Comments on: Xenophobe Hana http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2003/11/25/xenophobe-hana/ faults | sins | abuses Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:35:18 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: Chris http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2003/11/25/xenophobe-hana/#comment-356 Chris Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2003/11/25/xenophobe-hana/#comment-356 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. 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.

]]> By: cindy http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2003/11/25/xenophobe-hana/#comment-357 cindy Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2003/11/25/xenophobe-hana/#comment-357 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. 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.

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