Grammar or not to grammar, that’s a question…

Since English is my second language, I remember from the very beginning of my learning process, grammar played a very important role. Grammar is just like the fundamental concrete structure of the English learning “House”, with vocabulary being the bricks and tiles of the walls and roofs of this house.

Teachers taught specific sentence patterns based on grammatical rules, and we then make our own sentences. Once we were required to translate a sentence, the first thing that guided us was the grammar rules. Subject first, then think about the verbs, and then the objects. However, it’s very difficult for us, since it seems that each grammatical rule has exceptions. When it came to this occasions like irregular verbs, teachers would say, “it’s just the way it is, you just need to memorize all those”. Sometimes we were really confused, and then Chinglish was created by ourselves. Mistakes like “--Do you like mango? – Yes, I like.” and “--Haven’t you been to Beijing? –Yes, I haven’t gone there.” are commonplace, not to mention the errors like “I goed to the park yesterday” and “My mother is a teacher, and he is very kind to his students.” (In Chinese, he and she are both pronounced as “TA”, though characters are totally different.).

On the other hand, sometimes, grammar did help us, because for us, English language learners, it is something that we could use to check whether we are using Standard English correctly. It is something that may help us from making horrible mistakes thus embarrassing ourselves.

As for writing, I think grammar benefit us even more. A lot of Chinese students could write beautiful sentences with very little grammatical errors, because our teachers put much emphasis on grammar and the students have very good knowledge of it; and because in writing, students could have more time to think about grammar, and they could see what they are “thinking” and “talking” in their mind, compared with speaking English.

Frankly speaking, for me, if I knew nothing about grammar at the very beginning, and when I was still in China, which means I didn’t have very good language environment, I would have no clue to learn English, possibly I would have to memorize everything, every word that I see and hear. Wouldn’t that be an even more difficult thing?

Assessment

One of the important jobs that a teacher must do is to assess the students’ work, to check whether they’ve really learned and how much they’ve learned. What criteria could we use to assess the students’ writings? What should we see in their writings? As for course designers, what artifacts should we teachers examine to give students a grade?

We’ve already known about the Six Traits to evaluate a writing piece, however, among ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency, word choice and convention, which one should we give the most credits? Should we focus more on the students’ ideas and their thinking processes, or should we be picky on their use of language? Isn’t organization important as well? What about the ESL learners? What kind of accommodations should we make for them while grading their papers?

While we are to give students their final grades at the end of the semester, what percentage of A should we be giving? Won’t people think it’s too easy to get an A if too many students got it? However, will students got discouraged thus lost their interest in writing if they only receive a B, or even a C? Should we emphasize more on the effort that our students have been paid, or on the quality of the papers that they’ve produced? What else should we examine besides one or two finalized papers when we consider grading?

There is also an important issue: while we are doing writing conference, or when the students are doing peer writing response, how can we make sure that we really helped, and motivate our students to be willing to write more, and to share with each other; instead of being scared, and even discouraged from writing and sharing? How can a teacher make sure that each one of the small group is really building a supportive community that foster real learning and scaffolded help?

Authority Vs. Moderator of the Class

Mike’s post reminded me of an important question: while the students try to adjust to the class, we, as teachers, are also trying to adjust to the class each time we enter the classroom. How do we balance the role of being authority and moderator of the class?

Since my childhood, I have been taught that the teachers are the absolute authorities in the classroom, and we need to obey strict disciplines in the class and follow the teachers’ orders and instructions without questioning them.

As we grew up and entered the colleges, the classroom setting has been changed. We, more often than ever, have been given opportunities to play some roles in our own classrooms: doing presentations, role playing, etc. We, as students, sometimes are also enjoying the fun of being a teacher taking over the class. At that time, I would be wondering, what is my teacher doing now? Is he/she also listening to us? Is what we are doing right now something new to him/her? What will he/she respond to our performance? At this moment, our teacher turned to be one of the audiences, communicating with us through eye contact and facial expressions. However, whenever I didn’t have the confidence to report what I was about to present, or say, I didn’t have enough knowledge about certain information; or when I was not very sure about the reliability of other classmates’ presentation, I would be eager to become an obedient student, wishing the teacher would take over the control of the whole class, and give us the detailed demonstration of that knowledge.

But how could a teacher understand our needs and our thoughts in time? I sometimes understand it must be a difficult thing for teachers to notice when they should shift their roles from a moderator/co-learner to becoming the real authority in the class.

Maybe that depends on the teacher’s experience. Maybe teaching is also a process, a learning process…

Teaching patterns

From the classes I observed I found that different teachers have certain teaching patterns. Once the pattern was set up, it seemed the following classes were just following the routine and everyone understood what they were supposed to do, and they will find themselves on the right track very soon.

Both classes I observed are from the Department of LTC. One of the teachers hope the students could comprehend and exchange meanings by reading and sharing poems, therefore the routines are students taking the turn to introduce their favorite poems, then small group of 2-3 students discuss the poems and share their own feelings, then the big class get together and further discuss about it. Through this routine, everyone is very clear about their own roles, either as the discussion leader to bring a poem and prompt discussion, or as the students talking about their understandings about the poem.

The other teacher aim at broadening our understanding of the language we use, and deepening our exploration of the language we heard others use. Her specific teaching patterns are introducing students to read seven books in order, and students discuss about the texts in both small groups and big class, then they are supposed to write 2-3 page paper on each book, and then they are required to share and discuss their papers with small groups arranged by the teacher, and in the end the class come together to talk about their specific experiences or understanding towards certain points in the book.

I haven’t observed any English 1000 class yet, nor had I ever taken any. I am not sure about the contents that teachers are supposed to teach, nor am I aware of the American college students’ writing levels and their needs. I wish I could have more information after I observe one English 1000 class tomorrow.

I am also asking this same questions as Nell has asked already: how could a teacher balance both flexibility and stability of the class? How can we adjust our teaching and syllabus to the needs of both the students and the class without making our students maladjusted and frustrated?

Writing community and the teacher's roles

Teachers have very high social status in China, and also in many other eastern countries. Everyone respects teachers, not only in schools, but also in the society. Many girls wish to be teachers for teaching is a well paid, well respected and a very stable job, plus, this profession may possibly bring them a good husband – men always want to marry a woman with over three months’ vacation each year. And the men, themselves, also enjoy the stableness, good salary and the power in the classroom this job may bring them.

In the classroom, teachers are regarded as the absolute authorities, who are supposed to be the major source of the knowledge. Teachers need to know everything, and are supposed to be able to answer all the students’ questions; otherwise, they are not doing the job and will lose face in front of their students.

According to whole language philosophy and Boice’s article, teachers need to reexamine their roles in the classroom; they need to readjust themselves to be not only facilitators, but also co-learners. Frankly speaking, I was more fascinated by this idea that teachers could, and should learn together with their students than I was relieved to comfort myself that teachers do not need to know everything.

However, at the same time, I realized that we, as writing teachers, seldom write, or say, seldom write together with our students, not to mention we share our writings with them. Why wouldn’t teachers share with students their own writings? On the one hand, teachers should be superior than their students, and reading their own writings out aloud to the whole class might be thought of as showing off in front of a group of lower-leveled learners; on the other hand, probably due to the fear, and the embarrassment, even the teachers wouldn’t have sufficient confidence and courage to share their articles.

After I came to the U.S., I was surprised to find that not only we were often asked to write, and share with our peers, the classroom teachers would now and then share with us their writings, even though it was just an improvised paragraph she finished while we were writing. I was amazed not only by how good the improvised article was, but also by the teacher’s willingness to merge into us students as a writing community. I felt we were connected and our distance was suddenly shortened.

Um…I am thinking of overcoming my own fear and sharing one or two pieces of my own writings with my future students. Hopefully I won’t be too nervous or embarrassed to have my voice trembled…

Writing workshop and peer response

In my memories, I don’t think we had the experience of sharing our writings with our peer learners and receiving feedbacks back in school. Writing is always regarded as an individual thing; no matter it was a weekly journal, a diary, or an academic writing that the teacher assigned.

Yes, back in middle school days, some good articles will be read aloud in front of the whole class by the teacher, but that was just for the appreciation purpose – to allow the whole class enjoy how beautifully the article was written. Gradually it turned out that we admired that writer much more than we appreciated the article. No further comments were invited from the rest of the class, and that article was regarded as the final product – a model article.

Back to my own teaching days, I also assigned writing tasks, on specific topics. But due to the big class (I had 120 college students in one Reading and Writing class), most of the time, my young writers’ reader, and their only reader was me. Occasionally, I would find one or two outstanding “model article”, which conveyed creative thoughts and refreshing air; which also carried a plenty of common mistakes that many other students may make while writing in English. Having got the permission from the writer, I would copy and paste the article to a Word document on a computer to share with the whole class, and also read aloud in front of them. Although the writer’s name had been hidden, and the students were very active in “pointing out” the mistakes, I felt something was not right... Yes, the poor writer’s face was getting redder and redder – he/she was embarrassed to some degree. Although I was still inviting students to appreciate how the paper was structured and how carefully some particular words were chosen, my students’ attention had gradually transferred from “appreciating” to “error correcting”. Will the young writer still be willing to “share” the writing with the rest of the class next time? I doubt.

This Tuesday, we had a writing workshop. We were still using one “sample article”, and the comments from the rest of the class were invited. But this time, our aim was not to “fix the article” or to correct the mistakes; instead, we were to tell the writer what we saw and what we felt about his article. I truly believe that it was a healthy way to encourage the growth of a writer by letting him/her hear the voice directly from the readers, realizing his/her own strengths and weaknesses. It is a community where people trust each other and are honest with each other...

I will definitely adopt writing workshop and peer response in my future classrooms, to build up their confidence in writing, and to help them become a better writer, and, of course, I hope I could be given a smaller classroom.

Imagination

Boice mentioned in his article that what is as same important as motivation to help writing is imagination. While I was reading, I couldn’t help asking these questions: Where does imagination come from? Is it something we were born with, or something that we need to train ourselves to be good at with?

My husband used to say that I was one of the most imaginative people in the world, because I would always have the wildest and weirdest dreams during the night and to tell him when I woke up the next morning. But am I an imaginative writer? If you ask me to answer this question, I’ll never admit it, because just like many of my students, staring at the topics which were irrelevant to my life, and holding the pen in my hand on the blank paper for couple of hours, I still, couldn’t generate anything creative or interesting to write about. I would and could write up an article freely and fluently only when I, myself, had the life experience about the topic. To be precise, this type of articles does not belong to the academic writing category. They are often journal like articles restating what I had gone through, which left me deep impression.

Does imagination have anything to do with artistic ability or handcraft making type thing? If the answer is yes, and imagination does require a lot sense of art, then probably I’ll include myself to the non-imaginative people section, because I am always clumsy doing those kinds of stuff.

Boice’s article also talked about how information collecting may help generate imagination… I kind of doubt it…I’d rather say it is the information that we collect and take in that help with our thinking -- to think about a wider range of matters, which we perhaps pay little attention to, and to think about a particular issue more deeply, more critically. Could that also be termed as Imagination? Is imagination part of our thinking process? Why each time when I look at the word imagination, I could only think of something wild, unreal, and non-existent in this world, which we create only in our mind?