This week I'm grading papers (ha ha, of course I am - I'm always grading papers these days!) - and one or two papers gave me pause. These are papers written by some of the strongest students in my class - insightful, engaged & creative papers written by African American women in my class. In their papers I see them doing the very things that I dream students will do: engage critically with the topic, deeply analyze and weave in our course readings, and, most important, make a real, clearly articulated argument that follows through their papers. In terms of a grade, they both definitely pass and qualify to use these papers to represent them in the writing proficiency assessment at our school. But...both of these papers are filled with grammatical issues that stand out to me like a sore thumb....and make it clear to me that a reader could easily dismiss the analytical work in their papers simply because of some non-standard English sentences.
I've read plenty about this topic...but wasn't sure how to address it in a college-level writing class. I go over punctuation, comma use and sentence structure with the class as a whole - knowing that this is an issue that all kinds of learners struggle with. But this one is specific to my Black students. And, basically, I can see that they are writing the way they talk. And I don't want to be an asshole, but I do want to address the issue.
Luckily, there are fabulous educators out there like Linda Christenson, writing about how she addresses this issue (for example, in this article). She has a wealth of suggestions, from having students study model writing to deduce writing rules, explicitly discussing the differences between AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and SE (Standard English), to analyzing student errors. To explain this, she quotes from an educator named Mina Shaughnessy:
"In her book Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy wrote, "[T]he teacher must try to decipher the individual student's code, examining samples of his writing as a scientist might, searching for patterns or explanations, listening to what the student says about punctuation, and creating situations in the classroom that encourage all students to talk openly about what they don't understand.""
This is probably easier than it sounds - and also much more ethical than simply letting students go on in their lives never having addressed an issue that will certainly, as Christenson puts it, "handcuff them."
The truth is, different cultures, regions, and ethnicities in our country speak differently. Each way of speaking has an internal logic and grammar to it - either from being combined with a second language or from evolving in cultural segregation as AAVE did. Lots of students write how they speak - but since some students speak something closer to "Standard English" they get called out on it less.
So, what will I do? I realized reading this article that I actually have few qualms about offering quick, directed sentence/grammar feedback to ESL students. After teaching international students for years, I instantly recognize typical errors, and can categorize them as "rule-based" or ideosyncratic, and explicitly provide them with the error, type of error, and rule they need to follow to fix it (including web link if the rule is complicated). With African American students, I think I just didn't have similar language to address it. Christenson's examples, which basically point out how the student is following AAVE rules and how to change it to SE, give me a great model.
To read all of Christenson's article, with examples and ideas for further reading on the topic, visit: https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/951
Thanks for the great post! You've captured the problem of why this is a sensitive issue, since it's so difficult (but important) to teach students the conventions of Standard English without denigrating the varieties of English they speak in other contexts. Right now, my students in a History of the English Language course are discussing American dialects, and they tend to be judgmental without even really realizing it, using phrases like describing someone as "afflicted with an accent" or criticizing a dialect phrase as "incorrect." One of the big challenges I'm facing is convincing them to use neutral, objective language when describing varieties of English and to think of Standard English as just another conventional variety that happens to be particularly important in academic and professional contexts. Perhaps I'll share Linda Christensen's essay with them.
ReplyDeleteIn the context of a college writing course, college instructors often assume that students have already learned whatever it is they need to know about Standard English grammar in their K-12 education. I know that I've been guilty of that assumption, and it's simply not the case. I've found that most of my students have learned most of their basic grammar vocabulary (e.g. being able to identify and define parts of speech, verb tenses, etc.) from foreign language classes, but their understanding of Standard English grammar is mostly intuitive and unexamined. It sounds like you're already doing a great job of helping your students to understand SE grammar, though.
One thing that I found particularly helpful in Christensen's essay is the notion of focusing on just one issue at a time rather than "correcting" every "error" in a piece of writing. That's advice I should try to take to heart. At any rate, your post has given me a lot to think about, and your students are lucky to have such a thoughtful instructor!
- Katie