Blogging for 704

For me, as a writer, a good posting is one where I have to consider something new about a topic—the topic could be new to me or not; as long as there is a new twist for me to consider and write about, then it is useful to me.  On the other hand, the summaries of the readings are also useful.  They help me to get the main points of the article.  It might also  be interesting to post a quick reaction, a couple of questions, or even a suggestion at the end, just to get a discussion going.

As a reader, I appreciate points of view that I have not considered before.  It is nice when they are clearly written and developed, and especially if there is something of the personal in the blog post.

I like to get any kind of comment, as a writer.  It actually makes me feel a little special to get a comment.  Even if I know that the person had to make a comment, I am flattered that s/he chose mine to comment on.  It is especially nice when the commenter has a question or a point to make that can add to the conversation.  It can actually be fun to carry out a discussion in that way.

I think the blogs should not be evaluated.  One of the things I like best about blogging for this class is that they are fairly free form.  If we, as the students, start worrying about a grade, I don’t think they will improve.  I think our grade for the blogs should be based on how many completed.

Tutoring Case Studies

DK

I like how the tutor treated DK as a whole person, not just as a list of errors.

The student’s emotional and social life is as important to the tutor as the student’s writing.

The tutor built a plan of action in  the first session.  I had not thought of doing this.  Makes sense.

I like the way the tutor gave the student more help with editing in steps, each more specific than the last. (point out the sentence, point out the line, give an example of a similar but correct structure)

Justin

This tutor made the mistake of designing his course before he met the student.  I did something similar, so I know his pain.

Justin is a Gen 1.5 speaker.  His difficulties are common ones for Gen 1.5ers.  The tutor seemed to expect only ESL students.

I admire the tutor’s flexibility and his attempts to change his expectations and goals according to what the student needs.

I don’t think the tutor should feel bad about what he perceived as a less than successful tutoring experience.  He did his best and the student did too.  It’s clear that  the student got a lot out of it.

The tutor states that he regrets he did not contact the professor with questions.  I’ll keep this in mind.

Aurora

Tutor “learned the value of holding back, hoping that Aurora would emerge more from her shell.”

 Tutor came to realize that finding and correcting errors is easy for the tutor, but perhaps not best for the student.

Again, similar to other tutors, the tutor realized that s/he can’t  come to the meeting with preconceived notions of what to do. The student, her work, and her needs are what should set the agenda.

George (Robert)

Tutor had a hard time building rapport with Robert, and feels s/he should have tried harder.

As I read, I am interested in this student, because I think I might have a similar student—mine did not show up to our first meeting, similar to Robert.

I  can relate to the tutor’s initial overestimation of the student’s abilities because the student is a native speaker—I have been having a similar issue.

I like the idea of using sentence stubs for generating support for an idea or thesis.

What a tough experience!  I would be so frustrated with  this student.  I admire how the tutor was able to tap into Robert’s extrinsic motivation to do well in the class and how s/he just focused on the homework assignments.  This got Robert to buy into the tutoring process to a certain extent.

10 Tips to Help Students with their Grammar

1. The goal is to help students be good independent self-editors.  Don’t just edit the student’s paper, but teach the student how to edit his/her own paper.
2. Work with the student to get a list of common errors s/he makes, and help him/her develop a list of strategies and techniques to proofread for those errors.
3. Help students come up with a list of internal questions s/he should ask him/herself while editing.
4. Edit in cycles, checking for one grammar point at a time.
5. One good technique for ear learners or ESL learners who have studied English long enough to have some linguistic instincts: read the paper out loud, sentence by sentence, slowly, paying attention to where reading difficulties occur.
6.  Focus on global errors first (errors that affect meaning) and local errors after (errors that don’t effect meaning).
7. Know the difference between an error, which might be systematic and consistently made by the student, and a mistake, which student might make because s/he is paying more attention to expressing complicated ideas.
8. In my experience, everyone, no matter what their linguistic background, make the following errors: run-ons/comma splices, parallel structure, and errors with focus.
9. Edit grammar throughout the writing process, not just at the end.
10. Remember that learning to edit is a long and variable process.

Bates, 1993. Responding to Sentence Level Errors

Bates, L.  1993.  Responding Systematically to Sentence Level Errors

Chapter 3

1.       Be selective in marking errors

a.       Mark global errors over local errors

b.      Mark errors that occur frequently

c.       Consider the student’s proficiency, attitude and goals

d.      Consider marking errors covered in class

2.       Decide how you will mark errors

a.       Locate the error: Just use the symbol, underline, or bracket the error

b.      Identify the error: put the symbol over the error

3.       Decide when you will mark errors

a.       On early drafts, only mark errors that affect meaning.

b.      On later drafts, be sure that the students understand that the focus should be on the content of the paper.

4.       Decide if others (e.g., peers, tutors, friends) will identify or mark errors.

Chapter 4

Combining Response to Content and Sentences in an End Comment

1.       Should the sentence level errors affect the grade?

a.       Consider if the errors are global or local.  Global errors should probably affect a grade more than local errors.

b.      If the sentence level errors dominate the paper, then you might consider having the grammar affect the grade of the paper

c.       Finally, consider giving two grades to the paper: one for grammar and one for content

d.      What I do: I split the grade of the paper into three parts: 30% content, 35% organization, 35% grammar, and I only grade for grammar points we have covered in class.  I might mark or correct other grammar points, but they will not affect the grade.

2.       There should be 3 parts to an end comment

a.       Respond to the content first—it is the most important aspect of the paper.

b.      Second, respond to the sentence level grammar

                                                               i.      Balance positive and negative feedback

                                                             ii.      Indicate, if appropriate, the effect of sentence level errors on the grade.

c.       Include the grade and some justification for the grade in the end comment.

New Tutees

Here are some of the questions I might ask my new tutees, to get to know them and to evaluate their language and writing backgrounds:

Where did you grow up?
Where did you go to high school?
Do you speak any other languages?
Did you grow up speaking other languages?
Do your parents speak another language?

What  is the most difficult part of writing (or English class)?
When and where do you write the most?  Facebook? Email? Text? School?
What do you like to read?

Sample Texts--Ear Learners or Eye Learners?

Student A—Ear learner

“For example, I can use my ability to look at sawer system, I can see which pipe is get old and rusy to the sawer department can fixit first before it blow up.”

The errors tend to be more usage.  The grammatical errors that are there are based on inflection or other  word-final issues.

Student B—Ear learner

“But there’re still a lot of problem that I have to dealing with because of my economic change just like pople say “more money more problem.”

The passage is fairly fluently written.  There are some sentence boundary problems. The spelling problems tend to be homophonic. This indicates the writer is using oral language in his/her written work.

Student C—Ear learner (possibly Gen 1.5)

Uses idiomatic expressions with spelling errors.  Fluently written.  Relatively few errors.

Student D—Eye Learner

This student has pretty good spelling, and his sentence level problems  tend to be grammar errors more than usage errors.

Student E—Eye Learner

Basic grammatical errors (that are not usage errors).  Seem to be some transference errors, as in “for the survive.” The fact that he identifies himself as from another country suggests that he learned English in a classroom.

Student F—Ear Learner

The fluent, stream of consciousness type of writing here suggests that the student is a proficient oral speaker.

The Importance of Dance—Eye Learner

This one is difficult.  It is very fluently written, and many of the errors are either inflection or word-final errors.  The student shows a very sophisticated understanding of essay structure and argumentation, which to me would indicate previous educational experience.  This and the fact that many of the errors seem to be grammatical rather than usage-based would indicate that the writer is an Eye Learner.

Pot Legal—Ear Learner

The writing is fluent.  The biggest problems with this essay are not grammatical but organizational and genre specific.

Weird Friday—Ear Learner

The writing  is very fluent, and the errors tend to be more usage based than grammatical.

Spelling—Ear Leaner

Errors tend to be more usage based than grammatical. There are some word final mistakes (rather than errors).

Introduction Sample 1—Ear Learner

The writing  is fairly fluent, and the errors tend to be usage based (specifically homophonic spelling errors).

Introduction Sample 2—Ear Learner

A lot of errors that are homophonic spelling errors.  Some sentences are perfectly formed, and he uses some idiomatic expressions.

Introduction Sample 3—Ear Learner

Use of idiomatic expressions.  Fluent writer.

Grammar Rant

The grammar rant that I found can be found here:
http://stow.patch.com/blog_posts/grammar-rant

It was written in 2012 by a former English teacher of 30+ years, Tom Stephen.

The author of this grammar rant thinks that there is one way to speak proper English.  Here is a list of the mistakes that Stephen thinks are “horrible.”

1.      "We seen that deer run through the yard."

2.      "Me and my brother will help you with that."

3.      "If my husband had went to Home Depot instead..." (spoken by an English teacher!)

4.      "Where you at?"  (not even "Where're you at?")

5.      "We was workin' on it all day."

6.      "People are like dead, and it was like scary, and I'm like no way..." (a recent Colorado shootings interview)

7.      Answering the phone: "Yeah, this is him. 'Sup?"

Stephen gives a quick run-down of the problems of each utterance.  (1) is missing an auxiliary “have;” in (2), the speaker confuses the “nominative and objective case pronouns” (even though English does not have cases); the speaker in (3) has forgotten to use the past participle; in (4), the speaker omits the verb; in (5), there is not subject verb agreement; (6) suffers from too many “likes” and generally imprecise vocabulary; in (7), the speaker does not know what should follow a linking verb.

These errors might be uttered in informal contexts, by speakers of lower socio-economic classes, by people of a different race than him, or by people from less prestigious geographic regions.  An interesting aspect of his rant is his description of his own background.  Stephen states that he comes from a “a very normal, we-speak-correctly-in-this-family, plain old family that had been here for many generations”  He seems to be viewing himself as having a kind of default background, which is often the case when a person is member of a more prestigious class (though he seems to be rather proud that his family has been here for a long time).  He also gives an inadvertent clue as to the socio-economic level of his family—he mentions that he went to a private Catholic elementary and middle school, where the nuns beat the grammar into him.  It all combines to paint a picture of a privileged childhood.

Stephen is careful to not mention the race, ethnicity or socio-economic status of any of the speakers, though he does mention that most of them are his peers. This is what shocks him the most, I think—that people he might respect in other ways could speak in such ways.  He makes a comment at the end of his rant that suggests that he does not have the highest regard for the intelligence of the above speakers: “I am often bewildered by what I read or hear from seemingly intelligent people.”  Here he implies that his English-challenged acquaintances seem intelligent, but actually their speech reveals their mental deficiencies.

Because the author does not acknowledge the fact that there are different varieties of English that might be spoken in different contexts, because the author takes his own privileged background for granted, and because he judges peoples’ intelligence by their speech, his arguments for “proper grammar” are invalidated.  He states that “this is not the way that English was used when [he] was growing up,” which makes him seem like someone who has been clueless about language variety his whole life, as well as a fuddy-duddy English teacher.

Interestingly, the first person to leave a comment to Stephen's blog brings up these socio-economic, racial analyses of his rant, and points out that he is holding all English speakers to a version of English that is the most "prestigious."  Stephen replies with,  "I'm sticking with the "prestigious," dialect, thank you --- always have and always will."

Erasure of the Sentence

Erasure of the Sentence (Connors, 2000)

• ·         Francis Christiansen (1960’s) “You could be a good writer if you could learn to write a good sentence.”  Advocated combining a base sentence with modifying clauses and phrases
• ·         Imitation: an ancient technique has a renaissance in the 1960’s. Proponents believed that the emulation of well formed sentences would develop syntactic maturity.
• ·         Sentence combining (HUGE in the 1970’s): combining sentences using embedding, deletion, subordination or coordination. Based on Chomsky’s theories of generative grammar.
• ·         All these techniques lost influence despite the fact that all three of them had empirical evidence that using them would improve students’ syntactic maturity
• ·         Sentence counterforces:
• o   Anti-formalism: any pedagogy based only on form was suspect; sentence level work was lacking meaning, motivation, purpose
• o   Anti-automatism or anti-behaviorism: any techniques that tapped into non-conscious behaviors were demeaning to students.  These techniques had no theory and were destructive to the individuality of the students.
• o   Anti-empiricism: critics were uncomfortable with the scientific nature of these sentence level techniques; especially, these techniques did not address the cultural or community aspects of writing
• ·         Connors states that despite all these criticisms, no one actually showed that these techniques did not work or were not useful.
• ·         So why did we stop investigating these methods?  Connors says that composition became more and more a sub field of English and literature, and followed the directions that discipline took.

I [heart] Grammar

I love grammar.  Learning French grammar and all its ins and outs was one of my first enjoyable experiences with language.  For me, grammar is fun to think about and fun to teach.  This is going to sound really weird, but sometimes, in the middle of teaching a particularly complicated grammatical point, as I sum up the main idea of what I am trying to explain, I get a sense of the complexity and beauty of the grammar of English and experience a little frisson of joy.

Told you it was going to sound weird.

In some ways this is a great thing, since teaching grammar is one of my duties as an ESL teacher.  When I teach writing, however, even ESL writing, I consciously restrain myself from spending too much time teaching grammar.  If I am teaching a reading class, there is little reason to go into any grammatical explanations.  In an ESL writing class, there is more reason to go into grammar, but the focus of the class still needs to be the writing.  I spend some time discussing grammar in such a class, but there are other concerns that are more important that need to be addressed.  When I begin teaching Basic Skills writing or first year composition, I think I will put grammar even more into the background.

My background is in linguistics, so I am more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist.  I try to teach the language that people actually speak (or write), not some idealized version of English that might never have existed. I think of grammar in a writing class as a rhetorical tool.  Just as it is important to write in a tone that is appropriate to the genre and context, it is also important to write in a grammatical style that is appropriate.  That is not to say that conventions should never be flouted; in fact, making a statement in a unconventional or “nonstandard” voice can be rhetorically powerful.  Such shifts from what  is expected should be intentional, though.  When a shift to something “nonstandard” seems like an error, it dilutes the rhetorical power of the piece of writing.

Top 10 Bits of Advice on Being a Good Tutor

1. Questioning: Ask the student to discuss the prompt or assignment or his/her ideas, to check if student has learned what you taught, to gain their attention, to provide variation in teaching, to direct attention to a problem, etc.
   
2. Discover student’s writing perspective: Discuss their best writing assignments, what they are good at/bad at in writing, the rules they think should never be broken in an academic paper, why they think you gave an assignment, etc.
   
3. Affective issues: Be patient.  Get your student involved in the paper. Be supportive. Use positive body language. Be perceptive about the student’s body language. Give correction that helps motivate students.
   
4. Be  sensitive to gender issues, socio-cultural issues, learning disabilities and learning styles.  Act as a role model in an academic context. Work with all students equally, even if you like or dislike them.
   
5. Budget time. Set the agenda and goals for the session (after discussing the student’s needs).
   
6. Let the student do the work.  Guide with questions, facilitate brainstorming, let the student find their own process.  Give a model and let the student apply it.
   
7. Focus on global issues first (content, support, organization, etc), local issues last (grammar, vocabulary).
   
8. Limit each session to one or two skills rather than trying to produce a perfect paper.
   
9. At the end of the session: ask student to summarize what they learned, positively assess what the student has done, give resources for students to continue work independently.
   
10. Don’t: edit or fix papers; rewrite sentences, impose your personal writing style; predict grades or discuss the grade an instructor gave; provide essay topics, specific ideas for a topic, or organizational strategies.

Tutoring Links

Here are some links on good tutoring.  The first two are especially useful, with tons of great handouts and resources for tutors.

1.      http://www.dvc.edu/org/facilities/computer-labs/english/handouts.htm

Diablo Valley College study skills handouts.  Not only composition tutoring, but general study skills.  Everything from “Scheduling your time well” to   “Improve your concentration and memory” to test prep strategies. 

2.      http://www.dvc.edu/org/departments/english/learningresources/

Also from Diablo Valley College, more handouts, this time more related to composition and ESL learners.  This is a really good resource for handouts for things like writing theses, punctuation, commas, reading skills, and tons more.

3.      http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/944/01/

The Purdue Online Writing Lab, tutoring grammar, including rationales for tutoring grammar and some basic strategies.

4.      http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/663/1/

Also Purdue OWL, but this is a Powerpoint presentation discussing how tutoring (here, “conferencing”) is different from teaching in a classroom.  This was useful for me since I have been teaching but not tutoring for a while.

5.      http://writingcenter.unc.edu/esl/teaching-resources/tips-for-writing-tutors/

U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Ten Tips for Writing Tutors (some are specific to ESL learners, but most are generally applicable).

6.      http://writingcenter.unc.edu/faculty-resources/tips-on-teaching-writing/what-is-good-writing/

U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill again, this time a list of elements of good writing. There is an interesting list of attitudes or skills our students might have.  For example, “Your students may have always written assignments the night before they are due;”  “Your students may not believe they have anything useful to say on the assigned subject.” 

7.      http://guts.studentorg.wisc.edu/resources/tutors/AMtutorhandbook2011.pdf

GUTS: Greater University Tutoring Service, U of Wisconsin, Madison.  This is a handout given to tutors in a student-run tutoring center.  Of particular interest is page 7, “How to Handle a Tough Tutoring Session.”

8.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbmTv-SQNHE

Strategies for Tutoring English Language Learners from the College of Marin.  9 minute video about tutoring ESL writers from the perspective of the teacher/tutor and student.