Blog Post #6--Linguistics

Evans, Ann. “Beyond Grammar: Linguistics in Language and Writing Courses.” Pedagogy 11.2 (2011): 285-300. EbscoHost. 7 June 2011. Web.

Evans argues that the inclusion of several basic linguistic terms and concepts in either late high-school or early college writing classes can increase students’ understanding of how language works and improve their command of it. The specific terms/concepts she advocates including are morphology, semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics. Evans devotes several pages to a short definition of each concept, a justification for why it matters and how it can help students write, and suggestions for exercises to try.

Evans stresses throughout the article that the goal is not to turn students into linguists, but to help them understand some basics about how language works. The exercises she proposes are written to encourage a sense of play and to help students gain awareness of their own language-rich environments—for instance, a semantics exercise asks students to transform the word “whoops” depending on context, choosing an approximate synonym that they would use when speaking to different audiences (291), and one of her sociolinguistic exercises encourages students to “report on the various linguistic communities they were a part of during their holiday dinners” (298). Additionally, Evans’s exercises all ask students to generate writing after the concept is explained, rather than fill out worksheets.

However, when Evans writes that “the concepts and exercises introduced here are simple” (286), I have to disagree. Some of the concepts—like morphology—seemed easy at first blush, but as I got further into her descriptions and suggested exercises, I found that the concepts were not simple at all. (In the section on morphology, for example, Evans spends some time using other languages such as Turkish and Italian as examples, and while I think I understand what she is getting at, the examples served to confuse more than clarify.) In fact, I found the definitions in each section somewhat confusing, and I am skeptical that high-school or early-college students would be able to master the concepts without quite a bit of instruction.

In my reading on grammar instruction, I have found that two reasons for moving away from the traditional teaching of grammar are frequently cited: firstly, that such instruction is decontextualized and disconnected from student writing; and secondly, that time spent on grammar instruction is time not spent on actually producing writing. While Evans is not suggesting a return to traditional grammar instruction, I see her methodology as subject to the same critiques. Although her exercises ask students to produce writing, the writing itself is decontextualized in that it is not part of a larger assignment: it is writing to understand the linguistic concept. Also, the concepts she suggests are not simple and will take time to explain. Not only might that time be better spent writing, but students might end up focusing too much on mastering the concepts in the same way that a heavy focus on grammar can lead some students to think that good grammar equals good writing. This article is well written and interesting, but I remain unconvinced that it is the best path for improving student writing.

Blog Post #5--How professional writers write

Schuster, Edgar H. “Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules.” English Journal 100.4 (2011): 71-76. EbscoHost. Web.

Schuster partially addresses the concern I raised in my last blog post: How, exactly, do professional authors write? While he does not examine the actual composing processes of professional writers, he does focus in detail on the ways in which professional writers (and one talented student writer) selectively break rules of grammar and style in service of meaning.

As a framework for the article, Schuster examines a paragraph from Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and three paragraphs of an eleventh-grade student’s personal essay. As he notes, both pieces of writing are very well done, yet both break generally accepted grammar and style rules: specifically, admonitions to avoid passive voice, weed out “be” verbs, don’t begin sentences with conjunctions, and eschew sentence fragments. Schuster spends time on each rule, first laying out the generally accepted rationale for the rule, then presenting sentences from his selections as they appear (with the rule broken) and as they might appear if the rule were followed. He handles the comparisons fairly—the rule-following options are well constructed and are not straw men—and that is why these sections are the most effective parts of the article. The direct comparisons (and the analysis with which he follows them) demonstrate the ways in which breaking the rules can lead to clarity and emphasis that are probably more consistent with the authors’ intentions.

Schuster provides ancillary examples of good rule-breaking writing alongside the two main examples; however, the majority of these come from creative-type writing (fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction). My guess is that his awareness of this is why he ends the article with a section entitled, “But What about Formal English?” This is certainly a fair question, and Schuster attempts to address whether rules can be similarly bent in formal writing. However, the piece he selects as an example of formal English is David Foster Wallace’s introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007. The paragraph Schuster examines is quite good, and, as he points out, it does break many common grammatical and stylistic rules. I wish he had looked at something else, though. While DFW’s piece is “formal” in the sense that it is public, non-fiction, and edited, the rhetorical situation for which he was writing is different from the “formal” ones in which many college students will be asked to compose, such as the business world or the sciences. What is needed (and perhaps exists, although I have not come across it) is an analysis of which grammar rules matter in disciplines far removed from English. (Larry Beason’s 2001 CCC piece, “Ethos and Error,” in which he examines business-people’s reactions to a variety of common “errors,” is a major step in this direction, but stands mostly alone—again, at least as far as I’ve been able to uncover.)

Still, Schuster’s article is well worth the time to read for its lucid and careful examination of specific samples of writing, which provide support for the claims some of my other authors made for how professional writers bend and break rules for a rhetorical purpose.

Blog Post #4

Rustick, Margaret Tomlinson. “Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.1 (2007): 43-62. EbscoHost. 29 May 2011. Web.

Rustick spends the first part of her article discussing the historical debate surrounding grammar instruction, touching on what she sees as the rejection of any discussion of grammar in composition, to the politics and power dynamics of correctness, to the difficulty of figuring out exactly how to teach grammar in context.  Despite these conflicts, she suggests that teachers need to move forward in the teaching of standard written English (SWE) in some way because the world outside of English studies values it. In order to meet this challenge, Rustick suggests we draw from ESL research, treating SWE as something akin to a second language. The two languages between which students must learn to code-switch are their oral (home) language and the written (SWE) language of the classroom.

The bulk of Rustick’s article describes several grammar games she uses with her students. “It is important,” she writes, “to understand that the primary purpose of grammar gaming is not to teach terminology or prescriptive rules, nor is it simply a way to have fun. Instead, the basic premise […] is that students need to practice using language the way writers do” (50). Rustick’s ending assertion—that students need to use language like “real” writers do—is one I have read in several different articles, most recently in Dawkins’s and Micciche’s pieces. A question I have, though, is how do real writers use language? And how do we know? All the above authors spend a small amount of time addressing my first question—the gist seems to be that real writers are guided by a rhetorical transaction of meaning and by stylistic considerations rather than by hard and fast rules—but all elide the second question (how do we know?). In a field that is focused on how writing is generated, this elision seems odd. Of course, we all can read professional writing and see how different rules are bent, and books on the composing processes of professional writers abound (I use Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing in my classes), but if the stated goal is to replicate another group’s composing process, more needs to be said about that model process.

The games Rustick presents do sound interesting. All have to do with playing with punctuation, word order, and sentence structure to see what happens, with a goal of increasing the ability to make conscious decisions about the above elements of writing without getting stuck on terminology. Rustick also suggests talking with students about the different considerations and options presented by oral and written compositions. It is an interesting article, and I think it will be helpful as I develop my basic-writing course for the fall. I do, however, wish for a more in-depth analysis of the practices of professional writers, and I also question whether it is appropriate to model what we teach students on how professional writers write. After all, the purposes and genres for which our students will end up writing are different that those of most professional writers. But I do like the movement away from hard and fast grammatical rules and the acknowledgement that too much terminology can serve to confuse and dismay students.

Blog Post #3--Rhetorical Grammar

Micciche, Laura. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 716-737. JSTOR. 31 May 2011.

Micciche begins her article by exploring why grammar instruction has become “unquestionably unfashionable” (716). She writes that grammar (how we actually put sentences together) tends to be discussed separately from writing (i.e., content and larger structural considerations), and that the connection between traditional grammar instruction and cultural oppression has made writing teachers understandably wary. However, she writes that an understanding of grammar is fundamental to an understanding of how meaning gets made in a sentence, and that “teaching grammar is not necessarily incompatible with liberatory principles,” and in fact is “central to composition’s driving commitment to teach critical thinking and cultural critique” (717-718).

One key to Micciche’s argument is that the now-common positioning of grammar at the end of the writing process leads to a conception of grammar as being focused on “finding and fixing errors rather than of active choice making for a purpose” (720). Micciche advocates a discussion of grammar throughout the writing process, with a focus on how syntactical choices affect the meaning of a sentence (this is the “rhetorical” part—the focus on grammar as a key component in the transaction of meaning between author and audience). The principal activity she describes is having her students keep “commonplace books,” or journals in which they record written passages from things they have read—fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, syllabi, and the like. Following each passage, students analyze how the author’s grammatical choices affect meaning and sometimes write their own passages which imitate the original author’s form (with an analysis of how they matched their content to the grammar, or why the subject about which they wrote meshed especially well with the syntax they were imitating). Micciche writes that she has two goals for the commonplace books: “first, to emphasize the always entangled relationship between what and how we say something; second, to designate a place where students document and comment on their evolving relationship to writing and grammatical concepts” (724).

Secondly, Micciche discusses how a rhetorical approach to grammar can support the critical pedagogy that informs much of composition studies by “making available to students a vocabulary for thinking through the specificity of words and grammatical choices, the work they do in the production of an idea of culture and an idea of a people” (731). In her examples, she describes how her students learn to examine how Malcolm X uses second person to reinforce the idea of African-American unity, and how Gertrude Stein’s “disruption of language conventions [connects with] her disruption of sexual categories and desires” (731).

In her notes, Micciche writes that the classes she describes are sophomore-level. This is certainly consistent with the relatively advanced assignments and journal entries she presents. However, I could see some of her ideas working well in a first-year composition class such as the ones I teach. For me, the most useful concepts she describes are the repositioning of grammar as an ongoing consideration, and the commonplace books, which encourage students to look carefully at how grammar and meaning are intertwined and to practice constructing sentences in new ways.

Meaning-Based Punctuation

Dawkins, John. “Teaching Meaning-Based Punctuation.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 31.2 (2003): 154-162.

I first read this article a couple years after it was published. My school’s assessment data had revealed that out of the several course outcomes, our composition students consistently had the most trouble with the one having to do with grammar and mechanics (based on our department’s home-grown portfolio assessment). I was the coordinator of the writing program at the time, and I read a large number of articles having to do with grammar instruction to try and develop suggestions for our faculty. I remember being impressed with this article, but I also remember not completely understanding it—especially how it might be applied in the classroom. Based on my renewed interest in grappling with grammar, I decided to revisit it.

This time around, I found it very comprehensible. Dawkins focuses on six punctuation options: the period, semicolon, colon, long dash, comma, and no punctuation (the last is included as a teaching aid). His goal is to teach students to “use meaning as a basis for decision making [about punctuation], not grammar-based rules” (155-56). Dawkins’s sequence of activities is designed to encourage students to recognize where in a sentence punctuation might go, and to consider how different marks of punctuation (or the conscious omission thereof) affect the meaning of the sentence and the relative emphasis of its parts.

Dawkins recommends that students start with “some degree of confidence in their sentence-recognition skills” (156). Although he provides a few suggestions for how to support this—mainly reading aloud and familiarizing students with what a fragment and a sentence look like through models—this is the weakest section of the article. In my experience with developmental writers, learning to recognize a sentence is a task that can take an entire semester (and sometimes beyond). I would have appreciated more discussion of this area.

However, the rest of Dawkins’s article is well developed, interesting, and useful. He recommends teachers begin by having students examine when to use commas, periods, or no punctuation, with thought to how each choice affects readability and meaning. Dawkins suggests (and I agree) that we emphasize to students that good papers need not contain any other marks of punctuation. (I go farther, and tell my students that good papers need not even contain commas, provided the sentences are clear and direct.) He then suggests the incorporation of long dashes as “similar to yet different from the comma” (158), the semicolon as similar to (but different than) the period, and finally the colon as punctuation that precedes more information. Dawkins provides excellent examples throughout.

Dawkins’s focus is clearly on getting students to consider meaning rather than rules as they punctuate, as his title suggests. His own prose is clear and exemplifies his theoretical stance—he himself does not always adhere to handbook rules, yet the article is extremely readable. I would recommend this to fellow teachers, and I plan to apply his sequence in the fall.

Functional Grammar--Blog Post #1

Very few English teachers enjoy teaching about grammar. The reasons for this are manifold, but certainly include the following:

1.       We don’t LIKE talking about grammar. Of course, this is in direct contradiction to the view that most non-English teachers have of us as stern grammarians—grammar seems to be the ONLY thing they think we like talking about. But really, we dislike discussing it. We were drawn to the field because we love great writing and big ideas that are well spun out, and while we love robust and well constructed sentences, we like them more in terms of holistic style than we do as a collection of parts.

2.       Grammar smacks of authoritarianism, and we like to think of ourselves as empowering students instead of forcing them to conform. And really, when we speak in terms of correctness, that is exactly what we ask students to do: conform to our definitions of right and wrong and abandon their own. This stance not only contradicts the political and ethical beliefs most of us hold, it flies in the face of much current scholarship that argues for multiple voices/dialects/conversations in the classroom.

3.     We don’t understand it that well. Most of us English teachers acquired our command of standard written English (SWE) rather than learning it explicitly. We read all the time, and many of us came from families whose home dialect was close to SWE, so our explicit learning of grammar consisted mostly of correcting small misunderstandings. As a result, we feel only slightly less baffled than the general public when asked to define a gerund or adverbial clause (or an adverb clause—is there a difference?), and diagramming a sentence looks like something suspiciously close to balancing chemistry equations, which we never really got anyway.

Unfortunately, this means that we apply our considerable fluency with language and theory to craft rationales for why we shouldn’t teach grammar to our students at all (it’s more important to find their voice, it’s de-privileging their home dialect and othering some students, they’ll learn it naturally through reading so I’ll assign lots of reading, etc.). However, at some point, many of us realize that, especially in developmental writing classes, fluency with the grammar of SWE really is one of the key things that marks students and prevents them from doing well on their writing assignments—not just in our classes, but in their others, as well. And since we are committed English teachers, we decide we’d better teach them grammar.

However, this puts us in a bind. All the reasons I’ve listed above are real—they don’t cease to exist just because we’ve decided to teach grammar—and to add to them, we know that ample research has proven as conclusively as research in the humanities can prove anything that traditional grammar instruction just doesn’t work, and in fact can make students WORSE writers due to, for example, less time spent on actual writing and an increase in student confusion (in trying to use commas right, they think too much about it and forget the things they already knew about using commas).

Still, because I have two sections of developmental writing in the fall, I have decided to charge into the breach and try to figure out some research-supported ways to teach my students grammar. And that brings me to my first official blog post:

Fearn, Leif and Nancy Farnan. “When Is a Verb? Using Functional Grammar to Teach Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.1 (2007): 63-87. ProQuest. 19 May 2011. Web.

Fearn and Farnan begin with the premise that we do not naturally understand grammar descriptively, which they connect with traditional list- and skill-based grammar instruction, but functionally, in terms of what different words and groups of words actually do in a sentence. They argue that “the ability to define and identify grammatical elements is not related to writing skills […and] time committed to descriptive and definitional grammar impedes the development of writing skills precisely because time committed to grammar is not available for writing” (64), claims that I have seen many times in other articles. However, Fearn and Farnan write that increased grammatical proficiency will help students perform better in two contexts: they will write better, and they will score higher on high-stakes tests present in most public schools (64). The bulk of the article reports on a study the authors performed on three classes of low-performing (as measured by state proficiency tests) tenth graders.

I had a difficult time pulling from the article a definition of functional grammar that was more specific than that it focused on what words did in sentences rather than on identification and definitions. Much of the authors’ methodology seemed reminiscent of traditional grammar instruction, with a focus on sentence parts. I searched the web and several periodical databases for a better definition of functional grammar, but the term seems to be connected to linguistics, and I found that what I turned up just confused me further, as it seemed to be more theoretically than pedagogically oriented.

The reason I don’t intend to give up, though, is because of the results the authors report. Two classes received functional-grammar lessons for five weeks, and the third received traditional grammar instruction for five weeks. In the functional-grammar sections, students wrote sentences using verbs from a class-generated list. Students also wrote descriptive one-minute freewrites about a teacher-given subject while thinking about verbs. The authors used a similar process to teach about several other grammatical elements. At the end of the five weeks, they holistically scored both the treatment and control classes on writing performance and grammatical ability and compared the results to pre-test scores. The treatment classes significantly outperformed the control class in writing ability and matched or exceeded scores on the grammar tests. The authors write that their instructional method provides “a way to teach grammatical structures that will satisfy high-stakes tests and teachers’ needs, and at the same time […] positively affect writing performance” (77).

These outcomes attract me, especially the promise of improving writing performance. For this reason, my next blog entry will explore pedagogical applications of functional grammar in greater detail. While the article gives enough information for me to replicate the authors’ instructional methods, it does not provide me with enough of a theoretical explanation to feel good about such replication. I would recommend this article to other teachers interested in ways to improve students’ grammatical knowledge and writing ability; however, I would also suggest they pair it with another article that delves into functional grammar in greater depth.

Presentation for English 820

Here is my presentation for my English class (in PowerPoint):

http://www.slideshare.net/markblaauwhara/bloggingincomposition

I find it easiest (after clicking the link) to click on the black forward arrow to the immediate right of the green forward arrow in Slideshare. That will let you click through the slides at your own pace.

What's Comic about a Course Syllabus?

            For my pedagogy project, I explored whether some aspects of a course might be better addressed through comics rather than straight text. Graphic novels and comics have been steadily gaining recognition in academic and popular circles as valid forms of expression and communication—note MAUS winning the Pulitzer, for instance—and the process of taking meaning made in one form (text) and re-interpreting it in another form (comics) can lead to a consideration of “what [to] move forward, what [to] leave out, what [to] add,” as Kathleen Blake Yancey describes writing students doing as they move between media.

            I selected three free online comic generators—Stripcreator.com, Chogger.com, and Stripgenerator.com—and reinterpreted sections of my syllabus in ways I hoped would be more memorable to students and perhaps cast me in a different light. My goals with my syllabus are to lay out the structure and policies of the course and to give students a sense of me as their professor. It can be difficult to walk the line between respectably firm and a complete jerk. What is ideal for me would be a blend of strictness and approachability—after all, I view my purpose as being to help students reach their potential, and my policies are in place to ensure a fair environment in which they can work. Intimidating them on the first day of class is not my goal.

            For the purposes of this project, I examined my syllabus for English 111, the first course in my college’s first-year composition sequence and a required course for nearly all degrees and certificates. I chose this course because it includes students from a wide swath of our college, many of whom do not have an interest in English (and may be resistant to the course). I thought that the use of a blended comic/text syllabus might diffuse some student resistance while still effectively presenting course policies and structure. I began by visiting Stripcreator and “translating” my attendance policy, which currently reads like this:

If you need to miss class, I always appreciate a call or e-mail AS SOON AS YOU KNOW YOU WILL HAVE TO MISS.  If you do this, I’m happy to sit down with you in office hours and talk about what we covered (although it won’t substitute for coming to class—it’ll be brief).  I do not like it when students don’t show up for class and then tell me what happened in an off-handed way the next time they show up.  Would you do that with your job?  If so, you’d soon be out of a job.  I don’t need intimate details; I just appreciate the respect of having you let me know, in a timely manner, that you won’t be able to make it.

            The gist of this policy is that students should come to class, and if something comes up, they should contact me to let me know they will miss. I decided to represent this in comic form as follows:

I think the comic version of my attendance policy is more effective than the text version, especially when coupled with some oral explanation. The heart of the policy is intact, but it is presented in the context of a (hopefully) humorous story. Through some brief contextualization, I could let them know that they need to come to class focused and ready to learn, and that if they choose to miss, they need to contact me and make an effort to make up the material. This would stand to be more memorable than straight text, which would probably lead to better student attendance, and it is certainly more lighthearted than the current text.

Stripcreator is the easiest to use of all the comic generators I tried. It allows the user to shift between one, two, or three panels, and it contains a number of pre-drawn characters to take pressure off of those who are less than artistic. Dialogue and captions are entered through a series of text boxes and pull-down menus, making it possible to generate a simple comic within a couple minutes.

I next visited Chogger to re-present my office location, contact information, and office hours. Here is how it looks on my current syllabus:

Professor:                   Mark Blaauw-Hara

Office:                        138

Office Phone:             (231) 348-6631

Office Hours:             M-Th 1-3

E-Mail:                       mhara@ncmich.edu

Web Site:                    http://angel.ncmich.edu

And here is how it looks in comics:

      

            This time, results were mixed. The text-only version is easier to skim, allowing students to locate quickly whatever contact information they need. Also, Chogger is less easy to use than Stripcreator: instead of offering pre-drawn characters and drop-down menus, Chogger requires drawing and user placement of text, which is simultaneously more powerful and more maddening. If one is fluent with on-screen drawing and graphics, Chogger might be a gift in that it removes some of the limitations of Stripcreator; however, although I am not a novice computer user, I still found it difficult to move beyond a stick figure. While the comic version of my contact information does present the information in a light-hearted way, I do not think I added value to the information.

            My final experiment was to visit Stripgenerator and re-work my plagiarism section. Here is how it appears in my current syllabus:

Plagiarism is defined as the undocumented inclusion of another person’s work within your essay.  Students who choose to plagiarize will be in violation of North Central Michigan College’s Academic Dishonesty policy.  Plagiarism is grounds for failing the paper and/or the course.  In some instances it may result in expulsion from the institution.

Although my current policy represents an accurate description of my college’s stance on plagiarism, it comes off as overly pejorative and scary. For the comic adaptation, I decided to highlight the idea that many students plagiarize because they are under pressure and don’t know where to turn, and that I can help. Orally, I could still make students aware of the actual handbook policy, but it would be framed in the context of my willingness to help them solve problems they’re having with their papers. Here is the comic version:

This seems effective to me. Stripgenerator.com is something of a middle ground between Stripcreator and Chogger in that it offers more characters and flexibility than Stripcreator, but does not require the drawing skills of Chogger. The character representing me in the strip is one of a host of different pre-drawn characters that can be positioned in different spots within the panels, and the speech bubbles can be repositioned, too, and automatically adapt to what you type within them.

            As someone who is relatively unskilled in the creation of comics (or any type of computer-generated art), I found Stripcreator to be the easiest generator to use, and I would recommend it to other instructors who might be interested in integrating self-created comics into their courses. They seem to have the potential both to bring some of the more inherently boring aspects of a course to life and to recast the instructor in a lighter, more helpful way. Although both goals are possible with straight text, I think it is positive to bring different modes of writing into the classroom, and the process of taking a message from one medium (text) to another (comics) encourages instructors to examine what, exactly, they are trying to say, and whether they might say it better.

Works Cited

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake.  "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication  56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Online comic generators--for my grad peeps

—http://comiclife.com/

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—http://www.stripcreator.com

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—http://chogger.com/

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—http://www.stripgenerator.com

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—http://www.bitstrips.com/landing

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—http://www.toondoo.com/

Excellent tips for dealing with zombies during the holidays!

Expanding Argumentation to Include the Working Class

Welch, Nancy. “We’re Here, and We’re Not Going Anywhere”: Why Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions Still Matter.” College English 73.3 (2011): 221-43. ProQuest. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.

Welch’s article is a fascinating study of labor, production, and academia, and how our understanding of each has shifted over the past few decades. Her thesis is that the common understanding of composition as a middle-class zone, coupled with the prevailing view that changes to our economy have included a lessening of workers’ power, has resulted in writing teachers neglecting “some of the most contentious, creative, and powerfully influential arguments this country has witnessed”—i.e., the job actions of the working class.

The anchor of Welch’s piece is a discussion of a successful worker occupation of a Chicago window and door plant in 2008 after Bank of America cut off credit to the company. As she relates, the workers not only argued with their bodies, they also seized a kairotic moment by aligning their issues with the general public frustration with banks and bailouts, adopting the “Yes, we can!” slogan of the Obama campaign, and demanding attention from the public and government.

“Imagine,” Welch writes, “what a provocative multimodal, multicultural text the six-day sit-down […] could provide for study and discussion in composition classes.” Composition instructors should teach stories of similar job actions, she argues, not only because sixty-two percent of the workforce is working-class (which means a large percentage of our students are as well), but because the arguments of organized labor are often effective, and part of our job is to teach effective argumentation. Students can practice soapbox speeches and sloganeering, for instance, and Welch provides an example of how, when her university did not listen to faculty concerns about decreased health coverage, tuition hikes, layoffs, and class-size increases when faculty couched their arguments in middle-class ways (recommendations from the faculty senate, letters, committee work, private meetings), what worked was “demonstrations, pickets, speak-outs,” and other working-class-esque techniques.

Welch’s goal is not limited to the classroom. On a larger level, she advocates a study of the working-class because she seems to believe the country is moving in the wrong direction in significant ways. For example, she writes that our (at least public) beliefs that we are post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-production—that we don’t actually make anything anymore, and that the way the work-world operates is significantly different than how it was four or five decades ago—have led to longer hours, decreased benefits, and a harmful emphasis on producing more with fewer workers. Welch argues that these trends have been harmful for most workers, not just the “working class.” In short, Welch wants us to realize that workers are still important in America, and that we can be strong.

Welch’s article is interesting and potentially far-reaching. I agree that we need to teach effective argument in its many forms, and, as she points out, many of labor’s arguments have been very effective. I would suspect the principle challenge to such a pedagogical shift would come not from the students, who would probably enjoy writing and giving a soapbox speech, but from faculty who are somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of middle-class decorum that characterizes such argumentation.  I would hazard a guess that most composition instructors tend to be biased toward logos-centric argumentation—the “surely if we sit down and have a reasoned conversation, we’ll reach a fair conclusion” school of thought. As Welch points out, though, sometimes a closed fist is more effective than an open hand.

Zombie Professors

From my lovely wife come these two zombies, one composing a lesson plan, and one grading (complete with a brain-and-chocolate cookie):

Blogs in Developmental Reading

Shu, Hui-Yin, and Shiangkwei Wang. “The Impact of Using Blogs on College Students’ Reading Comprehension and Learning Motivation.” Literacy Research and Instruction 50.1 (2011): 68-89. ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2011.

In their 2011 article, Shu and Wang report on a study they did on the use of blogs in developmental reading courses. They write that recent research suggests that helping students develop a command of digital (and multimodal) literacies is important so that “students can successfully access and create the evolving language required in higher education and future workplaces.” However, they assert that not much research has been done about “how […] college reading education respond[s] to today’s students who are familiar with and motivated by […] digital technologies,” revealing what they see as a bias toward print in higher education.

Shu and Wang focused on nine sections (three instructors, each teaching three sections) of developmental reading at the same four-year U.S. university; two sections (taught by different instructors) incorporated blogs, while the other seven sections did not. The curriculum between the blog-enabled and traditional courses was standardized; in the blog-enabled sections, instructors supplemented traditional instruction by asking students to post responses to and analyses of textbook chapters, news articles, and YouTube clips. Students were encouraged to marshal Internet sources in support of their posts and to read and respond to others’ posts.

Appropriately, an extensive section of this article is devoted to their methodology, and I do not have the space to go into it in detail here. In brief, though, they incorporated demographic and academic data such as age, race, GPA, pre- and post-course COMPASS measures, post-class retention rates, and a thirty-one question survey “divided into four factors: self-efficacy, confidence in prerequisite skills, self-directive and initiative, and interest in learning the subject.” They also interviewed the two instructors who used blogs. Shu and Wang’s research questions focused on whether blogs affected students’ reading performance or motivation, what other factors might affect reading performance, and what instructors’ perceptions were about integrating blogs in their classes.

Their findings were extremely interesting. Their study did not support the contention that blogs (at least as they were used) improved reading performance or motivation. While Shu and Wang found several factors affecting student reading performance, blogs were not among them. However, student retention correlated strongly with blogging: students in blog-enabled sections signed up for another semester of classes at around a 10% higher rate than their fellows in traditional classes. Interviews with the instructors suggested that students in blog-enabled classes formed stronger learning communities and were better able to express themselves (due to the equalizing nature of the online environment).

Shu and Wang appear somewhat disappointed with these results. In their conclusion, they admit that, in retrospect, they do not feel they spent enough time training the instructors in blog usage, and they devote the majority of their conclusion to a discussion of why non-tech-savvy instructors might be resistant to using much technology and how such resistance might be addressed. However, as someone who has served on a committee for several years focusing on, among other things, student retention, I found their retention results astonishing, and I wished they had spent more time discussing them. A “payoff” of 10% for a relatively small change is incredible, and I plan to share the article with my committee. I would also recommend this article to a colleague interested in how to design and report on a research study—the discussion of research questions, methodology, and findings is exemplary.

An Interesting Progression

Stine, Linda. “The Best of Both Worlds: Teaching Basic Writers in Class and Online.” Journal of Basic Writing 23.2 (2004): 49-51. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

I approached this article with great interest, since, at first blush, it appeared to contradict the 2010 article by the same author I reviewed for my last blog post. I was surprised to see such unequivocal positivity in this title and abstract after reading the 2010 article, which I would describe as cautionary.

Reading this article confirmed that Stine views hybrid basic-writing courses very positively. Although she begins by laying out potential difficulties basic writers may have with online environments—issues of access, technological fluency, and learning to read online, among others—the bulk of her article is devoted to describing the positive potential of moving at least some of the work of the writing class online. In the middle third of her article, she lists ten general ways in which web-enhanced courses can outperform traditional ones. Her reasons are compelling and cover situations both outside and inside the purview of the course—for example, hybrid courses can greatly simplify scheduling for working single parents, and they can encourage students with shaky academic skills to develop them by requiring students to use the Internet, research, word-process, and communicate online.

The last third of Stine’s essay focuses on her own experiences with hybrid basic-writing courses at her college, which, she relates, implemented the hybrid program two years before this article was published. Her college’s version of hybrid means that students alternate between meeting for a week face-to-face and “meeting” for a week online. Face-to-face sessions concentrate on describing assignments, grammar, groupwork, and quizzes; online, students write and revise, participate in discussion, and review each other’s papers. Stine writes that the hybrid environment provides advantages over both fully-online and face-to-face environments; for example, students form stronger interpersonal bonds through face-to-face interaction, but still can have the space to consider their posts in online discussion. Stine ends her article by asserting that her college’s hybrid basic-writing course “seems to offer our students the best of both worlds: the infinite freedom of the Internet enhanced and made manageable by regular classroom interactions.”

As I wrote above, the tenor of this article is markedly different from her 2010 TETYC piece, which states that “the intersection of adult education, basic writing, and online learning [is] a complicated and messy place,” and ends with a series of questions that seem to suggest how little we know about what makes a good online or hybrid basic-writing class. It’s true that the latter article focuses more on fully online courses than it does hybrid ones; however, many of her cautions in that article apply equally well to both environments. When re-reading the 2010 piece, I was struck by how Stine describes herself as “struggle[ing] each semester to decide what sort of an online teaching/learning experience to require […and] growing increasingly conflicted.” Hawisher et al. have described how the optimism of the early era of computer-mediated composition was gradually supplanted by a more critical, theoretical mindset—practitioners realized computers were no panacea and began to advocate a more critical examination of their place in the writing classroom. I wonder if Stine may have experienced a similar progression (as I have over the past decade or so).

Stine is a thoughtful writer, and I enjoyed this article. The model of hybrid class she presents is interesting and worth trying at other institutions, and she provides a good theoretical underpinning for her argument.

Hawisher, Gail, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History. Norwood: Ablex, 1996. Print.

Adult Basic Writers

Stine, Linda. “Basically Unheard: Developmental Writers and the Conversation on Online Learning.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.2 (2010): 132-149. ProQuest. Web. 7 February 2011.

In her recent TETYC article, Linda Stine complicates the discussion of online and hybrid composition classes by drawing our attention to a group that she says receives little attention in the literature: adult basic-writing students. Stine begins by relating her growing realization that the students who appeared in “article after article filled with enthusiasm for Internet-based higher education” did not resemble the students she taught. Stine writes that, at least according to the articles she read, in order to benefit fully from online composition, students should posses a veritable laundry list of positive academic, financial, and social qualities, from clear academic goals to a good computer to the ability to learn equally well independently and from peers. As Stine asserts, “Most basic writing instructors would be hard pressed to fit their students into that general profile.”

Stine’s stated purpose is “to help close the knowledge gap by providing a preliminary exploration of some important factors at the intersection of basic writing pedagogy, adult learning theory, and online education research.” The three specific areas she focuses on are technological aptitude, academic skills, and individual learning characteristics, further subdividing each of these larger categories into smaller foci such as access to technology, emotion and learning preference, and cognitive load. Her technique is to present, in brief, relevant research, which she then connects to her own experience with adult basic writers. Stine’s emphasis is on the research rather than on personal anecdote; indeed, the article serves as a useful synthesis of a fairly wide range of sources and could be used as an annotated bibliography of sorts for those who wanted to examine any of the many issues she raises in more detail. (For instance, I was intrigued by a meta-analysis of online learning studies she referenced, which I saw as connecting to my own research. The analysis appears here.)

Despite Stine’s cautions against assuming that adult basic-writing students will automatically benefit from online and hybrid writing classes in the same ways that, say, full-time or tech-savvy students might, she does not advocate shying away from technology-rich writing environments. Instead, she writes that “it is essential that we learn more about how to provide a successful online experience for this vulnerable student population,” and ends her article by suggesting a number of research questions to help us in this quest.

Stine’s article was interesting, and I would recommend it to a peer principally as a very readable annotated bibliography. As a teacher of basic writing, though, I found myself wishing for more answers than questions. I agreed with her cautions and was enriched by her thorough research, but I still found myself wondering how to proceed in my own classes. It may be unfair to criticize Stine for failing to provide a clearer path, since her purpose seems to be to highlight an area that has been under-researched. However, I did finish her article thinking, “OK…now what?”

Classy Language

Borkowski, David. "Language: The War of the Word." Rhetoric Review 21.4 (2002): 357-383. Print.

Borkowski’s article focuses on William Cobbet’s 1818 text, A Grammar of the English Language, positioning it as a subversive work intended to disrupt England’s social hierarchy, both by its own existence and by the results of its teachings. As Borkowski writes, Cobbet’s book was written at a time in which the principle style and language guides reflected the upper-class view that “lower-class language [was] inherently inferior” (358). Borkowski states that the upper classes “believed that it was their responsibility to repel the vulgar who polluted language, in all of its facets, with coarse usage” (366), and supported this goal not only through grammar and style guides, but by implementing curricula in the schools that reinforced the current socioeconomic hierarchies—for example, by standardizing pronunciation to match that of London’s upper class.

In contrast, Cobbett’s book differed in presentation and purpose from the prevailing pro-hegemonic texts. Borkowski writes that “Cobbett objected to these texts for presenting language as intricate and mysterious, the product of a hostile governing class that deliberately used discourse as a gatekeeping device” (372). Cobbett alleged that the rules and definitions in the prevailing grammar and style texts were purposely constructed to be convoluted so as to exclude the working classes from civil discourse. As Borkowski relates, one of Cobbett’s central goals was to present guidelines for grammar and style that were easy to understand and clearly written, stating that the “best words are those, which are familiar to the ears of the greatest number of persons” (quoted in Borkowski 358). In fact, Cobbett believed that the simpler linguistic constructions of the working class were often superior to the more obtuse writings of the upper class, and he reinforced this view by including writing from upper-class writers as examples of poor composition.

Borkowski compares Cobbett’s goals to those of Paulo Freire, terming Cobbett’s book as a sort of “pedagogy for the oppressed” that he hoped would enable his readers to “someday even manage to topple their oppressors” (375). In addition to Freire, Borkowski sees Cobbett as laying the groundwork for a number of current scholars who concern themselves with language and power, writers such as Ira Shor, Victor Villanueva, Geneva Smitherman, Bruce Horner, Brian Street, and many others. Borkowski ends his piece with the suggestion that “as more and more compositionists call for advancing social literacy […] the past work of William Cobbett could help guide us into the future” (381).

I found this article to be engaging, and I would recommend it to a peer—especially if that peer were interested in demonstrating that liberatory pedagogy has a history that extends beyond Freire. I found the descriptions of the educational and political systems and their connections to language especially intriguing, even though I came out of them a bit disheartened. Borkowski does a good job showing how the climate of England in the late 1700s-early 1800s resembled today’s America, at least in the limited respects of language, class, and power. In fact, seeing the parallels so strongly established was a bit of a downer—how, then, are we to change things?

Here are the British: highly aware of class, highly aware of language, highly aware of how language serves as a key class marker. And here WE are, in our supposedly classless society, grappling with the same issues. Here are our students, whom we hope to empower in the same ways Cobbett hoped to empower his readers, and here’s the rest of world, which doesn’t care. (And here’s me, putting “whom” in that last sentence, ‘cause I’m an empowered member of that upper class and I want to be sure everyone knows it. J )