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If We Do Meet Again the World Will Have No Doubt Taught You the Error of Your Ways

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What this handout is near

When yous inquire students writing in English as an additional linguistic communication what they would like to piece of work on, they will frequently say that they'd like yous to check their grammar. "Checking the grammar" can feel uncomfortably close to proofreading and editing students' papers for them—which writing coaches know is strictly out of bounds. Unfortunately, multilingual writers take been unfairly denied access to language feedback because of the very stiff prohibition against editing, merely the good news is that we tin can still be very helpful without compromising our principles.

This folio provides a scrap of important historical context for the discussion and offers strategies for responding to the grammar-checking request in ways that respect the pedagogical philosophies of the writing centre and the instructional needs of students writing in a foreign language. The list of strategies is followed past excerpts of coaching sessions, with annotations that illustrate how some of the strategies piece of work in real conversations between writing coaches and multilingual writers.

1984: The triple whammy for multilingual writers

In 1984, several of the nigh influential texts in writing eye history were published. You volition probably recognize the starting time two because the vocabulary and the philosophy are withal driving forces in today's writing centers:

  1. Reigstad & McAndrew: Division of the writing process into "college order" and "lower society" concerns, establishing a value-laden sequence of content and organization before grammar and punctuation.
  2. N: Staunch declaration that writing centers were not centers for mechanical remediation and error correction. "In a writing middle, the object is to brand certain that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by pedagogy…our job is to produce better writers, not better writing" (p. 69).
  3. Friedlander: Exclamation that writing centers run across the needs of foreign students by focusing on mechanical remediation and error correction. The content of students' essays should be discussed merely as much as necessary for accurate fault correction.

The writing process was divided, the writing center's territory was firmly staked, and the perceived needs of multilingual writers were placed squarely outside the parameters of the writing center'south mission, pedagogical philosophy, and standard procedure. No wonder we've struggled and then much!

In fairness to the scholars above, they meant to emphasize that writers should concentrate on developing their ideas before they worried about comma splices, and to emphasize that truly adept writing involved the long-term development of a complex fix of skills. These ideas are still so powerfully present in writing centers today considering they are and so very true. Unfortunately, they had the unintended result of marginalizing discussions of sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and grammatical errors until very late in the writing process.

In truth, ideas can not be separated from the language used to express them. Multilingual writers are advanced language learners who are working toward the command of a sophisticated range of vocabulary, sentence structures, discipline-specific expressions, idioms, etc. Multilingual writers are too developing writers, so they practice need the same kind of process-oriented and "college order" feedback that monolingual writers demand. Quite oftentimes, though, their ability to develop the content of their essays is express past a lack of vocabulary or by difficulty with complex judgement structures. As coaches, you can support the development of writing skills by talking about language at any point in the writing process where it might be helpful.

It's good to discourage premature concern with nit-picky editing decisions, but information technology's groovy to encourage exploration of the correct linguistic communication for expressing a nifty thought. Exist flexible and be comfortable with the fluid, back and forth motility between discussing the ideas and the language.

What practice you do when students say, "But cheque my grammar"?

  1. Respond positively. ("Sure, nosotros can have a await at the linguistic communication stuff…"). Lectures about how we teach proofreading strategies or how nosotros don't actually do grammar in the writing eye put students on the defensive when they have a legitimate need for feedback on their language use. But say yeah, and motion on to the adjacent footstep.
  2. Elicit other concerns. ("What else would yous like to talk nigh today? Are you however working on the content?"). Students volition often identify quite a range of concerns with simple prompting at the beginning of the session, particularly after they've been reassured that y'all'll help them identify issues with a linguistic communication they're still learning.
  3. Ask for an overview. ("Tell me nigh what you're working on and where you are in the process."). Explaining their writing project (the consignment and the text and then far) gives students the chance to produce "comprehensible output"—a chance to use the English language to express their thoughts clearly and to make themselves understood. We know that linguistic communication learners are able to empathise a lot more than they are able to spontaneously produce in a foreign language, and information technology's really difficult work to express complex thoughts sufficiently in a language that's not your own. Past asking questions, past listening carefully, and by asking follow-up questions, you can help students work through the procedure of communicating clearly in English, and yous can give yourself a mental framework of the projection that will be helpful when language questions arise in specific parts of the text.
  4. Read the entire typhoon. You lot may find grammatical errors on the first or second page, simply go on reading. You'll become a sense of the educatee's complete argument, and you'll accept time to recognize more than serious errors that may occur afterwards in the paper.
  5. Stop only for extreme bug. Sometimes a sentence may be so malformed that the idea is completely obscured. You can make a note to come up back to that point later, but if you do decide to finish, ask a broad question and so listen carefully ("Can yous tell me more well-nigh this thought?"). Endeavour to be attuned specially to places where the student's language use is truly interfering with your ability to understand what they're trying to say. Clarifying these expressions takes priority over minor errors that don't really interfere with your understanding.
  6. Recast the educatee'southward explanation more grammatically. ("Let me see if I understand you correctly. You're saying that…"). If you understood and explained correctly, the student can hear the thought expressed in grammatical English and tin make notation of it—they tin can add together it to their English language repertoire. However, if your recasting (your paraphrased explanation) doesn't match the student's intended significant, or if you can reasonably offer two unlike interpretations of the text, y'all tin can examine the passage more closely to figure out why information technology was unclear. And so you can work together on correcting whatever is disruptive about the student's original expressions. This dorsum and forth process is called "negotiation of meaning" ("Is this what you mean?" "No, I mean this." "Oh, okay. We say information technology like this." "Oh, okay. Thank you.")
  7. Provide "linguistic input"—language that students read and hear. This "input" might be bits of English that are new to them (like a new word or idiomatic expression), or information technology might be familiar bits of English beingness used in ways they've never heard before. You are not usurping control if y'all make language suggestions that convey the educatee's ideas. If you lot've listened advisedly enough that y'all know what they're trying to limited, help them out.
  8. Use resource. Even if you know the grammer, introduce students to linguistic communication resources they can use independently at other times.
  9. Document the puzzles. If y'all encounter peculiarly interesting or confusing samples of language use, go along a copy to share with your colleagues and mentors. It may serve every bit a useful training sample, so you lot're serving the community well.

What if students really hateful, "Only check my grammar"?

In that location does come a time writers are ready to concentrate strictly on their grammar. They're satisfied with everything else, and as writers, you know that's a happy place to be. Normally we teach proofreading strategies to native speakers at this stage. We can do this with multilingual writers besides, but we also take to adjust our strategies to conform their status as language learners. These suggestions are meant to help you with that adjustment.

In that location's a potent misconception that in that location will be "patterns of error"—certain types of errors that occur repeatedly in the text. Sometimes that does happen, simply more frequently, at that place volition only be one or 2 instances of 20 five different kinds of error. That'due south okay. You can still exploit the educational value of an fault, having confidence that students volition try to apply what they acquire to their subsequent writing.

Two things to notation: First, even though the strategies listed below concentrate more than on straight proofreading and grammar checking, remember that you tin also use all of the strategies listed above for correcting the grammar by clarifying the intended significant. Second, when y'all do detect an error, you can ask, "How do you lot unremarkably proofread for this kind of mistake?" or say to the student, "Allow's try to find a few more examples of this structure, merely to double-cheque them." Look for correct and incorrect examples because nosotros need our successes reinforced too! Information technology's a great opportunity to assess the student's proofreading skills and practice some strategy building.

Think of these strategies as being listed in the society they should be used in, but experience comfortable to experiment with the order, depending on the pupil, the writing project, and your own judgment. Play with them to see how each strategy helps enhance the students' learning experience.

  1. Ask students to identify specific feedback targets ("Testify me what you're not sure about."). You can ask a diverseness of questions: why they're not certain most that sentence, if they tin think of other ways to express the thought, what rules they know near the particular grammar construction, if they checked a reference volume, if they can show you the page and so you tin await at the rules together, etc. In other words, y'all can learn a lot about the students' idea processes that volition be helpful in working with each of them. One caution: be sensitive to how much time you lot're spending on these questions. It tin be frustrating to students if every unmarried error is interrogated at length, as you can imagine. Idioms and prepositions are great candidates for a motorcoach's quick corrections because they're so idiosyncratic. Structures that follow a set of rules more than systematically, like verb tense or gerunds vs. participles, are good candidates for more questioning. (Locate the grammar references in the Writing Center if you lot didn't understand "gerunds vs. participles"!)
  2. Ask where they struggled to make language choices. Sometimes they really do believe they've written everything in correct English, so they can't point to a judgement they think might be incorrect. If you lot ask them to testify you where they had to piece of work at information technology, you have a chance to interrogate their decision-making process ("Why was this a hard option? How else were you thinking of maxim it? What fabricated yous cull this style?") and to either congratulate them and reinforce a right choice, or to correct them and perhaps teach them a play a trick on for making the right choice next time (a mnemonic device, a corking folio in your favorite reference volume, etc.).
  3. Identify "loftier gravity" errors–errors that truly interfered with your comprehension. Work with the student to effigy out how/why the sentence structure or word choice is obscuring their intended meaning. When they've explained their idea enough that you sympathize it, offer them the language they need to express their idea grammatically.
  4. Motility on to repeated errors. Ask questions near their choices or their full general cognition (e.g., "Why did you choose this verb tense?" or "What do you know about verb tenses?"). Ask the student if they accept a favorite grammar resource and/or share your own favorite grammar resource. Work through correcting the error together, helping the student understand and use the rules. Find a couple more than examples of the same kind of mistake and let the student use the resource to try correcting the mistakes. When they experience confident that they can find and correct that type of error, move on to another.
  5. Give prepositions abroad similar candy. Innovate students to "learner's dictionaries," which include data about word + preposition combinations, merely feel comfy freely offering up these of import petty words. Learning to use "up" correctly in one sentence will not ensure that students will utilize information technology correctly in some other sentence in the aforementioned way that learning about other structures will, and this fiddling act of kindness can help students stay more than engaged with the balance of the process.

The strategies in action

These transcripts are excerpted from sessions with second language writers. They accept been annotated to explain a scrap virtually what was happening, what the students were trying to accomplish, what the coaches were trying to accomplish, and to illustrate a few of the concepts and strategies listed above. Read each excerpt without reading the comments, just to get the menstruum of the conversation. Read them once more, looking at each of the marginal comments equally you reflect on the information on this folio.

Resources

See our English Linguistic communication Resources page for several learner's dictionaries and other language learning resources and strategies.

Y'all tin find very clear explanations of grammar structures and an EXCELLENT drove of idioms and phrasal verbs, which ESL students usually struggle with, at UsingEnglish.com.

References

Friedlander, A. (1984). Coming together the needs of foreign students in the writing middle. In Thou. A. Olson (Ed.) Writing centers: Theory and assistants (pp. 206-214). Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Northward, S. (1984). The thought of a writing center. College English, 46, 433-446.

Reigstad, T. J., & McAndrew, D. A. (1984). Grooming tutors for writing conferences. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.
You may reproduce it for not-commercial use if you use the unabridged handout and aspect the source: The Writing Center, University of N Carolina at Chapel Colina

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Source: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/just-check-my-grammar/

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