Blogging has been intermittent lately because I’ve received the latest tide of papers, and am swimming through them. For the most part, I’m happy: my in-depth work with embedding quotations into one’s own language has paid off, as has my repeated hands-on insistence that students use their handbooks to properly imitate MLA citation style. I avoid dryasdust research-paper-itis by asking students to choose an issue relevant to their majors (or prospective majors) and then take a stand on that issue that will be somehow relevant to their university peers. And we put this into practice — or at least we will within the next several weeks — by publishing them as student-produced Web pages on our Writing Program’s Web site. In such a way, I hope to help make research and writing matter for my students and for others.
Every semester, though, and especially since I’ve started teaching in a computer lab, I’ve had students who speak and write English as a second language, or ESL students for short. Often, struggling to overcome language barriers, they will put in several times the effort of native English-speaking students in order to do well in (or pass) the class. But sometimes they simply haven’t had long enough acquaintance with the language to allow their written style to catch up with their ideas.
This showed up for me several years ago with a student who had emigrated from Russia to the U.S. less than three years previously. The job of linguistic catching-up she had done was nothing short of phenomenal. (I speak here as someone who took three semesters of Russian as a lazy undergraduate, and realized how much more different it was from English than, say, French or Spanish, or even German.) She could hold her own in discussion, and — more importantly — she was brilliant and erudite. Her papers were disasters, stylistically speaking — full of error, full of infelicity — but I have yet to see another freshman, or undergraduate for that matter, who can manage to incorporate intelligent references to Chagall, Bulgakov, and the 10th Symphony of Shostakovitch into an intelligently argued discussion of mass violence and anti-semitism in rural Russia.
This is why idiots like Hana annoy the living shit out of me. Hana uses a student’s infelicity with language as a ruler by which to measure whether that student ought to be in college or not, or whether that student would be happier seeking non-degree-related employment. Hana, who is unfortunately a professor, seems to hold a snapshot view of learning, by which how much a student knows in any subject is their reason for attending college: in other words, if you know enough, we’ll let you learn more, but if you don’t, you can’t. I imagine that Hana’s classes involve nothing but multiple-choice tests where students demonstrate all that they already know.
Most institutional evaluations of successful writing programs indicate something along the lines of “students come into these programs with widely varying skill levels, and they improve, and they leave with widely varying but almost always higher skill levels.” But there are always those who rejoice in the impulse towards exclusion, who would exclude an ESL student from having a college education (since first-year composition is almost always a requirement) if she couldn’t overcome her stylistic ESL-related difficulties, never mind her demonstrated intellectual advantages over the slack-jawed children of privilege who rely on the xenophobic logic of idiots like Hana to secure their economic safety.
But it is a struggle to work with and help those ESL students, especially when their problems bloom from one assignment to another because of the increasing difficulty of the assignments. To disentangle problems with articles from problems with adverbs and problems with verb phrases, to try and read their drafts generously to see the ideas rather than critically to see the surface-level error. And sometimes it makes me sad to give back a paper a second or third time and walk them through the phrasings and the reasons, to ask them to take it to the Writing Center yet again. But the papers. Get. Better. And that’s why I do it.
Unlike some instructors, who seem to see higher education as the birthright of the privileged few. And I’m just getting started here: consider this a warm-up of the spleen.
Blogging will be intermittent again over the holidays, but I hope to have the spleen in full effect by Sunday or so.
I’m teaching a really interesting section this term: freshman comp with 15 students, all but one of whom are non-native speakers. The class dynamic is great, which is a huge advantage. One of the things I try to do repeatedly is remind them that they are, in a very real sense, being enculturated into the American university, with all of its attendant expectations and conventions. One of the things that really broils my ham is that the average subject-area instructor sees infelicities of language and grammatical flubs and treats these students as they would your average disinterested trustafarian: lazy, entitled, semi-literate. If you do pay attention to the ideas, these students are frequently not just bright, but experienced and understand the world around them with a degree of nuance many of my native speakers may never develop.
And they get frustrated; they know they’re playing with ideas that they don’t necessarily have the linguistic resources to express with the degree of complexity and critical awareness they want. I’ve enjoyed this class because I’ve been able to take these occurrences and turn them into teaching moments: we throw the ideas out to the floor, bash them around a little bit, and the author goes away not just with a richer understanding of the effect of her ideas on an audience, but also gets a sense of the ways and reasons that making the effort really is worth it. It helps, I think, that among the 15 students in the section, between 9 and 12 (depending on how you count) different language backgrounds are represented. That’s an immense pool of linguistic resources to draw from.
I also work in the tutorial center, and I see the comments written on ESL students’ papers. You can almost hear the sniff of disdain: “Please have a tutor fix your grammar.” Never mind that that attitude makes me want to throttle someone. It, like so many survivors of 19th C. writing-pedagogy-as-moral-hygiene, tells the students that their ideas don’t matter a damn. You’re right–it’s really hard to work with these students sometimes. One things I try to tell writing tutors who don’t have training in TESOL is that non-native speakers write with an accent because they know two languages. Sometimes you’ve gotta wonder where the heck these people get off.
You mean you aren’t in full spleen yet, Mike? 😉
I so hear you both. Teaching at a community college and dividing my work between basic writing and freshman comp, I encounter a lot of ESL students (but it might be more accurate to describe them as ESL or ETL, since some of them are on their third language, or ESD, since Standard Written English is almost a second *dialect* for them). The struggles these students go through are tremendous, and yet their determination never fails. Many of them have bachelor’s degrees in their own countries and are much more intellectually sophisticated than their eighteen year old upper-middle class peers who are at the community college because they did too many drugs in high school. They often write amazing papers, making the kinds of connections you are talking about, Mike, to literature, art, history, politics, but with grammatical and syntactical difficulty. These are the kind of people one like Hana might say “can’t write a sentence.” They are also the students I to whom I say show me improvement–not perfection–on the language errors by the end of the semester and you’ll go on to the next class. I once had a teacher come to me about an African woman I passed from basic writing who had much more sophisticated ideas than most of her classmates but had grammatical issues (which she did make progress on). The other prof read me the riot act about the student’s subjects and verbs not always agreeing. When I explained my reasoning for passing the student–that the student could think, develop, organize, analyze–she didn’t want to hear it. Two years later when I saw that student walk across the stage to receive her degree, I felt vindicated.