In “Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae, he reports that the learning of writing is continuous. He provides examples of basic writing students’ essays to illustrate their errors. He argues that they lack knowledge of formal discourse, and this lack of knowledge keeps them from effectively communicating their ideas, particularly when they use language and phrases that they believe to be academic.
A couple of weeks ago I graded some freshman composition II papers and most of the students got a C. A lot of these students were pretty upset and I am still carrying this with me. I don’t think it’s fair to punish students for what we have not taught them. One of the points made by the author that really interests me is that students should be taught to write with their readers in mind. That is interesting to me because this idea of putting emphasis on the process and not the product when it comes to writing is still new to me. I am asking myself how is this done and how is it done well? Just recently the lead teacher in my freshman composition II class explained to students that one of the problems that is constant in their essays is that they assume the audience knows what they mean. She told them that when they mention a character or a place for the first time, they must introduce said character or place because the reader does not necessarily know who or what those are.
On the surface this may seem like teaching students to write with their readers in mind but I think that writing with the reader in mind goes deeper than simply properly introducing characters and settings. It also has to do with knowing the language of the reader and what is deemed appropriate.
Teaching students to write with their readers in mind is not telling them, it is modeling which is not done enough.
I found the tone of this essay a bit unsettling. Did anyone else find his tone a bit sarcastic? Also, this idea that students invent the university is confusing to me as well. He says that students are inventing the university every time they write. He also says that students must learn to speak the language of their disciplines. Is that not conforming to the university and rather than inventing?
In “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar’ by Patrick Hartwell, he talks about the teaching of grammar in the classroom. He makes the distinction among five types of grammar. Grammar one, he says, lies in the subconscious of all native speakers. L1 speakers of a language knows what their language is supposed to sound like without knowing why.
I am a bit fuzzy, however, on the differences among grammars three to five.
With this article, it was hard to form an opinion. I try drawing from my own experiences and from the experiences of others. In the seventh grade I had been in the United States for two years. I remember how excited I was in English class when we were being taught grammar. I found it fascinating. ("When the subject of a sentence is in the third person singular form, its subject takes an 's' or an 'es.'" I was blown away!) 
So much so, we were given workbooks to practice in. Someone had written the answers in mind and I gave it back to the teacher and requested another workbook.
I have known many foreign students who in their country extensively studied English grammar. As a result, though their vocabulary may be lacking, their knowledge of grammar surpasses that of some native speakers. The teaching of grammar made a difference in my writing and total acquisition of English. Grammar made a difference in the acquisition of English of those foreign students as well. Why then do so many people say teaching grammar does not work? Why did it work for me? Or did? Perhaps my love of reading helped...
Sarah Glessner
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rhode-Elise, for your response and for highlighting a bit of your personal experience with grammar usage. I think learning grammar also made me a better writer; because we have a grasp on the formal elements and rules of writing in English, we are better able to arrange our thoughts in a cohesive way on the page. Knowledge of grammar certainly isn't the most important factor in writing, but I agree with you that it is important. Grammar knowledge is part of the writing process that informs the product and, as we have discussed at length this semester, both the process and product matter.
Sofia Binioris
Hi Rhode-Elise,
Thanks for this thoughtful post. To your last sentence -- I think Hartwell would say that your mastery of English language/writing was due in part or mostly to your interest in reading. He seems to be arguing that literacy itself -- and not a grasp of grammar rules -- allows us to internalize and produce Grammar 1 in our speaking and in our writing. Our ability to write grammatically-correct sentences is not, then, a result of knowing the rules; it's instead: "...a factor of knowing how to read" (113), one of the "natural concomitants of literacy" (114), and this is because "literacy changes the deep structure of one's internal grammar" (114). I can see how this might be true.
On the flipside, he's also saying that our ability to understand complex grammatical rules -- Grammar 2 (scientific/linguistic descriptions of grammar) or Grammar 3 (school-based translations/approximations of those complex linguistic rules) -- is also a factor of how much we've read and thus the result of the structures we have already internalized. I think this is what he's trying to get at with the COIK idea: the rules of grammar are Clear Only If Known, meaning we only understand the rules if we have already internalized them (and not the other way around). So the rules just give a name to what we already internally know and do (is this metalinguistic awarness?). So because you were a reader, you could grasp the rules.
I guess, for Hartwell, the way to improve students' control of grammar is to improve literacy -- to get them to read and write (and to be read to) more often. For students learning English as a second language, maybe it's an issue of speaking more often with native English speakers and other language learners as well as reading and writing more in English. Certainly, I think he's saying that grammar is not/should not be the primary way of getting students started.
ReplyDelete----
On another note, my English teacher in 6th and 7th grade had us frequently diagram very complex sentences. My notebooks and our classroom blackboard were always covered with things that looked like this (not kidding):
This was the same teacher who had us, at 11 and 12, outline our lengthy research papers on color-coded index cards...
In order to produce these diagrams, we had to identify the role of each word in a sentence (preposition vs. article vs. subject vs. adjectivevs vs. adverbs...); we had to learn the different types of clauses and coordinating conjuctions and all of that; and then we had to remember how to properly represent each of these in the dirgam -- each line represents something else. I was also studying Latin and Spanish in school, and especially in Latin, we were learning a LOT of grammatical terms, so this I think helped.
I like puzzles and drawing, so I also, strangely, enjoyed diargamming sentences. But did it help me at all as a writer? Did it improve my grasp of the English language? Do I remember any of it (I remember very, very little)? I don't really think so. I certainly don't think about this stuff actively when I write, and while I do think it helped me develop a pretty good grasp of the rules related to the use of semi-colons, that's a punctuation issue and in my everyday writing practice it just doesn't seem all that important.
More importantly, I think the fact that we were reading things that included such ridiculously complex sentences was what ultimately improved my writing.
When I taught GED classes, I had to teach some formal grammar because a good portion of the writing section of the test is grammar-related. While I spent a good amount of time with textbook activities, trying to help students identify the formal rules that made A a better choice than C or D, in the end they were usually more successful when I asked them to read sentences aloud--or when I wrote them on the board and we looked at them together--and to select the version that sounded best to them. This didn't always work, of course--it was especially hard when it came to punctuation--but for the most part their internal sense of what sounded right was more effective than my attempts to teach them formal rules.
Perhaps the more written sentences students encounter, the more they will grasp and internalize complex grammatical constructions so common in writing.
Sofia Binioris
Ah! Hit post too soon and now trying to write this on my phone...
Anyway, I didn't mean to sound as if I was disagreeing with your experience. I think students learn differently, and some probably benefit from rules more than others, or maybe some grammar instruction is more helpful and maybe it's more helpful at certain points in the learning process. Maybe it's also different for native speakers than for nonnative speakers when it comes to the impact of grammar instruction on writing. My experience writing in English and learning to speak and write in other languages (in which I never achieved fluency) feels pretty in line with Hartwell's argument, but maybe different approaches work for different students...
Raquel Coy
ReplyDeletePerhaps my love of reading helped...
I think reading has a lot to do with many successful writers' skills. My introduction to formal grammar was late in my academic career, but when I was I introduced to the many grammatical concepts, I really took to them. It was thrilling to see why all the sentences I could create worked, or alternatively why they did not work. But those were reasond tacked on after I had already internalized sentence patterns of my favorite writers.
Caitlin Geoghan
I totally agree that reading is the key to internalizing grammar rules and that explicit grammar lessons don't produce good writing. I also think that talking is a largely overlooked resources with regard to internalizing grammatical structures. Punctuation doesn't only appear on the page, it is essential in deriving meaning from speech. For example:
"George," said the teacher, "is a bad writer."
George said, "the teacher is a bad writer."
Both of the sentences have the exact same words but different meaning. We can understand that by looking at them because of the punctuation, but we can also hear the difference when we articulate the sentences...and so can very young children prior to any lessons on comma usage. We can also tell that one of the sentences is more likely to appear later, in writing rather than in speech (although both constructions are regularly spoken) because it's a more complex construction. The fact that children, prior to receiving any grammar lessons, understand the difference implies that they're internalizing the rules of punctuation before consciously knowing what punctuation is or how to explain its proper usage.
Rhode-Elise St. Jacques
Thank you all for your responses. Sofia, that diagram gave me a headache. I can't imagine doing this with my students and they're adults!
I encourage my students to read but many don't. Even if they did, one semester is not enough for them to acquire what takes good readers and writers years to accomplish.
This goes back to my response to Raquel; these courses and requirements do not have the average, modern student in mind. With all they have to deal with, along with the fact that reading is not a habit for them, me telling them to read more is rather simplistic and will not provide them with the tols that they need for the CATW at the end of the term.
Thomas Peele INSTRUCTOR MANAGER
ReplyDeleteLet’s talk more about this idea in Bartholomae that writers need to keep their readers in mind. He makes this point in a couple of different ways, but on 208 he’s making the argument that the common assignments intended to produce this effect miss the point (“What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing” (610). His main point seems to be about how writers must position themselves within a discourse structure and essentially lose themselves. Does this translate to keeping a reader in mind?
Your observation about the instructor is interesting. Here, she’s teaching them the commonplaces, right? She is trying to get them to inhabit or locate themselves within a particular discourse, which is, in a sense, audience awareness, but not in the conventional sense of figuring out who your audience is. In Bartholomae’s scenario, the audience for academic writing is almost a given: academics.
Let’s talk more in class about inventing the university. It’s central to the argument, obviously, but a complicated idea. Students invent the university when they write because they are trying to mimic academic writing. In so doing, they call the university into existence. It’s a stretch, I know, but it works conceptually. When an author writes a children’s book, on one level he’s inventing children; he’s developing his idea of who that audience is. Our goal as academics is to help students invent better universities. I didn’t find his tone sarcastic. On the contrary, it seemed very earnest.
Your point about your love of reading and the acquisition of grammar supports Hartwell’s claim. He argues persuasively that learning grammar two doesn’t help writing. Perhaps he’s wrong, but it might also be the case that you thought you were learning to write by studying grammar but really it was the love of reading.