Showing papers in "English Journal in 1990"

Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions.

Abstract: Sound familiar? This student response to a peer's draft is all too typical of the way untrained secondary students give feedback on each other's drafts during response groups. In a national survey of 560 otherwise successful secondary teachers of writing and 715 of their students, Sarah W. Freedman (1985, The Role of Response in Acquisition of Written Language, Berkeley: California UP) found that many teachers grieved over the use of peerresponse groups because they had difficulty getting students to respond effectively to one another's writing. Vague comments such as the one at the beginning of this piece proliferate. The students, too, complained about the writing responses, saying that their peers rarely offered substantial help with their writing. The result is that such vague comments rarely translate into effective revision, and this is unfortunate because when students receive concrete suggestions for revision, they do revise with the suggestions in mind (Nina D. Ziv, 1983, "Peer Groups in the Composition Classroom: A Case Study," Conference on College Composition and Communication, Detroit, March 17-19). For one year we studied this problem: How can we teach middle-school students to give focused and specific response to their peers during collaborative writing response groups?

Adapting the Portfolio to Meet Student Needs.

Abstract: When I first introduce the portfolio to writing classes, I spend a number of mini-lessons explaining how to use the portfolio and exactly what is included in these folders. Because it is a collection of their writing, including drafts, revisions, prewriting material, and final papers, I discuss with the students the importance of keeping everything they write and the importance of including a date on the papers they work on so that the students and I can keep track of what they write and when. For younger students, I hand out folders that they can keep in a file cabinet in the classroom. A rule that an entire portfolio should never leave the room (only single papers) insures that students do not lose their work. Older students purchase a folder with pockets. I provide space in the classroom where they can keep them if they choose, but they have the responsibility for keeping track of their own portfolios. Usually, when students realize how much of their grade depends on the portfolio, they guard it well.

On the Growing Shortage of Black and Hispanic Teachers.

Abstract: I am the citizen of a state in which last year's firstgrade class was 50 percent Hispanic and in which roughly 31 percent of students enrolled in public schools in 1986-87-the latest year for which statewide figures are available-were Hispanic and 15 percent were Black. In that same year, the percentage of Hispanic teachers in the state's public schools was approximately 13 percent, while that for Black teachers was 9.5 percent. I live in a city in which Hispanic students represented 33 percent and Black students 20 percent of public-school enrollment in 1988-89. But in that school year only 17 percent of the teachers were Hispanic and only 12 percent were Black. I teach on a state university campus which enrolls nearly 50,000 students; of that number, about 10 percent are Hispanic and 3.6 percent Black. In the fall of 1987, of those enrolled in programs of secondary education within the state's colleges and universities, only 8 percent were Hispanic and 5 percent were Black. The ratios-not unique to Texas, nor to Austin, nor to the University of Texas at Austin-trouble me deeply. For as the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in American public education continues to rise, the percentage of available Black and Hispanic teachers continues to decline. Signs of a growing shortage-what many view as a mounting crisis-are manifold. (For examples of these signs, refer to the data in shadowed boxes scattered throughout this article.) Furthermore, the full effects of mandated statewide testing of prospective teachers are difficult to assess, since tests and reporting procedures differ from state to state. Nevertheless, it is clear that "a disproportionately high number of Black, Hispanic, and Asian candidates are being screened from the teaching profession" (American Council on Education 1987, 13). Critics of the paper-and-pencil tests used in most state programs maintain that because these instruments fail to measure such abilities as those needed to

Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard?.

Abstract: When I was in the ninth grade, Mrs. Delaney, my English teacher, wanted to demonstrate the correct and incorrect ways to pronounce the English language. She asked Helen Draper, whose father owned several clothing stores in town, to stand and say "lawyer." Then she asked me, whose father owned a bar, to stand and say "lawyer." Everyone burst into laughter at my pronunciation. What did Mrs. Delaney accomplish? Did she make me pronounce lawyer correctly? No. I say attorney. I never say lawyer. In fact, I've found substitutes for every word my tongue can't get around and for all the rules I can't remember.

Using an Electronic Network to Play the Scales of Discourse.

Abstract: In a typical secondary-school writing course, students rarely write to someone who will be interested enough to write back. Because of the constraints of the classroom, it is difficult to create opportunities for students to write to an interested reader who will become an active correspondent. A teacher who believes in establishing a writing context for real communication has limited options. (1) The teacher may have students write to one another within a class. Small peer groups and writing workshops fulfill the need to share work with interested readers. (2) The teacher may become the outside reader by separating response from evaluation. By commenting without grading, teachers encourage students to write more to explore or to communicate rather than to be tested or judged. (3) The teacher has the option to create "cases" or hypothetical rhetorical situations for students to imagine a reason to write to a particular audience. Cases create realistic constraints, but they don't involve a response. Furthermore, the reader, disguised as a hypothetical employer or classmate, is still the teacher. (4) Another possibility is to use issues that compel students to write outside of the course to an administrator, legislator, editor of a newspaper, author, or businessperson. All of these options help to teach writing within a context that reaches beyond the ordinary classroom where writing is done primarily to be evaluated. All of these encourage students to imagine readers beyond themselves. None, however, provides opportunities for an ongoing exchange with a reader who does not share the same everyday events. This happens naturally in letter writing to people we know and care about. But how can a teacher construct that kind of communication in school? Better than that, how does one construct an ongoing exchange with readers and writers from different backgrounds? When students correspond with others from different places and with different lifestyles, they learn firsthand about what they know-how they are expert in things they take for granted, what they can learn from someone else. They are challenged to inspect their own assumptions and elaborate in a way that simply is not necessary when one writes to a teacher or peer in the same class. In her moving speech at the NCTE convention in 1986, Judith Langer advocated literacy projects in which students learn to think by participating in meaningful group activity. Her "sociocognitive" view of literacy learning

Grammar in Context: Why and How.

Abstract: If we were to summarize the state of grammar in most American schools today in one sentence, it would be this: Grammar is very often taught but very seldom learned. This fact seems odd since grammar, unlike many other aspects of the middle-school curriculum, receives continuous support from teachers, parents, and administrators. Yet, despite efforts made on various fronts, the grammar of their own language remains a mystery to most students. Rather than making them more comfortable with their mother tongue, a few lessons in the difference between lie and lay or restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses seem to produce a greater uncertainty bordering on panic. Many people, even some very well-educated people, simply learn ways to avoid rules they never really understood or learn to make excuses for their mistakes by apologizing lamely, "I never was any good at diagramming sentences." Although students do not appear to be learning grammar the way it is presently taught, most grammar curricula do not reflect new ways of teaching but simply rely on the same old techniques despite their ineffectiveness. In many schools, the same grammar objectives-"students will be able to identify verbs in sentences," for example-show up for several different grades, sometimes even being listed as an objective for grades as different as second and ninth. That fact alone should indicate to us that something is seriously wrong. Why should it be necessary to repeat the same instruction year after year? Why should students be taught, over and over again, the same definition for parts of speech, with only the examples changing? A calculus class does not spend the first week identifying numbers and reviewing addition and subtraction, and yet after many years of study and even more years of use, students at all grade levels are given grammar lessons that start at square one over and over again. The reasons for this state of affairs are many, but there is one that seems particularly important to us: Traditional grammar instruction is bound to fail because it is given without any realistic context. In Ed Vavra's words, "Students are never asked to do anything with [grammatical knowledge]" (1987, 42). People who feel comfortable and confident with the grammar of our language developed that confidence by becoming "natural language users" of standard English (Smith et al. 1982, 35). They spoke it and heard it spoken, they read it, and they wrote it. Grammar lessons showed them the patterns for what they already knew and in that sense were irrelevant. Now, however, we want the grammar lessons to do what life used to accomplish, and the old drills will not work. The classroom must now become the place where students become natural language users and learn grammar as part of the life of reading, writing, and speaking. Yet when language is taught in the middle grades, context is often ignored. Students are made to learn definitions--of parts of speech, kinds of sentences-and then are given worksheets on which each sentence contains an exam-

For Teachers of the Alienated: Three Defenses against Despair.

Abstract: We know who they are, and we know what they do to us, the alienated ones, those students so far removed from our values, our beliefs, our whole way of life. The despair of the teacher whose letter to the editor appears in the October 1989 issue of the English Journal (94) is so real we can touch it even as we are touched by it. The letter speaks, at its very beginning, of the feeling, shared by many teachers, of "utter and total helplessness." No feeling could be worse when it comes from our chosen work and is caused by the very people we have chosen to work with. At the same time, we know there are some teachers who succeed, against all odds, with these very students. This hurts even more because it suggests that only a few gifted teachers, ourselves not included, can do this work. Is this really so? Or are there certain things we can all do? Here are three suggestions, three tasks to carry out. Doing each one successfully enables us to say to ourselves, and anyone else, that we have done all we can do as classroom teachers. Saying that is what keeps despair at bay. What are the three tasks? Simply put, they are these:

Expanding the Circle: Hispanic Voices in American Literature.

Abstract: of the program-our remarkable collection of literature." Yet only twelve of the 1,399 pages in the text (less than 1%) are devoted to works by writers with Hispanic surnames (the nature writer Barry Holstun Lopez and the Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa), and not a single page is devoted to literature about Hispanic experience in the United States. The contents of American-literature anthologies offered by Scribner's, Scott Foresman, and other well-known publishers include little more. Literature anthologies are repositories of what is considered essential and "classic" in our liter-

Literature, Geography, and the Untracked English Class.

Abstract: Last summer just after my husband and I returned from a five-week vacation, I ran into John, one of my former students. "Your son told me you went to India," he said. "Is that in Africa?" Later, as I was telling my husband about my student's question and lamenting the gaps I see in the education of many students, it occurred to me that John's question had offered a solution to a problem I had been puzzling over all summer: how to approach my next year's ninth-grade English class. A month before school ended in June, the principal and vice-principal had agreed to change the way students are programmed into ninthand tenth-grade English classes. Instead of four ability tracks ("low" for stanines 2 and 3, "average" for 4 and 5, "high" for 6 and 7, and "honors" for 8 and 9), we would have two tracks-"honors" for certified gifted and high-achieving students (mostly stanines 8 and 9) and a large, mixed-ability group for students in stanines 2 through 7. The decision to change from four tracks to two came from our administrator's own pedagogical aversion to ability grouping as well as from a four-year campaign waged by a group of El Cerrito High School English teachers. Those teachers, collaborators on a research project with Rhona Weinstein of the University of California at Berkeley, had read a great deal of research on school change and at-risk students, had examined that research in their own classrooms, and had formed an ongoing collaborative teaching project-"PACT" for Promoting Achievement through Cooperative Teachingthat advocated an end to ability grouping at El Cerrito High. As one of the original members of PACT, I was overjoyed at our administrator's bold stand and support of us. I was also a bit cowed: What if the techniques we had incorporated into our classes didn't work with a band that included six stanine levels and not the two to four levels we

Where Does the Teacher Intervene with Underachieving Writers

Abstract: It seemed to me that the whole class was falling down around me. It was the first Friday in October, the day for issuing interims (our county's name for midterm warnings to students earning D's and F's). In my class of twenty-one eleventhgrade underachieving English students, eleven were receiving interims. When the students came in, there was a cloud of anxiety hanging over all of us. Sam hovered over my opened records. In a frantic voice, he said, "How could I be getting an F? I did all that extra credit."

Challenging Students to Think: Shaping Questions, Building Community.

Abstract: Andy Warhol supposedly once said to an interviewer, "Tell me clearly what answers you require, and I shall repeat them after you." Until four years ago, my students could have said the same thing about my teaching of literature. I was locking students out of any genuine inquiry, for my questions indirectly sought confirmation of the "correctness" of my own interpretations. I rewarded passivity by teaching that answers were readymade and one-sided, requiring only an ear, good notation skills, and the ability to memorize. I taught students what to think, and worse, I taught them that knowledge could be isolated into disposable chunks and bits. I did not give my students the responsibility for making sense of our readings and writings by studying a problem in depth, seeing a subject's complexities, and examining the various ways others thought about an issue. Even if I had given them this responsibility, I had not taught students how to be responsible. I had also not created an environment in which thinking could occur.

Responding to Writers: What I Value.

Abstract: Every year when I face a new group of student writers, I have some certainties about what works in responding to the papers that constantly come in during the semester. By the end of the term, I find myself sick of writing responses and determined to change my tactics for the next group of writers. This cycle repeats itself year after year, probably as part of my attempt to alleviate burnout. But since change for its own sake is not necessarily sound, I have begun to look at what aspects of response in my writing classroom have survived the whirlwind of change. I have learned through this process what I really value in student writing.

Gender Communication through Small Groups

Abstract: Okay, I admit it. I did not burn my bra as a sign of my feminist affiliations in the mid-60s. (Frankly, I wasn't old enough to wear a bra, let alone burn it.) And I haven't marched in any women's rights rallies, not recently, not ever. (I'm just not overt in that manner.) And I confess, I raised two daughters and dressed them in pink so innocent observers would exclaim, "What darling little girls!" So what gives me the right or privilege to attest suddenly to feminist claims? Not much in past history except that I am an English teacher ... and that says it all. In these past fifteen years, the gender communication issue has grown and flourished as we try to understand more fully, accept, and improve the relationships of males and females in American society. Sandra Bem (1974), Judy Cornelia Pearson (1985), Barbara Eakins and R. Gene Eakins (1978), Nancy M. Henley (1975), Alleen Pace Nilsen (1977), and others have done considerable research into gender and its relation to verbal and nonverbal communication, perception, attitude, and culture.

Feeling Good about Student Writing: Validation in Peer Evaluation.

Abstract: Many veteran English teachers have by now adopted a process approach to the teaching of writing; however, we often continue to draw the line at involving students in peer evaluation for a number of reasons, fear of loss of "control" not the least among them. Teacher reluctance to allow for extensive peer evaluation is an obstacle in conforming to the process model. Positive phrasing of criticism has also gotten short shrift, often when teachers feel their instruction must respond to administrative demands for traditional accountabili-

Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Teaching of Values.

Abstract: What possible use could there be in teaching science fiction or fantasy in the classroom? After all, aren't we supposed to be introducing our students to "serious literature"? Isn't fantastic fiction of any sort unrealistic and misleading to the fertile minds of teenagers? My state and district are now mandating that we teach values in the schools; how can there be any time for frivolous literature such as fantastic fiction?