Because College English has a decided lack of ESL issues, I chose two texts this week that I hoped had a common thread in discussing grammar. I chose one text from College English and one from the ELT Journal, both from the 1980s to see what they said about grammar use in the writing and ESL classroom and I hope next week to examine if any texts from the 2000s address grammar, given the popularity of “Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” which, in the mid-1980s, became a popular call to avoid teaching grammar at all.

I started with College English. In Thomas Friedmann’s “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class,” he argues in favor of asking or requiring students not to “fix” errors that they find in grammar workbooks or in their own writing, but instead to model and write the correct spelling, grammatical element, or sentence as a way of better correcting the “rule” that has been broken for future writing tasks. He starts out by noting that most developmental English students simply don’t have the models in their head to correctly fix a sentence or pick the one correct spelling out of a list of five words, stating that “developmental students have not acquired the correct image” (391), and that asking them to fix their work only reinforces all of the wrong possibilities that also exist in their minds.

Friedmann notes that such learning is at its core psychological, noting that “similar items confuse,” and instead of teaching the difference between there/their or to/too, one shouldn’t teach the similar item but instead teach the singular item in context, such as teaching “there, here, and where” as a bunch (394-95). He provides similar examples for how to teach apostrophes, language rules (such as foot/feet rather than feets), and spelling. He also argues that students must be required to write out the whole corrected sentence or word, as simply adding in a letter or “corrected” word into a longer sentence does not actually break the negative pattern that is already been engrained (398). Friedmann ends by noting that in the humanities “ambiguity is applauded” but that in teaching grammar, ambiguity must be cast out for the betterment of our students (399).

While this article does not directly address ESL students, it might be meaningful to think of many of them as developmental writers. At least at my institution, NOVA, a significant portion (a sizeable majority) of all developmental composition students come from the ESL classroom. But because this article does not address the various needs of different developmental populations, it is hard to put into context the differing needs of these two distinct groups and how to best help them individually. This is particularly true because Friedmann notes that if any given student is not having problems in one particular grammar area, the teacher should avoid confusing these students by teaching them to correct errors. This may be difficult in a classroom in which an ESL student has trouble with a particular part of grammar usage while most of the native developmental students do not. Clarifying how to help the many populations that inhabit the same classroom seems like it would have been important in the 1980s and yet this is not addressed.

Additionally, like last week’s College English articles, this one also does not contain outside sources or references to follow to shore up pedagogically sound methods. I am increasingly frustrated that these articles do not appear to be based in any particular research method or built upon other best practices of teaching pedagogy. Therefore, it is impossible to know if this advice is based upon method or methodology that may reach into the ESL pedagogical world or not.

The second article was also from the 1980s in the ELT Journal. “How to Cope With Spaghetti Writing” by Damien McDevitt defines “spaghetti writing” as that with “long incoherent sentences” and “subordinate clauses searching for a main one” (19). He states that simply telling students to write in simpler sentences will end up with them being accused of writing “baby English” and those trying to master the language will not be helped by this accusation (19). McDevitt then provides a series of exercises that teachers can work through with students to help in areas such as creating compound or complex sentences, expanding and linking sentences together through questions such as when and why, and error correction (20-21). McDevitt concludes by noting that such exercises will not make ESL writing perfect but will help students “review their own writing in a more critical and systematic manner” (22) with the certain hope of improvement.

There are some interesting connections between this and Friedmann’s article. From both perspectives, grammar has much to do with clarity of writing, and errors must be corrected to make for clearer sentences. Interestingly, though both talk about essay writing as a place for needed improvement, both talk about correction down to the sentence level rather than word level. Though McDevitt does stress some “error correction” which Freidmann shuns, they both talk about modeling good forms and working with students to take simpler sentences and make them more complex with correct grammatical forms. Neither, however, talks about how this will fit into the overall coherence of a longer essay, or why such grammatically correct language is important for the forms of writing students will be doing in college or elsewhere. Again, like our other articles, both suggest similar activities and ideas, but don’t differentiate between the two different populations they are working with (ESL vs. “developmental”). Ultimately, this suggests a lack of understanding on what the purpose of grammar instruction is in an ESL classroom versus a developmental English class. An ESL course could be teaching students basic communication skills while developmental English suggests a student who is college-minded and –bound. If the purpose of these courses is different, how should grammar instruction be tailored to each of these populations? Whether or not these articles can or should address this complex question is unclear, but it is one that has been weighing on my mind for several years of study in these cross-disciplines.

There were some additional interesting connections between the other works I’ve read this semester. The most interesting connection was with Oster’s College English article. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University.” In this article, she argues that while students are ready for the rigors of challenging their beliefs in college English, those coming out of ESL often aren’t ready for the language challenges themselves. While she acknowledges that student writing improves over the course of several semesters, she’s skeptical of their abilities in grammar and clear writing. I think this speaks to a common perception of college English teachers that students should come prepared to their classroom to write in Standard Written English (SWE), yet most, and this includes our native speaking students, do not (or lack at minimum some deficiencies). Because both authors today, as well as Oster, seem to take up the banner that improving grammatical usage is a process that takes time and is one that can go beyond ESL to composition, I then wonder when and how our disciplines decide when a student is ready and in what way they are ready to pass our classes and to take on the rigors of other college work. Is there a gatekeeper level of written accuracy that we need to hold students to, or does each institution or teacher have different ideas about this? If we maintain that students have the ability to think, but scarcely the ability to write, what does composition (and ESL for that matter) value most as a discipline, and why? If we ultimately value too many things, such skills cannot be taught in the matter of a single semester or even two, as most college composition sequences are set up.

Works Cited

Friedmann, Thomas. “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class.” College English, vol. 45, no. 4, 1983, pp. 390-399.

Hartwell, Patricia. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English, vol. 47, no. 2, 1985, pp. 105-127.

McDevitt, Damien. “How to Cope With Spaghetti Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 1989, pp. 19-23.

Oster, Judith. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University.” College English, vol. 47, no. 1, 1985, pp. 66-76.