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.