After reading Bean's chapter on paper comments, and also having attended Ann Feldman's vision seminar for the CWP position, I'm growing wary (and weary, too) of correcting low-order concerns like grammar and rhetorical style issues like passive voice.
Feldman mentioned that her grad students at U.I.C. often have trouble explaining grammatical rules to their composition classes simply because they had never learned these rules. When I have international or ESL students in the writing lab, I can usually point out one or two places where they made a usage error — "do you mean any university or just one specific one?" for definite/indefinite articles, for example. I then will turn them loose to review the rest of the paper and see if they can find more of these errors. Of course, there are times I simply cannot explain a rule. I admit to the student that I don't know why our language works that way, and usually come up with an ineffective "that's just how it is."
I like Bean's suggestion just to make a mark next to a line with a grammatical error. I've also seen papers in the WL with numbers that correspond to a rule in a guidebook or sheet of common errors that an instructor has distributed. The student should be the one making these corrections — if a teacher corrects it for the student (because "that's just how it is"), there's not much learning going on. Bean also suggested maybe trying to explain a few common rules, but this can be difficult if you don't understand the rules yourself! I think this is what Feldman was gesturing towards during the part of her talk in which she mentioned grammar — you can spend an entire semester teaching grammatical rules, but that's not the goal of freshman comp.
Since we try to avoid grammar correction in the WL, I'm wondering what the best way to do it will be. How do the rest of you plan to tackle the issue? (Linguistics folks, I'm looking your way....)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I agree that we should underline the not so obvious grammatical issues (things that Microsoft word didn’t catch), and if we just happen to slip up and correct the student a few times, I don’t think that will hurt. However, I think that the best way to tackle this issue is to devote maybe one class to grammar, and beyond that have a continuing emphasis on visiting the WL as well as utilizing writing handbooks such as Penguin’s. I don’t think that we have to be too overt when pointing out grammatical issues, as well as I don’t see where/ when we would even have the time.
For pervasive problems, maybe mark and correct the first occurrence, then tell the students they're on their own to identify and fix the rest (I guess Bean suggests this too). Problems common to several students could be addressed in class (though this would be tedious for students who don't have the problems in the first place). It's a tricky thing; if the Writing Lab doesn't do grammar, and instructors are encouraged (by Bean at least) not to spend time on, how will students learn? Can we really trust them to teach themselves, when this is a required course that many won't see as useful? I don't have a solution.
Joe
Curzan and Damour (page 149) also suggest using standard abbreviated editing marks (they include a table with examples). This is what I thought I'd use--I plan on covering grammar for one class and providing students with a handout that has something like this for them to refer to when I hand back papers.
Post a Comment