Week 3: Reading Responses

·         Berlin’s Chapter 5: The Communications Emphasis: 1940-1960

o   Berlin states, “Warfel advocated replacing the workbooks based on traditional grammar—at the time enjoying great popularity—with the ‘new structural grammar which relates language operation to composition’. With this new scheme, writing instruction would still focus on grammar, but the grammar would be that of structural linguistics.  Writing teachers would thereby offer to students ‘scientific insight into their most important set of social habits—into language—and could in this way help society achieve unity” (114).

§  Having studied structural linguistics, I don’t see how using it to teach grammar over traditional means would be any better for the student.  In today’s classroom, most students do not care to know “the scientific insight into their most important set of social habits”; they want to know what they need to get a grade and move on.  While I can see how some students would want to know the “in’s and out’s” of grammar and its structure, that is a very small percentage in the classroom and more time could be spent on something more productive and useful.

·         Berlin’s Chapter 7: Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975

o   Berlin states, “teachers cannot be sure their comments are reinforcing the desired kinds of behavior because they do not know what kinds of behavior are desirable: they simply do not know how good writers write” (141).

§  As a future high school English teacher, I personally take great offense to this statement.  While I do understand that certain comments can be misleading or misunderstood, our intent is never to intentionally confuse or misguide our students.  Moreover, by saying that teachers do not know how good writers write is simply is completely unfair.  Teachers are stronger is certain areas, but to say that we don’t know how good writers write is also questioning not only our knowledge of writing, but also our own writing skills.  English teachers didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Today, I think I’ll go teach me some English.”

·         Berlin’s Chapter 8: Conclusion and Postscript on the Present

o   Berlin writes, “Writing instruction has been dramatically transformed in the past twenty-five years—a transformation that is salutary and ongoing.  We have begun to see that writing courses are not designed exclusively to prepare students for the workplace, although they certainly must do that” (188-189).

§  I completely agree with this statement.  As Pearl mentioned last week on my blog, writing courses will do student no good (at any age) until they are tailored to specifically meet the needs of the student.  For example, a student going into the aeronautical engineering program (I’m assuming) doesn’t need to know if his/her gerund is in the correct place of the sentence or if he/she has comma splices.  Some might argue that he/she will need professional writing abilities for his/her future career, but that’s what technical writers are for.  Teachers and departments need to be shaping writing courses into what the students need, not the other way around.

·          Trimbur’s “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of US English”

o   Trimbur writes, “I want to imagine a new configuration of languages in the U.S. university and in U.S. college composition that realigns the old Anglo-American linguistic dyad, making English not the center but the linking language in multilingual writing programs, multilingual universities, and multilingual polity.  To do this would require a shift from unidirectional and subtractive monolingualism that has long dominated writing programs in the modern U.S. university to an active and additive multilingualism in which a range of languages are involved as the medium of writing, as the medium of instruction across the university curriculum, and as the medium of deliberation in the public sphere” (586).

§  While I would be extremely struggling should this ever take place, I do believe that Trimbur’s idea of a multilingual writing class could be remarkably beneficial.  Business students being able to write reports in Mandarin and education students being able to write lesson plans in Spanish would be exceptionally helpful to not only the individual student, but also to the global exchange of information.  As a teacher, I have no idea how this would actually work in the classroom, but it is a wonderful idea worth exploring.