grammar continues despite best efforts
To obsessively return to the complicated discussion of grammar and the place it holds in the inner-most hearts of us all, I find I must write a quick, fragmented blog about it and ESL students.
In the writing lab, we all know how differently an esl appointment goes. I will thus spare everyone a description of it. But with new perspective, departing from dinosaur-ic current traditional proscriptives, these aren’t as different from other appointments as they initially appear.
My point being to discuss the similarity between the ESL workshop advice and the readings for last week: Not focusing on grammar to the exclusion of the ideas whether creator of idea is esl or not.
It can be tough to do this, especially when grammar becomes distracting. But, if we relinquish our regime as diction dictators we can hopefully see beyond the splitting of infinitives towards the point of the student writing.
I’ve often had esl kids come in and I can’t see the writing for the grammar but, it is really not our job to teach them this, if it is even teachable* (long side contemplation about the teaching of second-languages and the acquisition of grammar).
Instead, though they often do ask for grammar advice, it seems the pointers given at the workshop are more pertinent for making a better piece of writing instead of a simply more correct one (am reminded of interesting point made by group in workshop about some non-colloquial usages being more interesting and indicative of unique perspectives than the strictly idiomatic way).
The workshop we all attended was very helpful for pointing this out. This lesson, reinforced by our readings, leaves me refreshingly (and uncharacteristically) optimistic about goal in understanding students as writers and not needing to make their papers bleed with the red pen of evaluation**!
*I am not suggesting to not give grammar help, just to note lower priority of it.
**especially good point from Sommers: writing is necessarily not static at revision point of process, and rather a waste of time to proofread prose that will be discarded…
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February 21st, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I was thinking back to those ESL workshops too. At the time, I left feeling somewhat empty-handed; however, since Tuesday’s class, that discussion is making a little more sense. What I’m thinking now–and what I hear you saying–is that from this perspective a tutoring session with an ESL student is not that different from one with a non-ESL student because in both cases we are asking, “What do you want to say?”
It’s somewhat like discovering I’ve been looking down the wrong end of a telescope all this time. Suddenly the role of grammar fits into the composition landscape in a far more productive and less unwieldy way.
February 24th, 2008 at 1:35 am
I concur. I recently had a positive ESL tutoring session, and I mention it b/c it was the first positive session. (Often the students leave happy enough but that doesn’t mean I’ve done my job.) In the successful session not only did I drop grammar but I also dropped my usual method of having the student read their essay out loud - it’s time consuming for ESL students and just makes it harder for me to not mark grammar problems. Instead, I scanned the essay for content, looked for main points of paragraphs, talked to the student about those points, or fleshed them out if they weren’t readily distiguishable, and went into structural and organizational possibilities. That meant that by the time we hit the 15 minute mark we were down to business and not nitpicking our way through the first paragraph. Hooray!
When I start teaching I’m going to try very, very hard not to touch a paper with ink until I’ve read it through once.
(I worked on a paper last week with a student that was so marked up that even I couldn’t make it all out. Granted, the paper was a disaster. But isn’t that all the more reason to keep the feedback clean and clear?)