follow the noun in this case. We should chalk it up as a Morphology error, but many people of non-SE background speak this way on a regular basis (it may count as a distinct dialect), so we could also say it's a Phonology error as well.
The second sentence, Loves to meet people and make friends., is one of the few fragments in these samples; it lacks a noun. As such, it's a sentence boundary error or Syntax error. Because of the inappropriately casual style, this marks it a Semantics issue as well.
4. "Pot Legal"
Krauthammer's article says most student errors tend to be Phonological, especially spelling and punctuation (59%, according to Connors and Lundsford). Because of this, "Pot Legal" is a bit more unusual and, to me, much more interesting. Particularly fun are sentences lacking like this:
Gray is a man who has already had his success in life and for that reason he wants to smoke mariguana legally.
It makes you wonder: does Gray, a politician, want to legalize pot for his constituents, now that he has enough clout to pull off such controversial shenanigans? Or has he always been riding around with Cheech and Chong in that funky van, blowing reefer? Is he now going to show up to work with red eyes and giggling -- only legally?
All snickers aside, this qualifies as a Pragmatics error, due to its general lack of coherence. Oh, and mariguana (is this a variation on iguana?) is misspelled, a blaspheme against Phonology.
And now that I, Jehova Almighty, have lain judgements and hurled lightning bolts, I stride off into the sunset...
Monday, October 7, 2013
Week 7, Post 2: NOT for the Faint of Heart
Why do you think it's difficult for some students move from informal oral language to written academic language? (Why is academic language so difficult for some students?) How would you explain the features of academic language to a tutee or to a class? How might you help students practice academic language?
Karma Chameleons
In my last post I referred to people like us, who "cop a feel," that is, adopt the feeling of academic writing, as "magpies," since we're grabbing a piece of this, a piece of that. It's about imitation, I feel, so maybe we're more like chameleons, blending into with whatever discourse we come in contact with.
Depth Charges
In my last post, I identified what, for me, is the other element in adapting to academic discourse. After determining to become a great chameleon (above), it's necessary to buy into the academic/intellectual world of IDEAS. Many people don't or can't. Most people we encounter have a great aptitude for more the more concrete side of things. Almost no one in my very intelligent family has the slightest interest in discussing topics at the dinner table beyond sports, business, the latest purchase, cooking and newborns.
However, the academic community delves deeper into self-examination and into analysis of all topics, peeling off the top layers to reveal the dark underbelly. Some people are analytical, but not skilled chameleons, while some chameleons won't dig down deep. This combination, plus a big appetite for learning, self-expression and taking giant risks -- all of this is necessary, just as a starter, for anyone to brave the wilds of academic discourse.
Cat-of-Nine-Tails
Then there's Krauthammer's paper, a brutal, bloody indictment of the cat-of-nine-tails that we call the written word. Even for those hungry enough, brave enough, brainy enough -- if they lack talent or luck or the iron stomach required to confront the snares of writing -- shucks, God bless 'em. We all know PLENTY of native Americans who have given up on writing. With all of this, who could blame non-natives for flinching? Of course, some would say the REAL masochists are their teachers. But, of course, we know better, don't we? (Gulp.)
Onward & Upward
How, then, to educate and motivate our "broken-winged starlings?" What makes most sense to this writer/teacher is what seems to be working for Ms. Goens of the "stretch course," 104: integrating reading and writing. How are our students supposed to "pick up" academic style, except by massive exposure and healthy emulation? I learned how to address elite gents and ladies by tuning my ear to the patter, by noting what style fits (or doesn't), and "dressing accordingly," and I would recommend our students do the same. They need to read academic language, they need to hear it spoken and they need to try to speak it on the spot, like a tennis player being shot balls from a tennis ball cannon. At first, it's bound to be tough, but repetition -- within a meaningful context --will reduce the tension and increase capacity.
Karma Chameleons
In my last post I referred to people like us, who "cop a feel," that is, adopt the feeling of academic writing, as "magpies," since we're grabbing a piece of this, a piece of that. It's about imitation, I feel, so maybe we're more like chameleons, blending into with whatever discourse we come in contact with.
Depth Charges
In my last post, I identified what, for me, is the other element in adapting to academic discourse. After determining to become a great chameleon (above), it's necessary to buy into the academic/intellectual world of IDEAS. Many people don't or can't. Most people we encounter have a great aptitude for more the more concrete side of things. Almost no one in my very intelligent family has the slightest interest in discussing topics at the dinner table beyond sports, business, the latest purchase, cooking and newborns.
However, the academic community delves deeper into self-examination and into analysis of all topics, peeling off the top layers to reveal the dark underbelly. Some people are analytical, but not skilled chameleons, while some chameleons won't dig down deep. This combination, plus a big appetite for learning, self-expression and taking giant risks -- all of this is necessary, just as a starter, for anyone to brave the wilds of academic discourse.
Cat-of-Nine-Tails
Then there's Krauthammer's paper, a brutal, bloody indictment of the cat-of-nine-tails that we call the written word. Even for those hungry enough, brave enough, brainy enough -- if they lack talent or luck or the iron stomach required to confront the snares of writing -- shucks, God bless 'em. We all know PLENTY of native Americans who have given up on writing. With all of this, who could blame non-natives for flinching? Of course, some would say the REAL masochists are their teachers. But, of course, we know better, don't we? (Gulp.)
Onward & Upward
How, then, to educate and motivate our "broken-winged starlings?" What makes most sense to this writer/teacher is what seems to be working for Ms. Goens of the "stretch course," 104: integrating reading and writing. How are our students supposed to "pick up" academic style, except by massive exposure and healthy emulation? I learned how to address elite gents and ladies by tuning my ear to the patter, by noting what style fits (or doesn't), and "dressing accordingly," and I would recommend our students do the same. They need to read academic language, they need to hear it spoken and they need to try to speak it on the spot, like a tennis player being shot balls from a tennis ball cannon. At first, it's bound to be tough, but repetition -- within a meaningful context --will reduce the tension and increase capacity.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Week 7, Post 1: The Power of the Magpie
Tell us a little bit about how you "mastered" academic language at various stages of your academic career -- the language of high school reading/writing, the language of college reading/writing, and the language of graduate-level reading/writing? Was it a conscious process? Or did you just "absorb" the language? Or was it trial-and-error? What struggles or challenges did you face? What challenges do you still face in academic reading/writing?
My One Blessing
I suppose I came to SFSU to get a handle on how to teach writing because, while I feel I write fairly competently, I can't remember ever struggling with it, so how to translate something so natural into a "methodology"? Math was always a challenge, frankly, and I felt like an idiot because I had to fight just to get Cs and Bs.
Languages, though, have been my one blessing. I fell in love with language through songs and movies and children's books. I began writing "songs" in fourth grade, then, really seriously in high school. I was on the school newspaper beginning in seventh grade, so I must have felt some enjoyment and control over language then. Reading, actually, was tougher for me. I was always a notoriously slow reader (still am).
My Two Activities
Two things stand out as useful activities that aided my language acquisition, and both of them come down to being a good "magpie." I remember watching lots of TV as a kid, and I recall putting on "skits" back in fifth grade. (One in particular involved a cop and a heroin junkie. The junkie was injecting himself with a "needle" (a mechanical pencil that resembled a hypo, I thought?) and the cop comes and freights him off to jail. Then the cop tells the audience the "moral" of the tale in a voice that tried to sound like Robert Stack from the TV show "The Untouchables.") It was nothing. But I always loved doing "schtick" like this, either drama or comedy, mostly the latter.
The other activity was songwriting. Again, it all began with listening like a total devotee to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle, Creeedence Clearwater, Motown, etc. -- then making something up based on, not pure imitation, but definitely inspiration and emulation.
In both cases, whether "drama" or songwriting, looking back, I was actively IMITATING other genres. Kids do this all the time in trying out impressions of friends, family, movie stars, etc. And so it goes, I suppose, with writing narrative. It starts with what I call in class The Art of Paying Attention. People who really listen, then absorb, then try to replicate -- this type of people has a far easier time. Because I think 80-90% of it's imitation, don't you?
Faking the Code
So we learn the "style" of writing book reports. We learn the "style" of writing a newspaper lead. We learn the "style" of a five-paragraph essay. And so the language of academic discourse is just a code. If I'm on the corner, talking to Jimmy Two-Fingers about the game, I'm gonna to hit Jimmy with his, you know, street "code." But if I'm to converse with learned minds concerning elevated topics, if I have any intention of impressing such worthies, it behooves me to wear the appropriate "clothes" to the event, namely academic "code," and to meet such people head-on with ideas that at least pretend to hold their interest.
Academic Magpie
When I was eleven, I became a "born again Christian." Part of the fascination with religion was the spiritual "pull," I suppose, and the other part was the intrigue of the rhetoric itself. The philosophy was compelling, largely a giant poetic ball of beautiful ironies: this poor carpenter becomes King of Kings; he tells people to turn the other cheek just when they're dying for revenge; he comes to fulfill his mission, but he's still got his moment of doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane. Anyway, I found it so mentally appealing, which is one reason that I jumped in, studied like crazy and began "preaching" to my friends as early as junior high (no, I wasn't popular).
Essentially, again, I was "trying on the clothes" for another act -- this time it was religious and, I suppose, intellectual or at least, academic. I loved the way a sermon could compel you through a mixture of reason and emotion: this was the art of the persuasive argument. I dreamed of being able to persuade people myself someday, possibly as missionary in an exotic land (!). In a way, my connection to academic discourse was just a melding of the "magpie" in me with my fascination for philosophy and persuasion.
PS
I just re-read the above after several days' marination, and I need to add that, as far as TRUE academic discourse, the above was my "grooming" for the academic culture, but I was blessed with additional tutelage. My sharpest "chops" for critical thinking, consciousness of my audience and concise writing came from a) my experience writing in journalism (Acalanes/ Piedmont H.S., UC Berkeley, Cashbox Magazine, various video magazines in LA) and b) my Rhetoric 1A course at Cal. As the editor of my high school paper, I felt like a bit of a "hot shot" writer, so I opted for Rhet. 1A, since it was said to be the toughest. It was. Through lively debates, we learned that critical thinking was the means to a clear concept of audience for the argumentative essay and the most succinct language. It was a merciless and absolutely successful "boot camp." All of us had begun thinking we were "great" writers. All of us improved markedly still -- even if, due to the stringent nature of the rubric, we were lucky to pull a B in the end. This was by far the most useful course in my college career (and I still have the cracked ribs to remember it by).
My One Blessing
I suppose I came to SFSU to get a handle on how to teach writing because, while I feel I write fairly competently, I can't remember ever struggling with it, so how to translate something so natural into a "methodology"? Math was always a challenge, frankly, and I felt like an idiot because I had to fight just to get Cs and Bs.
Languages, though, have been my one blessing. I fell in love with language through songs and movies and children's books. I began writing "songs" in fourth grade, then, really seriously in high school. I was on the school newspaper beginning in seventh grade, so I must have felt some enjoyment and control over language then. Reading, actually, was tougher for me. I was always a notoriously slow reader (still am).
My Two Activities
Two things stand out as useful activities that aided my language acquisition, and both of them come down to being a good "magpie." I remember watching lots of TV as a kid, and I recall putting on "skits" back in fifth grade. (One in particular involved a cop and a heroin junkie. The junkie was injecting himself with a "needle" (a mechanical pencil that resembled a hypo, I thought?) and the cop comes and freights him off to jail. Then the cop tells the audience the "moral" of the tale in a voice that tried to sound like Robert Stack from the TV show "The Untouchables.") It was nothing. But I always loved doing "schtick" like this, either drama or comedy, mostly the latter.
The other activity was songwriting. Again, it all began with listening like a total devotee to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle, Creeedence Clearwater, Motown, etc. -- then making something up based on, not pure imitation, but definitely inspiration and emulation.
In both cases, whether "drama" or songwriting, looking back, I was actively IMITATING other genres. Kids do this all the time in trying out impressions of friends, family, movie stars, etc. And so it goes, I suppose, with writing narrative. It starts with what I call in class The Art of Paying Attention. People who really listen, then absorb, then try to replicate -- this type of people has a far easier time. Because I think 80-90% of it's imitation, don't you?
Faking the Code
So we learn the "style" of writing book reports. We learn the "style" of writing a newspaper lead. We learn the "style" of a five-paragraph essay. And so the language of academic discourse is just a code. If I'm on the corner, talking to Jimmy Two-Fingers about the game, I'm gonna to hit Jimmy with his, you know, street "code." But if I'm to converse with learned minds concerning elevated topics, if I have any intention of impressing such worthies, it behooves me to wear the appropriate "clothes" to the event, namely academic "code," and to meet such people head-on with ideas that at least pretend to hold their interest.
Academic Magpie
When I was eleven, I became a "born again Christian." Part of the fascination with religion was the spiritual "pull," I suppose, and the other part was the intrigue of the rhetoric itself. The philosophy was compelling, largely a giant poetic ball of beautiful ironies: this poor carpenter becomes King of Kings; he tells people to turn the other cheek just when they're dying for revenge; he comes to fulfill his mission, but he's still got his moment of doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane. Anyway, I found it so mentally appealing, which is one reason that I jumped in, studied like crazy and began "preaching" to my friends as early as junior high (no, I wasn't popular).
Essentially, again, I was "trying on the clothes" for another act -- this time it was religious and, I suppose, intellectual or at least, academic. I loved the way a sermon could compel you through a mixture of reason and emotion: this was the art of the persuasive argument. I dreamed of being able to persuade people myself someday, possibly as missionary in an exotic land (!). In a way, my connection to academic discourse was just a melding of the "magpie" in me with my fascination for philosophy and persuasion.
PS
I just re-read the above after several days' marination, and I need to add that, as far as TRUE academic discourse, the above was my "grooming" for the academic culture, but I was blessed with additional tutelage. My sharpest "chops" for critical thinking, consciousness of my audience and concise writing came from a) my experience writing in journalism (Acalanes/ Piedmont H.S., UC Berkeley, Cashbox Magazine, various video magazines in LA) and b) my Rhetoric 1A course at Cal. As the editor of my high school paper, I felt like a bit of a "hot shot" writer, so I opted for Rhet. 1A, since it was said to be the toughest. It was. Through lively debates, we learned that critical thinking was the means to a clear concept of audience for the argumentative essay and the most succinct language. It was a merciless and absolutely successful "boot camp." All of us had begun thinking we were "great" writers. All of us improved markedly still -- even if, due to the stringent nature of the rubric, we were lucky to pull a B in the end. This was by far the most useful course in my college career (and I still have the cracked ribs to remember it by).
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Week 6, Post 3: Preliminary Self-Assessment
Do a preliminary self-evaluation of your blogs thus far. Things to think about:
What makes a "good" posting for you as a writer of your own blog?
What make as "good" posting for you as a reader of other people's blogs?
In your reading, writing and commenting on blogs, what's useful for you in developing your own thinking?
What "grade" would you give yourself? At this point let's just use CHECK or CHECK-PLUS or CHECK-MINUS as grades. Explain your grade.
I feel a real sense of accomplishment when, after thinking about the points raised regarding the classwork, I can synthesize what I've learned, or am learning, then to reach beyond that to integrate this with my personal experience or beliefs. Writing my blog, I've found, feels different from writing other academic papers in that I'm freer to use my own personal voice. This is what I love about writing in general -- expressing myself. My blog, then, allows me to re-examine or re-discover what we've been discussing, plus it gives me a much more significant personal stake in the process, since I'm encouraged to be myself and express myself.
Compared with some of my colleagues, I've found that it's much harder for me than expected to add some fresh departure after reading, writing and synthesizing, but this exactly what I, as a reader, find stimulating. (I suspect this is because some others have many years of comp instruction experience to draw from, while I have almost none. Oh well...) As a reader, this is both exciting and challenging for me when I read something by a student who has an unusual perspective. It encourages me to look at an issue from multiple angles and to speak my mind, rather than follow my age-old tendency to write for the teacher.
I find I'm learning a great deal from the postings. Occasionally, I get a great deal more from reading an usual posting. One case comes to mind (though from my 709 class) where a student tore off on a bit of a rant about a text we'd read. I was impressed and a bit intimidated by how much this person knew about the topic, and how personally she was taking it. Her post was so well-informed and so assertive, I found myself seeking her out to discover more about her and the way she teaches. Sometimes our own colleagues are our richest resources.
Assessing myself feels awkward as hell, to be frank, especially the idea of getting naked in front of others, revealing, confessing. However, I put a lot, sometimes enormous amounts, of thought and time into my posts, so that degree of effort should count for something. I feel the content of my posts reflects someone who's truly engaged with the question at hand and the course overall. Most important, I find that I'm learning a lot of useful things and growing as a student and as a teacher, so I have to say this development, together with the effort and content of my blog puts me in the "CHECK-PLUS" category.
What makes a "good" posting for you as a writer of your own blog?
What make as "good" posting for you as a reader of other people's blogs?
In your reading, writing and commenting on blogs, what's useful for you in developing your own thinking?
What "grade" would you give yourself? At this point let's just use CHECK or CHECK-PLUS or CHECK-MINUS as grades. Explain your grade.
I feel a real sense of accomplishment when, after thinking about the points raised regarding the classwork, I can synthesize what I've learned, or am learning, then to reach beyond that to integrate this with my personal experience or beliefs. Writing my blog, I've found, feels different from writing other academic papers in that I'm freer to use my own personal voice. This is what I love about writing in general -- expressing myself. My blog, then, allows me to re-examine or re-discover what we've been discussing, plus it gives me a much more significant personal stake in the process, since I'm encouraged to be myself and express myself.
Compared with some of my colleagues, I've found that it's much harder for me than expected to add some fresh departure after reading, writing and synthesizing, but this exactly what I, as a reader, find stimulating. (I suspect this is because some others have many years of comp instruction experience to draw from, while I have almost none. Oh well...) As a reader, this is both exciting and challenging for me when I read something by a student who has an unusual perspective. It encourages me to look at an issue from multiple angles and to speak my mind, rather than follow my age-old tendency to write for the teacher.
I find I'm learning a great deal from the postings. Occasionally, I get a great deal more from reading an usual posting. One case comes to mind (though from my 709 class) where a student tore off on a bit of a rant about a text we'd read. I was impressed and a bit intimidated by how much this person knew about the topic, and how personally she was taking it. Her post was so well-informed and so assertive, I found myself seeking her out to discover more about her and the way she teaches. Sometimes our own colleagues are our richest resources.
Assessing myself feels awkward as hell, to be frank, especially the idea of getting naked in front of others, revealing, confessing. However, I put a lot, sometimes enormous amounts, of thought and time into my posts, so that degree of effort should count for something. I feel the content of my posts reflects someone who's truly engaged with the question at hand and the course overall. Most important, I find that I'm learning a lot of useful things and growing as a student and as a teacher, so I have to say this development, together with the effort and content of my blog puts me in the "CHECK-PLUS" category.
Week 6, Post 2b: SFSU English Class Characteristics
As you might see from my previous posting, it was hard to make any generalizations about students by class. With the benefit of in-class discussion, I learned some useful information.
Generally, 104 is for students who took the DSP (Directed Self-Placement test through Early Start) and opted for remedial level. These students tend to be those who scored lowest on the test.
114 is the traditional freshman composition course. These students are here because they are more highly functioning in English writing and reading or because, following the DSP, they didn't care for the idea of 104, either because it's remedial or because it's a commitment to a full-year ("stretch") program.
214 is the sophomore segment of the two-year comp requirement at SFSU, so ususally these students are sophomores and more skilled than the 114 students. However, as I stated in my Week 6, Post 1, this does not apply to my two tutees, for whom it's the reverse. My 114 student writes at a decent level already, while my 214 student struggles with many sentence-level issues. (Both have a pretty firm handle on general, though the 214 lags behind by some degree.)
The key differentiating fact for these two, I believe, is that the more advanced student has the benefit of having heard and spoken English, at least as L2 if not L1, growing up in the Phillipines and in the U.S. The student who's struggling more has spent about the same amount of time (5 years) in the states with her folks, but the L1 is Cantonese 24/7, so she's missing some of the benefits of using the language, developing vocabulary and syntax.
Generally, 104 is for students who took the DSP (Directed Self-Placement test through Early Start) and opted for remedial level. These students tend to be those who scored lowest on the test.
114 is the traditional freshman composition course. These students are here because they are more highly functioning in English writing and reading or because, following the DSP, they didn't care for the idea of 104, either because it's remedial or because it's a commitment to a full-year ("stretch") program.
214 is the sophomore segment of the two-year comp requirement at SFSU, so ususally these students are sophomores and more skilled than the 114 students. However, as I stated in my Week 6, Post 1, this does not apply to my two tutees, for whom it's the reverse. My 114 student writes at a decent level already, while my 214 student struggles with many sentence-level issues. (Both have a pretty firm handle on general, though the 214 lags behind by some degree.)
The key differentiating fact for these two, I believe, is that the more advanced student has the benefit of having heard and spoken English, at least as L2 if not L1, growing up in the Phillipines and in the U.S. The student who's struggling more has spent about the same amount of time (5 years) in the states with her folks, but the L1 is Cantonese 24/7, so she's missing some of the benefits of using the language, developing vocabulary and syntax.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Week 6, Post 2a: My Tutee's Classes
I wish I were better able to make generalizations about my tutee's classes. However, I feel rather ill-equipped, armed with only info from my 3 tutorials with two students and a reading of my tutor groups' reports. Mostly, I find it hard to differentiate. For example, starting with my own two tutees, I find it odd that the more advanced is in the "lower" or freshman class, while the more developmental is in the "upper" or sophomore class.
Frankly, after umpteen years of my teaching ESL, I'm somewhat relieved that they're both at a certain level where they understand me and understand their assignments, as well as understand the general approach of a five-paragraph essay. On the other hand, my sophomore student in 214 struggles enormously at times with sentence-level issues as well as general structure.
My freshman in 114 has much higher level language ability in general. As far as his determination toward improvement, so far, I feel he's the more challenged because he seems to have a false sense of security that perhaps he doesn't need my help very much; this might explain his tardiness and his lack of preparedness to work when he arrives. As you can see, I'm a bit at a loss in my attempt to make any generalizations about students by level or by course, so far, whether it's my tutees or others. If anything, I see structure issues and sentence level issues across the board.
I must say, I'm filled with admiration reading Jennifer E's report where he student has composition to revise, so she launches into practicing reading skills. I only wish I had her reading instruction background. In the meantime, I'll do my best to encourage my students and to bolster their writing and grammar skills.
Frankly, after umpteen years of my teaching ESL, I'm somewhat relieved that they're both at a certain level where they understand me and understand their assignments, as well as understand the general approach of a five-paragraph essay. On the other hand, my sophomore student in 214 struggles enormously at times with sentence-level issues as well as general structure.
My freshman in 114 has much higher level language ability in general. As far as his determination toward improvement, so far, I feel he's the more challenged because he seems to have a false sense of security that perhaps he doesn't need my help very much; this might explain his tardiness and his lack of preparedness to work when he arrives. As you can see, I'm a bit at a loss in my attempt to make any generalizations about students by level or by course, so far, whether it's my tutees or others. If anything, I see structure issues and sentence level issues across the board.
I must say, I'm filled with admiration reading Jennifer E's report where he student has composition to revise, so she launches into practicing reading skills. I only wish I had her reading instruction background. In the meantime, I'll do my best to encourage my students and to bolster their writing and grammar skills.
Week 6, Post 1: Grammar Rant Analysisssssssssssssss
The website PAJIBA: Sweetened by Mock, Lightened by Droll (file:///Users/troycroom2/Desktop/Temp.%20Docs/grammar%20rant-Can%20We%20Settle%20This%20Once%20and%20For%20) offers a Grammar Rant dedicated to "I could care less."
1.What does the author of the grammar rant think is important about language and communication?
Apparently the author is upset by the use of the phrase "I could care less" on the grounds that, to the author, it sounds illogical and makes the speaker sound like an idiot.
2. What does the author say about errors or mistakes in people's writing? What do our grammar handbooks say about these uses of language?
Skirting a proper citing of Webster's, the author offers her own analysis of this faux pas, word by word. True to her word, according to laws of logic and the definition of the words, as well as the cumulate phrase, all signs point to "I could care less" being void of meaning (except that everyone KNOWS what it's intended to mean, and, truly, millions of people use it, just as the Leader of the Free World spake "nuke-you-lur").
3. Do the author's claims about what is right or wrong with language always hold true in any communication situation, or can you think of exceptions? What does the presence of exceptions do the author's claims?
See #2 for exception to this rule.
4. How do the author's claims about language relate to the socioeconomic class in which speakers and writers have been raised? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections between the author's claims and socioeconomics do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' socioeconomic class, such comments coming from an admitted graduate from a private, hoity-toity university like Carleton, mark the speaker as elitist by association. The speaker fails to acknowledge her grave offense; hence, her claims and her name shall forever be besmirched.
5. How does the author's claim relate to the race of readers and writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' race, such comments coming from a smarty pants with her own website make her look lousy.
6. How does the author's claim about language relate to the cultural or geographical region in which a speaker or writer is raised? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' geographical region, such comments coming from a Carleton grad mark her as know-it-all Yankee..
7. What can you tell about the author's connection of language use to the intelligence of speakers or writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
She calls it "just confusing, stupid, and not at all OK and we should not stand for it anymore." She is. verily, contemptuous of such speakers/writers. She fully accepts responsibility for the venom she spits. However, people who live in glass houses (ivory towers)...and at Carleton University, of all places...
8. What can you tell about the author's connection of language use to the ethical or moral character of speakers or writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
Frankly, she sounds pretty high and mighty and finger-pointy, which is just plumb rude.
On the other hand, these questions themselves are more judgmental than the grammar rant itself, in that the website is established for the sake of comedy: "Sweetened by Mock, Lightened by Droll." So, really, to criticize this ranter is like criticizing a hundred other knucklehead loudmouths who make us laugh. If this is true, how serious would our college students take this? Like much comedy, right or wrong, it's pretty funny and highly irreverent. If I know most students, they would side with the comic, not Dunn.
Your thoughts, please?
1.What does the author of the grammar rant think is important about language and communication?
Apparently the author is upset by the use of the phrase "I could care less" on the grounds that, to the author, it sounds illogical and makes the speaker sound like an idiot.
2. What does the author say about errors or mistakes in people's writing? What do our grammar handbooks say about these uses of language?
Skirting a proper citing of Webster's, the author offers her own analysis of this faux pas, word by word. True to her word, according to laws of logic and the definition of the words, as well as the cumulate phrase, all signs point to "I could care less" being void of meaning (except that everyone KNOWS what it's intended to mean, and, truly, millions of people use it, just as the Leader of the Free World spake "nuke-you-lur").
3. Do the author's claims about what is right or wrong with language always hold true in any communication situation, or can you think of exceptions? What does the presence of exceptions do the author's claims?
See #2 for exception to this rule.
4. How do the author's claims about language relate to the socioeconomic class in which speakers and writers have been raised? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections between the author's claims and socioeconomics do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' socioeconomic class, such comments coming from an admitted graduate from a private, hoity-toity university like Carleton, mark the speaker as elitist by association. The speaker fails to acknowledge her grave offense; hence, her claims and her name shall forever be besmirched.
5. How does the author's claim relate to the race of readers and writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' race, such comments coming from a smarty pants with her own website make her look lousy.
6. How does the author's claim about language relate to the cultural or geographical region in which a speaker or writer is raised? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
While her claims make no allusions to the speakers'/writers' geographical region, such comments coming from a Carleton grad mark her as know-it-all Yankee..
7. What can you tell about the author's connection of language use to the intelligence of speakers or writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
She calls it "just confusing, stupid, and not at all OK and we should not stand for it anymore." She is. verily, contemptuous of such speakers/writers. She fully accepts responsibility for the venom she spits. However, people who live in glass houses (ivory towers)...and at Carleton University, of all places...
8. What can you tell about the author's connection of language use to the ethical or moral character of speakers or writers? Does the author acknowledge these connections? What do these connections do to the author's claims?
Frankly, she sounds pretty high and mighty and finger-pointy, which is just plumb rude.
On the other hand, these questions themselves are more judgmental than the grammar rant itself, in that the website is established for the sake of comedy: "Sweetened by Mock, Lightened by Droll." So, really, to criticize this ranter is like criticizing a hundred other knucklehead loudmouths who make us laugh. If this is true, how serious would our college students take this? Like much comedy, right or wrong, it's pretty funny and highly irreverent. If I know most students, they would side with the comic, not Dunn.
Your thoughts, please?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)