Week 11, Post 4: Grammar Lesson Plan, Parts 1 and 2

Blog 4: Do either an idea draft, a brainstorm, or an outline for part 1 and 2 of the lesson plan portfolio (It can be very sketchy at this point; the goal here is start figuring out your ideas.) Bring 4 hand copies on Thursday to share with your group:
What's your philosophy about grammar editing and proofreading? How can teachers help students become better grammar editors? 
What's your philosophy about development of academic language?  How can teachers help students produce more complex sentences, more complex writing and more appropriate academic language?

• How students develop academic discourse, including factors that facilitate/hinder the development.
• The role of students’ oral language, home dialect, and home language in the process.

For your teaching approach, be sure to discuss:

• How you will foster academic language development in your classroom through assignments and activities.
• How academic language will build over the course of the semester.

ONE 

* To develop academic discourse, students need to develop as readers and writers and imitators of "the conversation."  Factors that facilitate this growth are intensive readings of academic discourse, writing in it, journaling about the process, peer discussions about it and teacher-student discussions about the student's process.

* It has been shown that home dialect that differs greatly from MAE and SE can present a greater challenge to the student attempting to assume the role of academic writer with SE.  Non-standard dialect students have no less potential for learning SE than students of standard dialect.  However, learning to code-switch or style-switch is vital.  Many linguists hold that allowing students to write freely in the home dialect is the best way to "warm up" such students to the notion of academic writing.

* Students will be given numerous opportunities to practice writing in various styles and genres, from home dialect (if they choose) to formal, from personal narrative to descriptive essay, to argumentative essay, to a formal research paper complete with appropriate citations.

 

• How students develop grammar and editing competence, including factors that facilitate/hinder the development.
• The role of students’ oral language, home dialect, and home language in the process.
• Your attitudes toward error (both based on both descriptive and prescriptive rules).

For your teaching approach, be sure to discuss:

• How you will foster grammar and editing competence in your classroom through assignments and activities.
• How these activities will build over the semester.
• Your process for “error treatment” in student papers (including assessment and grading)
• How you will deal with errors that come from home dialect and home language.

TWO 

* It's been shown that content is always of greater importance than form, and that a writer's ideas are more critical than his grammar and punctuation.  It's also been illustrated that students, while they may show interest in error analysis, almost never improve from this method, nor from explicit grammar instruction -- unless it's conveyed in meaningful context, for instance, a mini-lesson in the context of trying to understand their errors.  These mini-lessons are useful as are student grammar logs, where students keep notes of their errors.  Also peer counseling is a great low-stakes way both to practice spotting errors and to accept criticism.  Explicit full-class grammar lessons should be rare, limited to recurring issues across the majority of student papers.  In addition, sentence building and sentence template exercises show great promise for assisting students in assuming the academic voice.

* As written language shadows oral language, non-standard dialect students may struggle to adapt their writing to SE.  It's critical for teachers to be aware of this, to be patient, and, where feasible, spend extra time with non-standard students one-on-one.

* Errors can create great errors for students personally, contributing to an inferiority complex, which can give way to self-fulfilling prophesies of incapacity in writing classes.  For this reason, error analysis, is often best left for later drafts of essays, especially in developmental classes.  For mainstream FYE courses or sophomore courses, however, where student self-esteem may be more robust, it can be useful for students to learn means of incorporating grammar and punctuation as additional tools to strengthen their rhetoric, as Laura Micicche and John Dawkins have shown.

* I believe it's important to discuss prescriptive and descriptive grammar approaches with students.  This angle places grammar in context in terms of history and function and de-mystifies an otherwise intimidating theme.  Personally, unless we're discussing an SE context, I generally prefer my grammar on the descriptive side.

 

Week 11, Post 4: Case Study Whatsitt

Student Background and Issues:

* Filipino student living in the US since middle school with his family
* Excellent socializing: champion wrestler for HS
* Issues: Though he understands the basics of a 5-par. essay, he often seems lost
* Issues: Often arrives to tutorial ill-prepared; seems somewhat apathetic

How I worked with him:

* Essay construction -- thesis and topic sentences.
* I repeatedly showed him the benefits of an outline and reverse outline to check organization.
* Surmising the student lacked motivation (as much as cognitive skills), I encouraged him to believe in himself as much as I believe in him.
* Regarding his tendency to arrive with no clear plan for our tutorial or a vague notion of his teacher's instructions, I encouraged him to pursue her until he understood exactly what was expected.

Results of tutoring:

* Slow and steady progress
* Some increasing ability to spot stronger connections and weaker connections bet. thesis statements and topic sentences.
* Some improved ability to spot needless repetition and wordiness.
* I still feel his progress is limited by his lack of confidence and inexperience in both reading and writing.

Week 11, Post 2: Quizzical

Take-home quiz:

Educators have long puzzled about why some group of minority students tend to be more successful in school while others tend to be less successful.  How does Ogbu explain the difference between success and failure?  Do you personally find this explanation very useful or convincing?  How might Ogbu's theories help you as a teacher?
What are the criticisms or shortcomings of Ogbu's theory? What other explanations might there be for success and failure of minority students? Do you find these other explanations to be useful or convincing?  How might these other theories of success and failure help you as a teacher?
Imagine you teach at an urban community college and most of your students come from a place like Capital High School. What experiences, attitudes, beliefs and strategies might such students bring into your community college English classroom? How might this affect their success?  And how might you respond as a teacher to help these students succeed?

Ogbu groups students into three groups: Autonomous, Voluntary, Involuntary.

Autonomous students aren't REAL minorities, according to Ogbu, since, if you're Greek, for example, you just might "pass" for White.  They're only minorities by virtue of their low numbers.  This includes Mormons, Irish and Jews, for example.

Voluntary are REAL minorities, that is, they LOOK very minority, according to Ogbu.  These people came to the US by choice, so, he says, they have a very sunny outlook re: prospects in a new nation.  This includes Koreans, Persians and Arabs.

Involuntary are REAL minorities, too, but they basically hate every minute of living here, since they came against their own volition.  This includes Blacks, Native Americans, Inuits and Hawaiians.

His theory, that the above groupings alone indicate their tendency for success, feels weak.  I understand that he updated his theory, saying that the group you're in dictates your success, insofar as certain groups have stronger credos for success.  Shucks.  That's more than an updating of the previous.  That would seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater, meanwhile eroding the man's credibility entirely, I would say.

OK, so he's saying "Erase, erase: here's what I mean..." And then he proceeds to say that if the group you're in is full of optimism and encouragement to succeed, then you will succeed.  And if you feel a high level of trust in someone in the group, this will build your confidence and your chances for success.  OK, true dat, but do we credit Ogbu for stating what seems obvious?

Regarding his original views, they don't hold loads of water.  Most White folks are descendants of Brits and Germans who came here, ostensibly "by choice."  But what does that mean?  If your entire village was wiped out in the Potato Famine, does this mean you left Ireland by choice?  Sure, if it means you chose not to die alone in your devastated village.

What does Involuntary mean?  You can find thousands of students who hate school today who are not from Involuntary groups, yet they're depressed by many other influences, from child abuse to parental negligence to poverty, crime, alcohol and drugs.  Or simply because the American family has disintegrated, leaving little or no sense of belonging, let alone hope and determination to succeed in schoool.

On the other hand, many students in Black communities may have had all of these issues or none of them.  However, they often have what many other groups lack -- religion.  Many Black communities organize around the neighborhood church, the local pastor a major positive role model lacking in the lives of many students from other cultures.  On a deeper level, perhaps, a person's connection to a "higher power" could be argued as providing, again, what so many Whitebread homes lack  -- a sense of purpose, a sense of direction.

By contrast, many Latinos have the church connection, but their culture may not value education so much, simply because few people in their family have much experience with school beyond the sixth grade.  Again, what is Voluntary?  If Manuel, from Tijuana, takes his wife and two infants across the border simply because Burger King's hiring in Palm Desert, does this indicate that his kids will feel a buy-in to the system and want to excel in school?

Of course, Ogbu's got a point.  Especially for any Involuntary students who are plagued by memories of lost culture, or for those who are encouraged to hate Whites for past atrocities.  That's right: atrocities.  Some groups commit atrocities and others are on the receiving end.  But, just as the abused child has every right to hate his abuser, that hatred rarely impacts the abuser.  Rather, it only poisons the child and robs him of his own power to determine his chosen happiness.  Given, this is easier to say if you're White and your history is not stained with injustice, abuse and bloodshed.

From the standpoint of a teacher, it's vital to understand the potential for pain, anger and resistance from Involuntary students in our classrooms.  As a college teacher with minorities in my class, it only makes sense to teach a lesson or a unit on the beauty of diversity and the validity of every culture and every dialect, while keeping one eye on the prize: helping every student advance equally toward "joining the conversation" academically.

Note re: SRTOL: Peter Elbow's article "Inviting the Mother Tongue."  Excellent paper for showing helping White teachers step into the shoes of Black the students they teach.

Week 11, Post 1: AAVE Students 1-on-1

Imagine that you're going to work with students who wrote the AAVE draft below. What sort of grammatical/rhetorical issues do you see with the draft?  What How might you work with the student one-on-one on these issues.  How would this work be different from one-on-on work with an ESL student? How would you respect students' right to their own linguistic identity while working with the students?

Grammatical/Rhetorical Issues
#1 Lacks apostrophe to indicate possession.  Drops the s for third-person simple present verbs.  Uses personal pronoun they; needs possessive adjective their.  The -ed suffix is dropped from the past tense of stress out.

#2 Uses simple past went; should use past participle with present perfect: gone.  Uses double negative don't never; needs don't ever.  Otherwise, very few issues.

#3 Lacks s for some plurals (not all).  Lacks apostrophe for possession.  Instead of there are, the student uses It's.  Sometimes drops s for sim. pres. third-person.  Last line is wordy.

#4 This was the most confusing by far.  Drops apost. for possession.  Drops s for plural.  Drops -ed suffix for past part. (a chance to be acknowledge; had been force upon them).  These are easily negotiated by the reader.  But certain sentences are simply convoluted, as if the student, trying to express complex thoughts, hasn't quite got them under control yet.  For example: Then they took action to translating the literature of AAVE.   Forgetting the infinitive issue, I'm confused: is this writer saying that 18th Century Black English literature was translated to AAVE?  Vice versa?  Another example: To be a member of the African American Vernacular English culture our descended from Africa had their native speaking.  It seems the student incorrectly melded two different sentences, one about being a member of the culture, the other about the history of AAVE.  The meaning, though, evades me.  A last example:

Our language is different in many ways, all because of the past history which we have accepted.  I'm confused why this writer adds "which we have accepted."  Is it a problem of word choice?  Does he mean "endured"?  Otherwise, why would he suggest Blacks have essentially "agreed to" mistreatment?

How I'd Work With These Students

Depsite the ample studies we've done on SRTOL, plus my own ongoing research (Engl. 700) on the same subject, I have to say I'm torn on this subject.  On one hand, I feel for these students as they struggle with code switching from AAVE to SE.  I feel for them as I feel rotten for all Blacks, as I feel rotten about being a privileged Whiteboy with loads of encouragement to excel and plenty of exposure to SE, and with few experiences with poverty -- certainly nothing compared with the feeling of doom of many Blacks to the "caste" system of modern America.  

That said, from what I've studied about AAVE, I accept it as a distinct dialect, but not one so drastically different from SE as to preclude the jump from using no apostrophe to actually using one, for example.  Considering merely the obscene amount of TV consumption of American children, Black kids included, it's next to impossible to argue that these kids are unfamiliar with mainstream English: even 99% of the programs on BET use mainstream English, not Ebonics.  If the dialect itself is not the problem, the key issues would appear to lie in ambivalent attitudes of Blacks regarding "acting White" and the sheer lack of funds and good teachers in inner city schools.

All of this is to say that I, too, am ambivalent about Black students' struggles.  On one hand, I'm sad for their background issues.  On the other hand, I have little compassion for people who are self-sabotaging their futures.

To answer the prompt (finally), I would speak to these students with all the compassion I have, careful not to denigrate them, their culture or AAVE; careful to acknowledge them as individuals, careful to laud their work and their ideas, careful, especially, to speak about error correction in terms of "Here's how this would be better in formal writing." and careful NOT to say things like: "You're MISSING x" or "You lack y and z..."

Having taught ESL students for years, I would not feel the need to "walk on eggshells," so to speak, as most ESL students, while self-conscious about their lack of education at times (low-income Latinos), if they've risen to the level of essay writing and error analysis, most likely they have the concomitant confidence to handle positive criticism, at least to a greater degree than the AAVE students we've studied about.