Instructional Tool Presentation

Here is a link to my Instructional Tool PowerPoint. I'd recommend downloading it so that my narration plays.

LINK

Blog Post #2--Teaching Writing at a Distance

Pavia, Catherine Matthews. “Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom.” Journal of Basic Writing 23.2 (2004): 4-22. Print.

In “Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom,” Catherine Matthews Pavia describes the experiences of two basic writers in her computer-equipped basic writing course and uses their stories to enrich her pedagogy. Pavia cautions her readers that all students do not have computer experience and access, and that that computers should not be seen as unequivocal tools of empowerment for basic writers.

            Pavia begins by presenting research that “still tends to paint an idealistic picture” of computers in basic-writing classrooms, characterizing technology as increasing student motivation, enjoyment of writing, and writing volume, and portraying students as comfortable and experienced with computers (5). Pavia complicates this view by focusing on two of her students who wrote less on computers and frequently chose to write by hand. She interviewed each student, took notes on their writing, and asked them to write about their own experiences with computers. The students were not selected randomly, and Pavia’s study should be seen as a discussion of specific circumstances rather than easily generalizable research, but the students’ experiences and Pavia’s conclusions are helpful to the basic writing teacher who wants to consider how best to reach all of her students.

            The students’ specific experiences differ, but there are many similarities. Both are low-income, and neither came from households with extensive computer usage. Neither student likes to write. Both have a positive view of computers, “reflect[ing] society’s positive and idealistic views about computers and the benefits of computer literacy” (12), yet both dislike writing with computers even more than they dislike writing in general. Much of this dislike seems to stem from unfamiliarity with computers—neither can type well, and both produce much less writing when using computers than do their classmates. Neither has access outside of class to an up-to-date personal computer. Pavia writes that for these two students, “writing on computers in the classroom did not lead to more empowerment when viewed from a more short-term focus on the class itself” (16). In fact, the technology “may lead students to doubt their [writing] abilities when what they really need is confidence” (17).

            In light of her research, Pavia now has students write “technology narratives” early in the semester in which they describe their past experiences with computers and current attitudes toward technology. She adapts her course to her students’ experiences. She has also added basic computer instruction to the course and assigns some writing assignments to be completed by hand. Finally, she “avoid[s] assignments in basic writing classes that might subsume writing by involving technology in the writing process in even more complicated ways than word processing does” (19)—in other words, no multimodal or Web authorship.

            As I mentioned above, Pavia’s research is not easily generalizable. However, I would still recommend this article. In addition to the value of her conclusions and her excellent critique of the overly rosy characterization of computer usage in basic-writing classes, her description of how she adapts each class to the specific students she has serves as an excellent model for other teachers.

Pedagogical Tool Review

Pedagogical Tool Review

Introduction:

            Next semester, I will begin teaching an accelerated-learning course (ALP) in which developmental writing students are integrated into a college-writing class and asked to do college-level work. The developmental students will receive additional support, and one of my goals is to provide much of this support in a way consistent with a blended online/face-to-face classroom.

            I have taught developmental writing for a little more than a decade, and one of the key ways I have found that developmental students lag behind their college-level counterparts is in their command of standard written grammar (SWG). While the power dynamics and even the existence of a “standard” written grammar have been challenged (Barbier; Smitherman), it has also been well established that students—especially those who already come from outside the culture of power—are disadvantaged in the workplace and academia by their uncertain command of generally accepted grammatical conventions (Beason; Delpit). I choose to move forward by stressing to my students that so-called standard grammar is something they should learn for a specific purpose: to get ahead in school and work. They should employ it in much the same way they employ their good set of clothes for a job interview—SWG can get them in the door and set them up for success.

            Unfortunately, I have been frustrated by how challenging it is to teach SWG. Even when students accept my rationale for learning it, they exhibit resistance and fear inculcated by years of inept and often punitive grammar instruction. I have responded in several ways, including writing my own handbook on basic grammatical ideas and punctuation that grounds the concepts in rhetorical context and draws its examples from articles we read in class. My methods have been well received, but I am still searching for better ways to address grammar.

            In keeping with my goals to make my ALP class a blended environment, I decided to search for free computer-based games that addressed basic grammar. While there are numerous grammar resources online, most of them (including those offered by the major textbook companies) are strongly reminiscent of the blue mimeographed worksheets I remember (with nausea) from my youth. I do not want a drill-and-kill approach; instead, I want relaxed, fun learning that does not remind students of their past grammar instruction. It took a surprisingly long time to find non-worksheet-based grammar games that might be applicable for a college developmental student, but I did find two worth exploring: one on the web, and one for the iPad, which I included because of the prevalence of i-devices among my students and my school’s current project to explore student and instructor iPad usage.

Description:

            Grammar Ninja: This game is featured on multiple sites; the one I reviewed was at http://www.wordgames.com/grammar-ninja.html. The purpose of the game is to help players learn parts of a sentence, such as nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, etc. The premise is that you are a ninja who throws stars at the parts of speech that are called for in a sample sentence. You can choose from three levels of difficulty—the higher ones add in additional parts of speech—scribble notes on the screen, ask for a hint, and finally throw your star into the correct word. The game will indicate whether you are correct or not and will provide help if you are incorrect. At the end of a question set, the game provides feedback based on how long it took you and the percentage of correct answers and gives you a “ninja rank.” The game also features fun music and decent graphics.

Grammar Ninja Front Page
                            

Grammar Ninja Game Page

Grammar Ninja Final Score

            wiseHopper: This is a free iPad or iPhone app. The game allows you to play with math, words, or grammar. The basic premise is that you are an insect trying to hop across a stream before being eaten by a giant frog. In the grammar game, you progress in order from verbs to pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions. The game gives you a sequence of sentences that scroll across the stream in opposite directions; it then prompts you to identify, for instance, verbs, and you, as the insect, have to hop on the appropriate word in each sentence. After you make it across a few sentences, the giant frog appears and begins to hop after you, increasing the pressure to decide on the right word to hop to. If you choose the wrong word, your insect falls into the river. If the frog catches you, you get eaten. (For those readers of a certain age, the game is very reminiscent of Frogger on the Atari.) Once you make it across the stream, the game tells you your time, and you can try to beat your best time. The graphics have limited animation but are quite pleasing.

                          

wiseHopper Front Page                     

wiseHopper Game Play

Review:

            Grammar Ninja: This game seems targeted to the middle-school level, judging by the level of the graphics, which are cartoonish (albeit well done) and the task itself. Additionally, the sentences are not based in the students’ own writing, nor in the context of a finished piece by another writer. This lack of rhetorical context makes the game problematic. Research has suggested that direct skill instruction has little, if any, positive effect on student writing (Hartwell; Tchudi and Mitchell).

            However, many of the students in developmental courses have around a middle-school understanding of basic grammar. Discussions of relatively simple, yet important, concepts such as complete sentences are made more complex by students’ limited understandings. As Beason demonstrated, it is important for writers’ ethos that they learn to write complete sentences and to avoid fused sentences reliably. In past classes, when I have tried to reduce complete-sentence tests to simple formulations (“Look for a noun, verb, and complete idea.”), I have encountered difficulty because students are not able to identify nouns and verbs. I have decided that some basic understandings of parts of speech may be necessary for us to have a productive conversation.

            As one of my principle goals with the ALP course is to help students to conceive of themselves as college material, the level of the game concerns me. They have work to do to get to the college level; however, I worry that the basic nature of the game may serve to highlight for them how far they need to come. I do not want them to think that I conceive of them as middle-school students. However, it is difficult to predict student perceptions. A colleague of mine has used Grammar Ninja in her developmental writing classes and reports that many of the students, especially the males, love it. They found the rankings at the end to be motivational, and got competitive with each other to attain the highest scores.

            wiseHopper: This game is similarly targeted to much lower than a college-level student. However, I found myself more engaged than with Grammar Ninja; somehow, the pursuit of the frog intensified the game for me and made me more focused. (Or maybe it’s because I always liked Frogger.) The quality of the graphics was pleasing and did not seem insulting, and the pressure of the frog increased the difficulty in a positive way. The game does not give hints or the same quality of feedback for missed answers as Grammar Ninja, but if you fall off into the river because you answered something wrong, it highlights your correct answers in the previous sentences, making it easy to hop back to where you messed up.

            Somewhat confusingly, wiseHopper does not recognize helping verbs. For example, in the sentence “I am writing an essay,” wiseHopper would count hopping onto “am” to be a mistake and “writing” to be the only correct option. While this is not a deal-killer for the app, it would require a “grammar-speak” explanation to the students, which is one thing I am trying to avoid.

            Like Grammar Ninja, wiseHopper does not provide any rhetorical context for the sentences it includes, and it suffers from the same pitfalls as other methods of direct skill instruction. However, it might serve as a precursor to more effective grammar instruction by helping students learn basic grammar vocabulary and the ability to recognize parts of speech.

Discussion:

            We know that grammar usage can serve as a socioeconomic marker and influence how others see us (Beason; Gorrell; Lynch-Biniek). We also know that grammar is best addressed rhetorically—as an element of the transaction of meaning between writer and reader—and not with piecemeal sentences divorced from context (Dawkins; Williams). Neither of these programs follows these best practices, and both are more closely aligned with the teaching of grammar as a series of isolated and absolute rules.

            However, I plan to try them this fall, and I would urge other teachers of developmental writing to give them a careful look. When used narrowly as a relatively painless way to build a common grammatical vocabulary and improve sentence recognition, they may have merit. The competition and video-game-like feel might engage students in an otherwise boring subject, and when used for a short time early in the class, the software might provide a scaffold for basic writers to engage grammar in a deeper, more rhetorical way as the class progresses.

Works Cited

Barbier, Stuart.  “The Reflection of ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’ in First-Year Composition Course Objectives and Descriptions.” TETYC 30.3 (March 2003): 257-67. Print.

Beason, Larry. “Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors.” CCC 53:1 (September 2001): 33-64. Print.

Dawkins, John. “Teaching Meaning-Based Punctuation.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 31:2 (December 2003): 154-162. Print.

Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press, 2006. Print.

Gorrell, Donna. “Style and Identity: Students Writing like the Professionals.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 32:4 (May 2005): 393-402. Print.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47 (February 1985): 105-27. Rpt. in The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. Eds. Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn. 3^rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995: 370-393. Print.

Lynch-Biniek, Amy. “Bemoans, Belittles and Leaves.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College. 33.1 (2005): 29-37. Print.

Smitherman, Geneva. "CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights." CCC 50.3 (1999): 349-376. Print.

Tchudi, Steven, and Diana Mitchell. Explorations in the Teaching of English. 3^rd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Print.

Williams, Joseph M. “The Phenomenology of Error.” CCC 32 (1981): 152-68. Rpt. in Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into the Field. Eds. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps. Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996: 163-175. Print.

Citation for Blog #1

Carpenter, Trudy G., William L. Brown, and Randall C. Hickman. “Influences of Online Delivery on Developmental Writing Outcomes.” Journal of Developmental Education 28.1 (2004): 14-35. Print.

Distance Writing--Blog Post #1

In “Influences of Online Delivery on Developmental Writing Outcomes,” published in the Journal of Developmental Education, Trudy Carpenter, William Brown, and Randall Hickman, all from community colleges around Michigan, share results on developmental students' success and retention rates in online writing courses. As the authors point out, the conventional wisdom has been to steer developmental writers away from online classes for fear that the online environment adds technological barriers to a population that already has an uncertain future of success.Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman complicate this assumption in productive ways.

The authors studied a group of 256 developmental students who self-selected online developmental writing courses over a period of four years. In comparison to the students who comprised the general population of developmental education at Lansing Community College, the students in the online group tended to be "older, female, white, and part-time, with higher reading and writing placement scores" (15). A veteran composition teacher might notice that this describes what is generally the highest-performing group in a community-college writing class, possibly skewing the data; however, the authors attempted to control for all of these variables, as well as student credit load, time of registration, and math placement scores.

The two variables of key interest to the researchers were completion rate (i.e., whether students finished the course) and success rate, which they defined as a final grade of 2.5 or higher. The authors found that delivery method was a reliable predictor of both retention and success--in opposing ways. Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman found that students were less likely to complete online developmental writing courses, yet if students completed the course, they did better in it. Their data suggest that "there are some things about online instruction as  delivery method that lead to greater withdrawal rates but that may ultimately lead to success rates for those students who finish the course that are comparable to, if not greater than, success rates in traditional, face-to-face instruction" (16). They admit that the greater withdrawal rate may have indirectly affected the greater success rate, since poorly performing students may have dropped rather than sticking it out and receiving a poor grade. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was the case. An additional limitation is that all of the online sections were taught by the same instructor. The authors attempted to control for this by comparing success and withdrawal rates between this instructor's face-to-face sections and those taught by other instructors, and they did not find a statistically significant difference. However, the possibility remains that their sample group was too limited for their results to be generalized.

Despite these difficulties, the study serves as an interesting data-driven rebuttal to those who say developmental writing courses are recipes for disaster. Instead, the study’s findings suggest that developmental writing classes may be a viable alternative to conventional instruction and merit more consideration.

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!