Check out the penultimate fifteen words of this comment thread at Crooked Timber responding to a recent ha-ha-ha-the-MLA-is-silly essay at The Believer, describing “millions of hours of English grammar and composition classes” as “the interlingua of global capitalism itself”.
First off, I don’t know of any colleges and universities that offer straight “grammar” courses, and this signals to me that the commenter has a rather distorted (albeit all too common) view of what first-year composition courses teach. But of course that “interlingua of global capitalism” thing totally grabbed my attention. I might suggest that many rhet/comp scholars would immediately protest, “No, no! That’s not at all what we’re trying to do!” But I wonder how many English Lit scholars — the types perhaps more likely to attend annual MLA conferences — might nod their assent, and think, “Well, yes; nice of those rhet/comp folks to handle the grubby little economic side of things, since we’re all about capital-c Culture.” (Yes, I know that’s unfair of me. I’ve been to MLA, and enjoyed it.) And then I wonder what global scholars outside of English departments and rhet/comp programs might make of the “interlingua” thing.
Thoughts?
A minor quibble: Two out of the three universities I’ve attended offer straight grammar courses. At the University of North Alabama, English majors are required to take a sequence of history of the English language one semester and a senior-level grammar class (the department head at the time is a linguist and dialectologist) the next. I truly loved it; all we did was diagram sentences by writers like Emerson and Thoreau. Remember when I diagrammed that big Judith Butler sentence? That class served me well. 🙂 Actually, it really did; when I tutored at Tennessee, the non-native speakers who came to the Writing Center found my explanations of grammar accompanied by the visual diagrams very helpful.
The University of Minnesota’s rhetoric department offers a Principles of Grammar course from time to time too, I imagine to supplement the Technical Editing class (most technical editing classes I know of are basically grammar courses too, BTW). Principles of Grammar isn’t required for majors, though.
Not that this weakens your point, of course. Certainly many people think all we do in FYC classes is teach people where the commas go, etc. That reminds me!–when I was home, I saw a Church of Christ sign that said, “Death is not a period but a comma in the story of life!” Niiiiice.
I like the sign, Clancy.
Like so many empirical questions in our field, no one really knows the answer to where and how grammar is taught in American colleges and universities.
The comment Mike cited in the comment thread reflects a powerful bias among us. We are perfectly content to generalize from the combination of our personal experience and the reading we have done.
Most of us use the term “grammar” without a sense of how contested it is, so it may refer to usage or style or syntax or inflectional features or “rules” –another contested term.
Most of the material used in handbooks that support FYC deals with matters of usage and style. Real language study mostly happens in linguistics and ESL courses. But how much of what kind of “grammar” occurs in FYC in particular and English in general is unknown. And it’s not likely any one will do a study to find out.
We have a grammar course here at the community college–it’s an elective, not a requirement. I would be interested in finding out how many colleges/community colleges/universities have undergraduate grammar courses (non -ESL), how “grammar” is defined and taught in these courses, and whether or not the courses are mandatory. And then I’d like to get into the why’s and how’s and how come’s and the myriad implications that these answers bring.
I majored in English, minored in Rhet/Writing. My undergrad institution, like English program at my current U, offers a grammar class but its alternative is the History of the English Language which most people seem to opt for unless they are also education majors.
There’s a difference between a course in grammar, one usually offered to majors and/or juniors and seniors, and the use of the term “grammar” to generically speak about the work that people in writing classes (and really, in English departments in general) do, particularly in lower-level classes. Every time I’m in some situation where I have to talk with a stranger (an airplane, for example), I of course end up being asked “what do you do?” “I’m an English professor,” I say. And inevitably, this stranger says something like “oh-oh, I better watch my grammar.”
Anyway, I suspect that’s what is meant by “grammar” in this discussion– not real grammar issues, but the sort of “grammar police” sort of thing. Of course, I haven’t read the article yet…
Thanks, Steve; that was the point I was going to make. The grammar courses Clancy and Michelle mention seem to be upper-level and primarily for majors, and not a part of the “millions of hours” of courses taught to serve “global capitalism” — which I really take to be FYC. I could have taken a graduate-level Latin grammar course to fulfill my advanced language requirement, but that course was focused around the teaching of Latin grammar — and I decided that a Cicero seminar would be a lot more fun. So, too, a grammar course offered in my department was focused around the teaching of English grammar, aimed at future educators.
But see, the grammar point was to me a minor one. What I found far more interesting was the “interlingua of global capitalism” thing, and how that perspective plays out among different people: John and Joanna, teaching literature and writing at community colleges, are you helping students learn the interlingua of global capitalism? Is that any different from what I’m doing at Big State U, or any different from what Clancy’s doing in the professional and technical writing courses she teaches? What would people outside of our disciplines say?
I blogged about this one a while ago…
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2679
Yeah, I recognized that you intended the grammar classes observation to be a minor point. I didn’t mean to derail the discussion. 🙂 In my experience teaching technical communication and reading tech comm textbooks, I’d have to say that yes, the textbooks do tend to be focused on the product (not the writing product) that you’re trying to sell or instruct people how to use or assemble. Technical communication is writing that gets things done. The prose should be transparent and unobtrusive, our required textbook says.
I did try to initiate a discussion of the Gap, Inc. Social Responsibility Report to analyze the way the disunification of production, outsourcing of labor, and the notion of social responsibility are approached from Gap, Inc.’s point of view (and also to show them an example of the kind of problem-centered, persuasive research reports they’d be doing), but the students weren’t that into it. I didn’t want to be all heavy-handed Crit-Ped and in-their-faces with my opinions, so I didn’t force the issue.
I’m not sure I understood from your entry and the reference to the penultimate sentence, what exactly you were looking for. I only commented because the direction the comments took seemed to be interested in the experience of grammar courses in English versus Rhetoric departments so I thought I’d give my take on it.
Of course, I understand what Krause is intimating and that’s fairly obvious to even undergraduates majoring in English: the common perception is that it pertains to diagraming sentences and monitoring fragmented sentences. They don’t even think about literature.
I thought that your question was do people think that rhet people are responsible for it, and blow off the lit people.
And btw, I don’t even know what FYC means.
Hey, Michelle, sorry to do the exclusionary abbreviation thing. It stands for first-year composition.
Thanks, Clancy. It seemed rather obvious later but you know how the lingo doesn’t really hit you if you’re not entrenched with it.
Actually, Michelle, I think I was being kinda defensive: my question about attitudes towards the “interlingua of global capitalism” came out of my perception of the opinions within English departments that the litterateurs are the ones doing the good and noble work of Interpretation, and that the rhetoric and composition folks are doing the grunt work of producing a mass literacy that can serve the interests of Capital. Which makes your observation that English departments are supposedly all about surface-level correctness even more interesting, and carries me back to the whole perspective thing: where do these different perceptions come from; who constructs and perpetuates them? Who are the people who see the purpose of English as the production, or consumption, or correction of texts? And who are the folks who are perceived to be doing that production/consumption/correction? As I’ve noted before, I find the work of Robert Scholes particularly helpful in thinking about this, and I’d love to hear of other perspectives.
Yeah, the Scholes insight to production/consumption of texts is very helpful. A Marxist scholar at U of Washington, Evan Watkins, did a book titled “Work/Time” in which he examined the circulation of work generated by an English department with a writing program. The jargon of the book drove me batty, but he did have a useful insight into the production concept: how much student worktime are compositionists responsible for?
As for the global interlingua thing at CCs, we solicit International students at De Anza because they pay full tuition, producing positive cash flow on top of state funding. So we have about 1500 students, most of them from various Asian countries, who come to be fluent in English, including writing, and to build a record that will get them into a university.
This can create “class” issues that do not fit our institutional assumptions. In the spring, one of my Singaporese students blogged about a column on “maid abuse” from the Singapore Times. Most of my students have never had maids, and so would not know the issues of maid abuse. But through that blog, I learned there are about 800,000 foreign workers in Signapore, lots of them Malaysian, who function a lot like Mexican illegals do here in the American southwest. By the way, that student was 17 years old and his father bought him an Audi A4, brand new, before he’d gotten his driver’s license. Our class assumptions don’t allow a student like that to be here–he’s supposed to be at Stanford.
I’m not answering any questions here, Mike, just complicating the one you raised. I don’t think we have a conceptual framework in American higher ed or in comp yet that allows us to analyze these kinds of intercultural complexities. So go write it. : )
Well, what are you and Clancy doing at your respective universities? ; )
I think that John and I may be kindred spirits in our teaching methods, but we teach across the country from each other at different community colleges, and I wonder how much local demographic variation plays into the discussion.
In answer to the question of teaching lit and comp at a cc, freshman comp is one of our bread-and-butter offerings, and there really isn’t any room for anyone to loftily think of teaching only lit classes. Teaching writing is exciting and important here, not some onerous chore one might undertake en route to tenure and the “important” lit classes,or might have to undertake as a grad assistant or adjunct faculty member. So there isn’t a separation of labor in quite the way that there might be at a university.
My guess is that I am contributing to the production/evaluation of text like a good little prol. But a Marxist or economic perspective reduces what we do to a grind, and I simply don’t see language, interlingua-ly or not, as easy to pigeon hole as that line of thought wants to do. Nor do I teach in an environment where that kind of stratification (lit vs. comp) exists anymore. I teach lit and comp, and reading and basic writing, and grammar and English to speakers of other languages, and summer bridge writing -for- the -web programs, and creative writing to people in our continuing ed. department, and essay writing for high school seniors and workshops for high school teachers. Even though lit and comp and production/consumption wend their way through these activities, they aren’t the only means of definition.
And I’m rambling. But I second what John said about there needing to be conceptual framework out there for these ideas. And the framework needs to consider cc as well as university and other higher ed venues of teaching.