An excerpt from Susan Naomi Bernstein's book, Teaching Developmental Writing 4th Edition:
"Basic writing, considered to be part of the social good in educational
experiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Shaughnessy, p.7; Rich,
p.12), often has been redefined, forty years later, as a set of basic
skills over which students must demonstrate mastery before thy are
allowed to move to credit composition courses.
Although some courses require that students master sentence-level
skills and paragraph writing before attempting a complete essay, current
best practices suggest that this step-by-step approach can lead to
inattention and a lack of critical thinking..." (ix).
Well, I'll be! I've been saying that teaching sentence-level concerns in
basic writing classes takes time away from teaching students how to
think critically, respond to and write about texts (a skill that many in
the bw world detest) and write with ownership of ideas.
It's nice to know, I'm not the only one; however, how then do bw instructors best incorporate grammar into the class? Should bw teachers worry about teaching students about grammar?
Rasheda, The grammar question is something that basic writing teachers have been struggling with since the 1970s. One way to approach this subject is to break it down into different components of "grammar": word forms (word structures), sentence patterns, verb tense, use of pronouns, idioms, use of articles (the, a, an), and so on. Some aspects of "grammar" are more easily learned than others. Verb tenses are more easily learned than prepositions and articles for people learning English as a second language, for example. The way I approach this is to give very short grammar workshops in my writing classes: this does not guarantee that everyone will learn but it provides opportunities for those who want to learn. I also point out features of student writing that are grammar topics for them to learn. I sometimes can teach small aspects of grammar in conferences with my students.
ReplyDelete--Barbara
Thank you. I'm starting to use their essays as a way to teach them their errors. Once I find their pattern I teach it to them.
ReplyDeleteAnother idea is to have them do a five minute presentation to the class on their most common error. I'm not teaching now. I just have these ideas.
Thank you for your suggestions. Do you have any more?
I like to ask students to tell an oral story in a group, then write out the story, then write an essay comparing the oral story and the written story. They can learn differences between spoken English and written language that way, and they can learn about their own language styles and about their strengths and weaknesses. I published an essay on this writing assignment in a book published by Heinemann. The title of the book is Attending to the Margins: Teaching on the Front Lines. Valerie Balester is the first editor. The title of my essay is "Something of Great Constancy: Storytelling, Story Writing and Academic Writing," or something close to that.
ReplyDeleteThey can learn about language by working from their own language with this project. And they don't have to focus on "error." --Barbara
Thank you. I look forward to reading your articles.
DeleteRAsheda