Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

I'm teaching at a uni and am appalled at the grammar and writing, I graded a test and most students don't even capitalize the first letter of the sentence. Some had the entire essay written as one sentece, just using commas and semi colons.
Other wrote things such as, yeah, well, you see, !!!!!! ya know, anyways in their essays,
Whatever happened to teaching formal writing in school? these kids are 20 years old and write horribly.

[BethMac]

I think punctuation is a much overlooked part of the written language insofar as ESL/EFL goes. Does anyone teach punctuation? I make it a point to go over it in my writing classes, but otherwise, I don't pay a great deal of attention to it. If your students are going to be writing a lot of essays in this course, perhaps you could do one entire lesson on proper punctuation and formal vs. informal language. If you really want them to focus on proper punctuation, let them know that you will deduct points from their essays and assignments for missing or erroneous punctuation.

[zaneth]

Yes, I've noticed horrible writing skills in university students. The ones who can actually write clearly, expressing their own ideas really stand out.

Think of it as an opportunity. You have it written down, you can go over it and tell them exactly what they need to do differently. Some of them will listen and be grateful.

A professor once gave me a student essay to look over, just in her office over coffee. The professor had already checked the paper and gave it a high mark. I went over it again and found enough potential red marks to have sent the poor student into depression. The professor readily admitted to me that she would never have seen most of the mistakes. Wrong words, collocation errors, grammar mistakes, etc.

There's a lot in writing that they've probably never been taught. And a lot that is difficult for them to see (informal vs. formal language). They've been focusing on acquiring words and phrases and using them. They don't necessarily know what belongs in an essay and what doesn't.

Plagiarism is another issue. Where I was, students were taught to memorize texts and often used whole sentences in their essays. To me this was plagiarism, but to them it was what they had been expected to do, showing that they knew the correct use of the phrase.

There were times when it was very difficult for me to rearrange a sentence or paragraph to make it grammatical. They're starting from another language. To take those ideas and put them into written English grammar requires a lot of manipulation sometimes. You have to completely rewrite something. This is difficult even if you know what the grammar is.

Think about how much we work when writing, as opposed to mostly effortless speaking. And we have to really dig into our grammatical knowledge to rearrange things and get it to sound just right. And we always have someone checking our work and marking things and making us rewrite it. The students often haven't had this.

It's harder than it looks. Try not to judge them by the writing standards from your university (or even high school). The grammar of an essay is grammar that stretches across sentences, paragraphs, and even the whole essay. It's complex stuff and it all has to flow seamlessly.

Start from the ground up and be patient. Make sure to reassure them that every time you wrote an essay in school, the teacher marked it up. That even native speakers have to learn how to write, and benefit from having other people check over their work.

[moonraven]

The problem is not limited to the writing they do in English. I am currently teaching a class in Spanish for incoming university students. Their writing in Spanish is really abominable, but they have been making an effort because it's embarrassing for them to have a foreigner correcting all their errors in punctuation, grammar and syntax....

[denise]

Well said, zaneth. I'm trying to point out to my students that their papers will not be perfect on the first draft, and that it takes time.

I do teach punctuation in grammar and writing classes. I don't give too much emphasis on it--I don't want the poor dears to spend so much time stressing about where to place their commas that they never actually write anything--but I point out how to separate sentences, clauses, etc.

Register is also an issue. I get a lot of sentences beginning with and, so, but, etc., and a lot of "and so on"s. Before they write, I tell them that, while those may be perfectly acceptable in informal speech, in email, etc., they're not OK for academic papers. Then they turn in their papers, full of informal expressions. Ay!

And plagiarism--the students do plagiarism-awareness activities in which they have to compare several student-written sentences to the original and decide how/why they are plagiarized. Then they get practice paraphrasing, paraphrasing, paraphrasing. The result? Papers that still have plagiarism!

They get the information, but they can't seem to transfer it to their own papers...

d

[Roger]

Itoowonder whatthehellmychinesestudentslearnatschoolalldaylongforyearsonandon...
writing'chinese'withlowercaseintial'c'isthenormalthoughwriting'England"withacapital"E"alsoisthenorm...
OKsoigivethemtheseassignments:rewritethistextagainwithcorrectpunctuationmarksandusecapitalletterswherenecessary!
Takes at least two hours for them to do it - with many mistakes!

[leeroy]

Yeah, just because you know English doesn't mean you can write in it - plenty of native speakers are abominable.

The writing element of the IELTS exams essentially tests academic writing skills. But as I understand it the students can get away with writing poorly if their other skills (speaking, reading etc...) do well enough. Thus, lots of ESL students go to university without the foggiest idea of what an essay is (and, correspondingly, lots of bookish ones get in who can't hold a conversation in English).

It might not be a bad thing to make "academic writing skills" a prerequisitie to any course that needed it, for native and non-native speakers alike.

[moonraven]

The program I was directing in a university in Ecuador last year included three "bridge" courses, for folks whose writing, grammar and speaking were not up to competitive level. One of those courses was "Principles of Writing", and all students whose writing samples were below part upon admission were required to take it.

[Snoopy]

When I started schoolteaching in England in the 1970s, the standard of punctuation was saddening. Then came Sinclair Basic, and they all understood the need to distinguish between a colon and a semi-colon. Sadly again, those days have gone.

[ntropy]

I've taught at N. American universities working in Writing Services, which give guidance/advice to native speaker students with their essay assignments.

The level of written English these students come in with is truly horrendous. Thinking back to my uni days, I may not have known essay structure very well but I could spell and use grammar correctly and knew the difference between formal and idiomatic English.

[isabel]

And then we have teachers, some at the university level, who themselves don't know the difference between good and well, and actually teachtheir students "gonna" and "wanna" (and there are textbooks that teach it also!). I've heard university teachers use "ain't" with a straight face! I am more appalled at the level of grammar and writing skills amongst those with whom I teach than those of my students.

I used to correct the students, and tell them that they must have misunderstood their previous teacher. Now I just tell them that the teacher was wrong. Here in Korea it is good to debunk the notion that teachers are omnipotent, anyway.

While it is not necessary for everyone to use the king's English- English instructors should know how to differentiate it from the joker's.

[denise]

Gonna and wanna are perfectly valid--native speakers say them all the time, so, "correct" or not, they are part of the language that students will hear and need to comprehend. As long as they are told when it's appropriate to use such forms and when it's not (e.g., casual conversation with a friend vs. academic paper), I'm all for exposing the students to them.

One of my students a few months back asked me what "ain't" meant. He had heard it in a song, and likely couldn't find it in any grammar book. His question was perfectly valid, and I was happy that a) he had noticed something new in English, b) he was not too shy to ask me about it, and c) it provided an easy opportunity to discuss context, register, etc.

d

[Roger]

"Gonna and wanna are..." perfectly legitimate? I am surprised, Denise! To me they are NOT legitimate. Why should they be? They are pronunciation variants of standard English, and we are teaching standard English, not dialects.
I think knowing standard English is the key, and once students have that key they can easily get to grips with such regional variants. if they need special teaching on such trivia I would say the whole teaching of English they received was geared towards the wrong objective!

[ls650]

[guest of Japan]

Although I am disgusted to see gonna and wanna in written English, I agree with Denise that they have merit in being taught. If hundreds of millions of native English speakers use them in everday speech, they can hardly be called regional variants. It seems rather that in spoken English they have become the standard.