Two Views of Language

 

Two Views of Language

by Jack Farrell

Retired A.P Teacher

Consultant Teacher

School Board Trustee, Mammoth USD

 

                  For the past 20 years process writing has been the default strategy for teaching exposition in a secondary language arts classroom.  There is no doubt that struggling writers, those who combine a lack of ideas and a sense of focus with a general inability to generate coherent sentences properly punctuated and accurately spelled, have been helped by the meticulous implementation of process writing.  However, I have long held a suspicion that what works for these writers, simultaneously fails for writers in the middle and actually retards the progress of the top writers, those we designate as gifted.  Put another way, the process does not aid the middle thinkers and writers and actually impairs the progress of the top writers. 

                  When I first entered teaching there was a widespread tendency to teach to the top students.  After all, they were the ones who paid attention, answered questions, worked hard on their assignments and turned them in on time.  The students in the middle got less attention and often, the struggling students got written off.  This was necessarily a poor strategy, especially in light of the teaching standards, since adopted, which call on the teacher to address all students.  The somewhat aptly named "No Child Left Behind" legislation codified this responsibility. 

                  The problem with leaving no child behind is not in the intention, which is laudatory and nearly doable.  It is in the parallel thinking that what works for the lowest learner, works for all learners.  This pedagogical view has been systematically employed over the last 20 years, much to the detriment of more able learners, especially the ones in the middle.  These are students who can be challenged to accomplish more difficult work, but who are now spoon-fed essentially an oral education with visual support.  These students are assessed using primarily objective tests, often consisting of multiple-choice, true-false and matching questions.  They are rarely assessed by means of the written word; more often they fill in bubbles on scantron forms.  The top students have been somewhat spared this system by means of aggregating them in GATE, Honors or A.P. classes.  However, the textbooks supporting these courses have been gradually infiltrated by the pedagogy of the challenged learner, so even these students are becoming gradually more at risk. 

                  The area where there is still widespread agreement is how to teach expository writing.   From the basic English class up to the Honors or A.P. class, process writing has taken over.  Wikipedia offers a good description of the writing process:

 

                           Prewriting: planning, research, outlining, diagramming, storyboarding or clustering (for a technique similar to clustering, see mindmapping)

                           Draft: initial composition in prose form

                           Revision: review, modification and organization (by the writer)

                           Editing: proofreading for clarity, conventions, style (preferably by another writer)

                            

Submittal: sharing the writing: possibly through performance, printing, or distribution of written material

 

                  Teaching writing as a process encourages the emerging writer to recognize the recursive nature of writing, the fact that it is a step-by-step, logical process that moves from draft to revision and back to draft until a final result is yielded.  This is, in fact, how professional writers work with their editors and even how many professionals work with their own writing prior to, and after, sending it to their editors.  The process is a sound one, but like many good ideas, it has generated some unintended consequences during implementation.

                  I have used the writing process for many years and have watched it implemented by many a classroom practitioner during my years as a consultant teacher.  The main problem seems to arise from an over-reliance on the first step, what is often referred to as pre-writing.  The most common method used by teachers is some variation of the 'brainstorm,' wherein the student, the class, or the teacher in combination with the class, produces some version of the spider diagram on paper or the classroom white board.  As I have observed this process during implementation, the following view of language seems to emerge:

 

Language is random, spatial, associative, simultaneous and disorganized.

 

                  This view postulates that language offers a system by which random thoughts can be harnessed and put to coherent use through the structure of the modern essay, typically 4 or 5 paragraphs in length for classroom purposes.  The premise is that without the structure of the modern essay, and the power of language to conform to it, the student is left with only thoughts and images firing all over the cerebral cortex.  These firing thoughts are metaphorically imagined to occur in some manner of mind-space.  They tend to be linked by association rather than logic.  They occur all at once and clearly lack organization.  The way to make sense of this psychic activity is to apply all the rules of the modern essay.

                  What happens between the pre-writing and drafting stage is too often the use of graphic organizers that force unruly language into coherent boxes that can be linked together.  Students from as early as the 4th grade, but, unfortunately, as late as the 12th grade, are being taught to write sentences into boxes, then recognize that the boxes are linked and so the boxes themselves can be removed, yielding a tightly written and thoroughly coherent paragraph.  Link 4 or 5 of these paragraphs together, add transitions, which are taught next, and you have the modern classroom essay. 

                  Any teacher who has read a classroom set of these finished drafts will instantly recognize that this is formula writing.  He or she will also be struck by the complete lack of voice in these form-fitted essays. 

                  The formula paragraph, sometimes referred to as a power paragraph, can be outlined as follows:

 

Topic sentence

Concrete detail

Commentary

Commentary

Concrete detail

Commentary

Commentary

Concrete detail

Commentary

Commentary

Conclusion (or restatement of topic sentence)

 

                  This is an 11 sentence paragraph and there are many students who write paragraphs exactly this length and in this order and present them for assessments.  And, for many students, the only time they have to write an essay is for a district or statewide assessment.  This formula, or some version of it, will provide the paragraphs they will generate for such an assessment.

                  I would like to offer a vastly different view of language than the one I cited above, which I reproduce here for contrast:

 

Language is random, spatial, associative, simultaneous and disorganized.

 

                  Here is a contrasting view:

 

Language is time-bound, rule-governed, logic-based, linear and generative.

 

                  This second view of language is not a slight variation of the first.  It is as different a view as can be imagined.  Let's explore the implications of this second view.  In terms of this definition, there is, in reality, no difference between oral and written speech.  If you speak a sentence, the words come out of your mouth one at a time.  Time has elapsed from the first to the last word of that sentence.  A written sentence is similarly time-bound.  When you read a sentence from beginning to end, time has elapsed.

                  The second characteristic of language is that it is rule-governed.  When young children first begin to acquire language they embed these rules, what we have labeled grammar.  The rules for language are fully acquired at least by the age of 3.  Students arrive in school with an already functioning grammar.  If they did not, they would not understand anything anyone said.   Take a look at the following list of words: "walked morning saw blue the as sky I to I school bright this."        Anyone over the age of two or three immediately recognizes this as a random list of words.  The sense is nonsense.  This string of words does not conform to any rules of word order.  You don't need to know the grammatical labels to recognize this, nor to understand this re-arrangement of the same words: "I saw the bright, blue sky as I walked to school this morning."  So, without studying grammar in any formal sense, all speakers of the language share a common set of grammatical rules; communication is impossible otherwise.

                  Thus far I have described sentences which are bound by a certain amount of elapsed time and march by following a set of intelligible rules which we all share, a language map.  Language is not only rule governed, it is bound by an internal set of logic.  Most of us delight in nonsense verse and paradoxical statements.  These work on us precisely because they represent such clever deviations from the norm, which is a world of never-ending strings of words that make logical sense.  The logic is the stitching around the rules, which govern the language.  Even mathematics, which is usually displayed as a series of signs and symbols is nothing more than the logic of thought and language translated into symbols.  Virtually any equation can be described and solved using the logic of language.  For example, 3 x 2 = 6.  The teacher who writes this on the board invariably verbalizes this expression using the following language:  "Three multiplied by two equals six." 

                  The final two elements of the definition of language have the greatest impact for how we should teach writing.  It is no accident that written language appears as lines of text which wrap-around to the next line and then from the bottom of one page to the top of the next.  Even the languages that reverse the process follow the same, basic linear pattern, as is true for pictographic and idiographic languages.  It can take a few minutes to read a page of text because, as I pointed out earlier, language is time-bound.  It is neither instantaneous nor simultaneous.  The words march by one at a time and one after the other. 

                  The last element refers to the generative nature of language.  The spoken language, or the textual representation of it, because of its rule-governed nature and as a direct result of its internal logic, represents a series of discrete thoughts linked together in a logical chain.  In the act of speaking or writing, the first sentence generates the second sentence, which generates the third, and so on.  Most spoken language, or its textual representation, is not pre-conceived in outline form, nor is it random thought captured and harnessed by language; most language marches by in elapsed time in a straight line representing a series of logically connected and generated thoughts.  There is an exact match between language and its visual representation as text. 

                  If the first view of language is correct and process writing, which is based on it, is the best way to teach composition, then the product of this system, today's writing, should represent an improvement on the past.  I know of no one who asserts this.  Any classroom practitioner of more than 20 years can describe the gradual deterioration of student thinking and writing.  International test scores routinely describe the United States as falling steadily to the bottom of all developed nations.  Yet the worse the news, the more steadfast we work on the process.  It is time to try another, older method.

                  If no one used process writing on the great prose essayists of the 18th and 19th centuries, then how did they learn to write such eloquent, densely ideational essays?  How did the common soldier during the Civil War write such beautiful and grammatical letters home? 

                  The classical approach to writing has been a mimetic one.  What little schooling there was, formal or informal, usually involved the presentation of compelling models for students first to copy and then to imitate.  Reproduced below is the method Benjamin Franklin concocted to teach himself how to write.  He is referring to a period of time when he was about 16:

 

                  About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact on me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.  [from Chapter 1 of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin]

 

                  Franklin is here describing classical training for writing, or any other form of art, which involves imitation of the masters, i.e. painters, composers, authors.  The writers of the Spectator were anonymous at that time, but turned out to be Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, whose prose styles were greatly admired at the time.  Earlier in his autobiography Franklin mentioned that he had embarked on an ambitious reading regime, including Bunyan, Plutarch and De Foe.  The classical approach, then, to the teaching of composition would combine broad reading as a background activity with highly specific acts of imitation as described in the passage above. 

                  I spent 30 years teaching English, 22 of which were spent with Advanced Placement students.  What follows is some anecdotal evidence and impressions from working with all levels of writing from 7th through 12 grade gathered over these many years.

                  When I began teaching English I could read through student essays, making a few marginal notes per page.  The students above the 90th percentile would write impressively while the students in the middle, from the 45th to the 75th percentile, would struggle with less clear and cogent thinking and in prose that was gradually more flawed.  Still, nearly all the essays were readable.  By the time I retired, essays from the middle group were virtually unreadable.  Nearly every sentence needed attention.  No teacher can read a set of student essays and offer corrections for every sentence in every paper.

                  In contrast, over the years I encountered scores of very bright students and able writers who were literally unable to produce an outline in preparation for writing their papers.  Some of them confessed to me that they wrote their papers first, then worked backwards to produce an outline to be turned in with the paper.  How can very bright students and able writers not be able to brainstorm and to outline in advance?  The very ablest students understand how counterintuitive our scaffolds often are.  They know, at least unconsciously, that, after all their research, they do not yet know what they think and can therefore produce no ready outline.  They understand that they will discover what they think in the act of writing, that writing does not merely record thought; it creates thought.  They can generate an opening and craft a tentative thesis, but what they really know and think is yet to be discovered.  They are in service of the second definition of writing: they are producing thought by employing language that is linear, logical and generative.  This view of language serves them very well. 

                  Further, when I first began teaching the emphasis was on word count.  Our goal was to gradually increase fluency by adding specific supporting detail. Our goal was to produce students who could write on demand.  Often these students would increase their over-all length, but the end result would be very long paragraphs: for example, a two-page essay one paragraph in length.  I contend that this is a much easier problem to solve than the corresponding one created by process writing and the 5-paragraph essay.  Once a student has achieved fluency, it is fairly simple to show him where the paragraphs naturally break.  You can teach a student to paragraph after the fact, but it is so much more difficult to increase the fluency of a student who has learned paragraphing first and has internalized a completely formulaic sense of what a paragraph is.  Put simply, if a student has learned to brainstorm, then write sentences into boxes on a graphic organizer, then pull those same sentences down into a neat 7, 9 or 11 sentence paragraph, then add transition words like "therefore" and "additionally" and "in conclusion," he will be nearly disabled as a writer. 

                  There is a place for process writing in our classrooms, as there is for nearly all forms of scaffolding.  But a scaffold is, by definition, a temporary support.  I would argue that if you have a heterogeneous classroom and encourage wide reading and writing from models from your students, and some of them cannot advance this way, all scaffolding, including brainstorming, spider diagrams, graphic organizers, etc. are available to the teacher.  But I would further argue that these scaffolds should never be used in a default manner with the entire class.  You only offer a scaffold to the student who needs it, and for only as long as he needs it.  I have observed the same graphic organizer in use in both 4th and 12th grade classrooms.  In this way, the scaffold is the default for all students and is never removed.  This approach does not serve the students in the middle and very negatively affects the students at the top. 

                  I spent 6 of my last 8 years before retirement as a full-timed released consultant teacher, mentoring new teachers and training veteran teachers to be mentors.  These 6 years were divided into two 3-year rotations.  In between rotations, I rotated back to the classroom for two years and, at that time, asked to work with students in the middle.  I no longer wanted to teach advanced placement students, but wanted to direct my efforts toward the most underserved students in the K-12 system.  Often significant resources are dedicated to the academically challenged students and some of our best teachers are given the top students.  The students in the middle are not taught like the poor step-children of the gifted.  All the money spent researching how best to address our least able students percolates upwards to the student in the middle.  He is really the poor step-child of the resource class.  He is orally spoon-fed his education and spends an inordinate amount of time filling in boxes on graphic organizers and drawing story-boards of his ideas.  He is accreting power paragraphs on the rare occasions when he is asked to write.  Mostly he fills in bubbles, at best agreeing with the language in a given answer generated either by his teacher or some drone working for a standardized testing company.  The most you can say about his knowledge is that he agrees with someone else's statement.  He has not even been asked to generate his own thought in his own language.

                  When I returned to the classroom I simply treated these students in the middle as if they were advanced placement students.  Rather than lowering my expectations, I waited for them to struggle and signal their inability to do the work.  I immersed them in a text-based world and gave them plenty of models from which to work.  I gave them rubrics for scoring their work and had them grade themselves before I did.  I was pleasantly surprised with their growth in fluency in both reading and writing.  What most struck me was the development of voice.  As they became accustomed to letting the writing be generative and logical, distinctive voices emerged and it became impossible to confuse one student's writing with another.  They found their voice as student-writers.

                  Much of this work is chronicled on my website:  www.readfirst.net.  Any teacher, administrator, parent or student interested in learning more about this classical approach to learning should visit this site.  I refer you specifically to the "Reading Weblog" I maintained during my second rotation as a consultant teacher and also to the articles under the heading "For Professionals Educators."