The Language Instinct, Chapter 12

Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nest are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an "error"? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer, anyway? -370

To a linguist or a psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. -370

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. -372

. . . since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. -374

One of the major discorveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word--noun, verb, adjective--is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental catagory that can be verified by experimental assays, just as chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. -394

Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. -396

[A quote from Dwight Bollinger]
In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, otehrs with a rich fund of practical knowledge--whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn. We are living in an African village and Albert Schweitzer has not arrived yet. -399

Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks of writing well. -401

Teaching One-to-One: the Writing Conference

Teaching One-to-One: the Writing Conference

by Muriel Harris Harris, Muriel. Teaching One-to-one: the Writing Conference. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1986. Print. Here are some basic points inside. In her book she prefers the term "teacher" or "instructor" rather than "tutor. Conferences can be incorporated in very different ways according to your structure. How can we teach a process? Talk about it Demonstrate it Participate in it. -Writers need to write, get immediate, helpful, supportive feedback, then write again. -Adopting the role of a collaborator, an interested but sometimes confused reader -pg 49, she covers proper seating, paper placement -Open Questions vs Rhetorical Closed Probe and Prompt Leading (questions where the teacher knows the answer) -Theorists like JoAnn Johnson feels an imperative structure is better than an open-ended questioning one. (As in, "Do X" and the tutor watches and responds to the results.) -"Education, Johnson comments, is the only field where a question is considered a stimulant for higher levels of thinking." -p64 -p.73 Pointing out the potential hazards of differences in nonverbal communication! EYE CONTACT, USE OF SPACE, CHAIR PLACEMENT, PAPER PLACEMENT -She mentions John Hinds idea of Reader vs Writer Responsibility in Meaning Making. how much mental work do we expect the reader to do? She advocates "perception checking" of students' intended meanings (that they are expressing through writing or talk). "In contrast, the nondirective approach [in counseling] rests on the assumption that most people can help themselves if they are freed from emotional obstacles such as fear of criticism and fear of failure." -70

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp Theory, ed by Victor Villanueva ISBN: 0-8141-0976-4 by Patrick Hartwell For me the grammar issue was settled at least twenty years ago with the conclusion offered by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer in 1963: In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teacher of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing. -205 [He wants to ask 4 questions: 1. Why is the grammar issue so important? 2. How can we intelligibly define the word grammar? 3. What do findings in cognate disciplines suggest about formal grammar instruction? 4. What is our theory of language and what does it predict about the value of grammar teaching?] [He distinguishes 5 versions of grammar. #1. Native speech patterns. #2 Scientific description of native patterns #3 Linguistic etiquette #4 Grammar as taught in school #5 Stylistic advice] ... or James Briton's analogy, offered informally after a conference presentation, that grammar study would be like forcing starving people to master the use of a knife and fork before allowing them to eat. -216 

 I consider a hypothetical argument, that if Grammar 2 knowledge affected Grammar 1 performance, then linguists would be our best writers. (I can certify that they are, on the whole, not.) Such a position, after all, is only in accord with other domains of science. . . -216 

 Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other strings. -218 

 Most students, reading their writing aloud, will correct in essences all errors of spelling, grammar, and, by intonation, punctuation, but usually without noticing that what they read departs from what they wrote(22). And Richard H. Haswell ("Minimal Marking," CE, 45 [1983], 600-604) notes that his students correct 61.1% of their errors when they are identified with a simple mark in the margin rather than by error type. -223 22---- See Bartholomae, "The Study of Error"; Patrick Hartwell, "The Writing Center and the Paradoxes of Written Down Speech," in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, ed Gary Olson (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE 1984) pp 48-61; and Sondra Perl, "A Look At Basic Writers in the Process of Composing," in Basic Writing: A Collection of Essays for Teachers, Researchers, and Administrators (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1980), pp13-32 

 Developing writers show the same patterning of errors, regardless of dialect. (29) Studies of reading and of writing suggest that surface features of spoken dialect are simply irrelevant to mastering pring literacy. Print is a complex cultural code--or better yet, a system of codes-- and my bet is that, regardless of instruction, one masters those codfes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization. -224 

 Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form. -225

Inventing the University

INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY

by David Bartholomae, anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp, Victor Villanueva Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion---invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. -623 

... he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of the discipline, on the other hand. -624 This is, however, one of the most important characteristic slips of basic writers. (I use the term "basic writers" to refer to university students traditionally placed in remedial composition courses.) It is very have for them to take on the role--the voice, the persona-- of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. -625 

 Linda Flower has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between "writer based" and "reader-based" prose. -627 [Bartholamae thinks this advice is unhelpful, considering how little they really know about the reader and his/her discourse conventions]. Our students, I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily or comfortably one with their audience. -628 

 What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or "To His Coy Mistriss" than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate. -629 

 [B argues for the importance of "academic writing" as writing for a discourse community, not an expressivist interpretation.] [Here he is reacting to a Cognitive Process theory , an expressivist type that places meaning in the writer, expressed by language.] The act of writing, here, has a personal, cognitive history but not a history as a text, as a text that is made possible by prior texts. When located in the perspective afforded by prior texts, writing is seen to exist separate from the writer and his intentions, it is seen i nth e context of other articles in Seventeen, of all articles written for or about women, of all articles written about English teaching, and so on. Reading research has made it possible to say that these prior texts, or a reader's experience with these prior texts, have bearing on how the text is read. -630 And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of

Key Authors To Know in Writing Theory

Key Authors To Know in Writing Theory

Expressivism Peter Elbow Donald Murray Social Constructionism Kenneth Bruffee Marilyn M Cooper James Berlin Patricia Bizzell Cultural Studies pedagogies [Are heavily influenced by] Paolo Frere Ira Shor Mikhail Bakhtin I.A. Richards Linda Flower, Writer Based vs Reader Based Prose

The St Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

Tutoring is interpersonal. Tutors must draw upon extensive interpersonal skills to work effectively with students who bring a range of educational and cultural backgrounds and a variety of learning styles to their tutoring sessions. Tutors need effective interpersonal skills because the purpose of tutoring is to meet the needs of individual writers. -p.1

Expressivist tutors often employ "the Socratic dialogue," asking heuristic, or exploratory questions as a way of getting the student to discover and think about ideas and how they can best be communicated. -3

The writing center practice advocated by social constructionists involves extensive use of peer group critiquing to reflect the workings of discourse communities and to downplay the role of the tutor as an authority figure or the single source of knowledge. -4

In this view [cultural studes pedagogies], the goal of writing tutorials should not be the simple improvement of student writing. Instead, the goal is to give student writers a heightened awareness of the social injustice perpetrated by the dominant culture's racist and classist agenda and to empower these writers to resist this agenda. In short, the goal of such tutoring is to make better citizens of both tutors and student writers. -4

In a similar vein, proponents of postmodern, postcolonial, and post-process theories of composition call for approaches to tutoring that emphasize plural perspectives, identities, and processes. -5

Methods of Tutoring Assessment

Methods of Tutoring Assessment

Surveys= Teachers, Students, Tutors -Forming good questions is difficult -Students are unmotivated to give good detail Paired tutoring -The presence of a third person changes the dynamic -the paired tutor can easily observe most things, but it is hard for three people to look at one paper -the student is liable to be intimidated Tutor report forms -check boxes -narratives -overly positive -time pressures -little motivation to give detail Video records -recording affects the dynamic -captures verbal and nonverbal behavior -difficult to see the paper/text on the tape. Audiotape records -misses body language -equipment is inexpensive Self-Evaluations -overly positive -free