Response to Min-Zhan Lu's "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle"

     Min-Zhan Lu’s treatment of language in “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” is interesting in that she describes a process during which acquiring language leads to a deepening silence. Lu depends heavily on code-switching to communicate alternately in her bourgeois home and in a school run by the state, Communist China; the language of each place prohibited in the other.  It’s interesting that as Lu folded association and meaning into her words she became less and less sure about the proper way to use them.  In addition, to her dismay, she discovers that she is conflating two incongruent ideologies in a way that makes communication even more difficult.

     Lu describes the process of reading and writing as progressively more conflicted, “My parents and home readings were the voices of an opposing group…these voices struggled to dominate the discussion , constantly incorporating, dismissing, or suppressing the arguments of each other…” (444) Lu internalizes this conflict and is drawn toward tendencies to suppress her ideas because she’s unable to craft a message she’s confident about for her dissimilar audiences.

     In a way, I think many students experience a similar experience.  Of course, the stakes aren’t quite as high -- in communist China there could be serious repercussions for espousing unpopular ideas – here, the students just lose the opportunity to complete post-secondary education (which is serious enough, I think.) Many students struggle to produce work in Standard American English—required by institutions—which is so different from their heritage languages. In addition, there is censure for being unwilling or unable to produce the required language in a form prescribed by institutions. This instills a sense that writing is a barrier rather than a means of communication and an extremely effective method of self-advocacy.  I think that basic writing teachers need to change the notion that writing is what holds students back and illustrate the ways in which it can advance education and communication.

     In all, I believe that basic writing and freshman composition teachers initially need to accept whatever language is used and work toward increasing output through positive response.  Students need low stakes opportunities to practice writing as expression rather than seeing it always as a chore. Min-Zhan Lu regained her voice after a struggle and our students need to do the same.  

Response to "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing" by Frances Zak

         I was so pleased to read this article because it provided some much needed information about what I have believed for many years: that it's not necessary to correct "errors" in student writing. I've long believed that students that positive reinforcement and response is all that's necessary to facilitate an improvement in student writing.  Or rather, students should learn to correct their own writing through an ongoing process of revision. I feel that the best way to get students to improve their own writing, at least initially, is to get them to increase their output and to reflect critically on their own work.  Critical reflection will drive them into attempts to clarify and refine the content of their work which can lead to fewer mechanical errors in and of itself.

     I also think that positive feedback confers upon the students a much needed boost in confidence and the feeling that the stories they have to tell are meaningful and worthy of being told and heard.  If someone believes that their story isn’t worth telling, how hard are they going to work to tell it properly? If we can, we should instill in students who have been underserved the idea that underserved doesn’t equal unimportant and that if no one listened before, we’re ready to listen now.

     Frances Zak notes in her article that students that receive traditional responses to their writing improve as much as do students who receive purely positive feedback.  The difference seems to be that students who don’t have their mechanical errors corrected have improved without the intervention of the instructor.  We can infer from this information that through the process of clarifying meaning, students will be able to reduce mechanical errors on their own.  It can be really difficult to look at a paper full of errors and not correct them; however, what’s important about the writing is the story not the punctuation.  A well written story is organized, has a sense of chronology, uses a variety of descriptive language and rhetorical techniques and uses dialogue among many other things.  Our focus should be on these high order concerns and not on commas.

A Report on My Observation of ENGL21002: Writing for Social Sciences

     I arrived at the classroom, NAC 6/122, to observe ENGL 21022: Writing for Social Sciences at 6:15pm on Monday September 29, 2014. The room was small with individual desks that were curving in rough semi-circles around the instructor’s desk, facing the chalkboard.  There was a movie screen pulled down on the right side of the room but no other technology was apparent. There was likely mobile technology that could be provided at the instructor’s request.  There weren’t any windows and the room was a bit stuffy. The instructor, Jennifer Horne, hadn’t yet arrived; there were six students in the room when I entered.  The students were all relatively young; the age range seemed to be early twenties to early thirties.  There were five female students and one male.  The women were a racially mixed group; they wore modern, casual clothing; one of the women was wearing a hijab but otherwise wore modern clothing. Over the next 10 minutes, students continued to arrive. The early group was a fair representation of the whole class.  There were many more women than men in the class; the majority of the students were African-American or Latino.  The students were well dressed in a casual modern way. Prior to the scheduled meeting time, the students discussed information relevant to the class.  Some comments I heard were associated with past and future group work sessions; the students were clearly used to working communally, there was a friendly feeling in the room and people were sharing information unreservedly.

     My attendance in the class serves a double purpose.  First, I am here to fulfill a requirement for my class, ENGL C0862: The Teaching of Composition and Literature. The second and, perhaps, more important reason that I’ve come to observe this class is because, in my opinion, there’s no better way to improve your teaching skills than watching another teacher work. This fact remains true as long as you’re working; learning is as important part of teaching as anything else.  I think it’s important for teachers to keep open minds, try new techniques and be willing to admit that they don’t know everything, which is difficult for teachers. If you consider yourself always a learner as well as a teacher, you’ll better serve the other learners around you. 

            The professor, J. Horne, entered the room at 6:30pm and started the class immediately by requesting the students turn to page 68 in their text -- FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research, 4th Edition by Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater – and asked for a volunteer to read a paragraph from the text.  After the student read the paragraph, J.H. focused the discussion by asking directed questions such as: How old is the writer? What was her first entry? Is this believable? What is this writer’s purpose? The students were very responsive and appeared, as a whole, prepared for the class. The instructor had a friendly manner; she was dressed professionally in a wine-colored blouse and black pants.  She spoke confidently, made eye contact with students and really listened to the answers the students gave.  She responded positively to some comments, asked questions if a point needed clarification and gave positive feedback if a student was creative like when a students used a word he’d formed, notebookist, to describe a person that keeps a fieldwork notebook.

    The class continued in this vein. There were several more short readings which different students took turns reading aloud, after which the professor elicited responses from the students. The professor continued to expand the theme with questions like what is the writer’s purpose? What is the writer trying to communicate with their descriptions? And, she expanded on the theme by asking about the editor’s intent.  In other words, why would the authors of the text include these particular selections in the text? The students continued to respond in a focused way and appeared familiar with the subject matter. The professor was respectful of the students’ ideas and used positive language to acknowledge their comments.  For example, after one student’s comment, she said, “I really like that idea….” and then asked a different student to respond to the first.  In this way, she really kept the students’ attention focused both on what she was saying and on what their peers were saying.

    At approximately 6:45pm, 15 minutes after the scheduled start of the class, two students entered the classroom.  The room was small and relatively crowded, and the door squeaked so the late entrance was quite noticeable.  Despite the interruption, the professor did not comment on the students’ lateness.  However, approximately three minutes later, the instructor directed a question at one of the two women who had arrived late.  When the student wasn’t prepared to answer -- she hadn’t yet taken out the appropriate material for the class or found the paragraph the class was discussing -- there were a few seconds of silence as the student attempted to orient herself before J.H asked another student to “help her out.”  The episode was very quick, only about 15 seconds, but the message was very clear.  The professor, without any explicit statement, communicated that she’d noticed the interruption and expected that students be on time and prepared for the class session.

     After about three paragraphs, read aloud and followed by short periods of directed questions and answers, the class moved into a fourth reading.  The fourth reading was a bit different from the prior three.  It was much more clinical than the initial readings.  The paragraph described the interaction between a professor and a student of natural history.  The professor directed the student to look at a specimen -- a fish, gave the student explicit instructions on how to care for the specimen and then, before he left, told the student he would ask later what the student had seen.  The piece describes time passing and the student following a repetitious system of steps to care for the specimen.  After the reading, the professor once again led a short focused discussion. This time, the professor’s questions focused more on the mechanics and linguistic choices the author had chosen for the piece. She asked the students if they could remember a term they’d previously discussed that would fit the piece; one student came up with the correct answer: process.  

     J.H. affirmed the answer and focused the discussion around the theme.  She used the board to note important information such as where process could be identified and how students could parallel the author’s technique in their own fieldwork notebooks. She mentioned double note taking, which the students had practiced, and asked their opinions of the technique.  In addition, she pointed out the authors use action verbs to make the description more effective.  She did a quick activity during which she mentioned an action verb – moisten – and asked students to call out whatever words came to mind.  The responses were varied but included repetitive, wet, water, cooking, soil, first-aid and sweaty socks.  

     The instructor pointed out and noted on the blackboard, how action verbs could be used to expand or condense time by either noting all the steps for an audience that wasn’t familiar with the content or summarizing/eliminating steps for an audience that was familiar with the content. The discussion turned to how this information could be useful to the students in keeping their own notebooks.  JH reminded them to keep in mind both their respective purposes and audiences when taking field notes. The class also discussed the importance of specificity with regard to dates, times, numbers, places, insider language, dialogue and details when documenting real people and events.  

    The learning objective of the lesson was to introduce and/or review the types of information, language and note-taking techniques the students would use to maintain authenticity and credibility in their notebooks while doing their semester long survey of a subculture of their own choosing.  The class wrapped up with a directed 10 minute free-write focusing on one feature of the students’ field sites.

The class I observed was teacher-centered but there was a lot of evidence that that was not the usual case.  The professor spoke frequently; she directed the flow of conversation extremely well; she questioned students, affirmed opinions and focused student comments with follow-up questions.  She had a friendly manner, was respectful of the students’ opinions and was exceptionally good at keeping the students’ focused on each other’s comments as well as her own.  There were several times that she called on students who weren’t prepared to answer -- in my opinion -- either because she’d noticed that they weren’t paying attention or because they’d arrived to class late.  A couple of these students were unable to answer the questions. If they weren’t able to answer, the professor waited a few beats before asking a different student to “help them out” by answering the question.  This technique seemed to me exceptionally effective on a number of levels.  It allowed the professor to communicate displeasure about certain lapses without explicitly administering a correction or openly displaying a disapproving manner.  It also alerted the students as a whole about the unwanted behaviors and kept people paying attention to the discussion.  The message seemed to be received by the students who were initially unable to answer questions because they all volunteered to answer questions very shortly thereafter.  This technique seemed to perform double duty, equally effective as a classroom management tool and as means of prompting the students’ attention and participation.

     The class was fast-paced and transitions between topics were very smooth.  The instructor had 
a plan and had different questions for each section of reading.  The questions that followed a reading also elicited information that the students would be encountering in and discussing after the next reading.  For example, the instructor led a mini-discussion on the students’ impressions of the importance of note taking prior to the reading about the fish, a selection wherein it becomes apparent how important note taking is.   

     They covered a lot of ground, moving from one short reading to the next; the professor drew attention to different features of the passages, asked questions and circled in on what ultimately seemed to be the learning objective -- the techniques and information best suited for fieldwork and documenting that information.  She gave examples of all relevant features and continually checked back with the students for comprehension of the material.

    What struck me most about the professor’s method was her use of positive reinforcement with her students.  Her disapproval was, as stated before, implied; however, her approval was explicitly stated.  I liked the way the instructor used silence then focused attention to communicate her disapproval without stating either the reasons for the disapproval or who had perpetrated the unwanted behavior—even though both of these answers were very clear to everyone. Direct confrontations can make the classroom an uncomfortable space; I think they should be avoided whenever possible. She complimented ideas that were creative or well stated; she drew other students’ attention to those students who’d had good ideas, she asked students to comment on other student comments and asked whether they agreed or had a different opinion.  In all, I think that this professor simultaneously set the bar high for the students (they covered a lot of ground in one session and had significant after class work) and let them know that she appreciated the effort they put in to the learning process.  

    Finally, although this particular class session was teacher-centered with desks arranged so the students faced the front of the room, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this class did a lot of group and/or pair work, work shopping of ideas and other student-centered activities.  When I first entered the classroom, the students were discussing group work and checking with each other about what was necessary for a future group work session.  The students also spoke with each other in a comfortable way as if accustomed to sharing information with each other.

    Observing this class session was extremely informative. There were many ideas and techniques that I’d like to try to enact or adapt for future sessions of my own classes.  The most impressive feature, in my opinion, was the focused nature and pace of the lesson.  There was a really fluid feeling to the whole class and an accumulation of pertinent information as the lesson progressed.  There was never a moment when the lesson veered away from the learning objective and the pace of the lesson made the time fly. The lesson proceeded seamlessly; each activity related to the both the activity that preceded it and the one that followed.  New concepts that the students were going to encounter were introduced inductively prior to the event, and then discussed in greater detail following the event.  It was an excellent example of how effective teaching can be when time is spent planning and activities vary throughout the session.

    

Writing Proposal: A Valuable Possession