Understanding Language Use in the Classroom: Including Teaching Materials for College Educators - Brossura

Behrens, Susan J.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 178309978X ISBN 13: 9781783099788

Casa editrice: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2018

Riassunto

It is clear that a proper understanding of what academic English is and how to use it is crucial for success in college, and yet students face multiple obstacles in acquiring this new 'code', not least that their professors often cannot agree among themselves on a definition and a set of rules. Understanding Language Use in the Classroom aims to bring the latest findings in linguistics research on academic English to educators from a range of disciplines, and to help them help their students learn and achieve. In this expanded edition of the original text, college educators will find PowerPoint presentations and instructor materials to enhance the topics covered in the text. Using these additional resources in the classroom will help educators to engage their students with this crucial, but frequently neglected, area of their college education; and to inform students about the unexamined linguistic assumptions we all hold, and that hold us back. You can find additional materials on the Resources tab of our website.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sugli autori

Susan J. Behrens is Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Director of the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, USA. She contributes weekly lessons on writing and English composition to The New York Times in Education (nytimesineducation.com). Her other publications include Grammar: A Pocket Guide (Routledge 2010) and Language in the Real World: An Introduction to Linguistics (with Judith A. Parker, Routledge 2010).

Susan J. Behrens is Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Director of the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, USA. She contributes weekly lessons on writing and English composition to The New York Times in Education (nytimesineducation.com). Her other publications include Grammar: A Pocket Guide (Routledge 2010) and Language in the Real World: An Introduction to Linguistics (with Judith A. Parker, Routledge 2010).

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Understanding Language Use in the Classroom

Including Teaching Materials for College Educators

By Susan J. Behrens

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2018 Susan J. Behrens
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-978-8

Contents

Author Biography, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Introduction, xiii, 
Part 1: The Role of Academic English in Higher Education, 1, 
1 Linguistic Obstacles to Better Teaching and Learning, 3, 
2 Examining Academic English: Form and Function, 17, 
3 Linguistics and Pedagogy, 37, 
Part 2: The Linguistic Conversations, 51, 
4 Introducing the Conversations: Linguistic Principles, 53, 
5 Word Formation/Morphology, 57, 
6 Word Meaning/Semantics, 65, 
7 Grammatical Markers/Morphosyntax, 82, 
8 Grammar and Punctuation/Syntax, 90, 
9 Narrative Structure/Discourse, 107, 
10 Pronunciation/Phonology, 127, 
11 Voice Quality and Speech Melody/Prosody, 149, 
Part 3: Study Sheets: Review Materials for More Conversations, 167, 
A: Backformations, 168, 
B: Common Derivational Morphemes, 169, 
C: Common Word Conversions, 170, 
D: Jargon/Words with Special Meanings, 171, 
E: Idiomatic Use of Prepositions, 172, 
F: Pronouns and the Case System, 174, 
G: Ambiguous, Vague and Inconsistent Pronouns, 176, 
H: Punctuation/Apostrophes and Commas, 177, 
I: Subject-Verb Agreement Issues, 179, 
J: Modifier Problems, 180, 
K: Tense vs. Voice, 182, 
L: Texting Features, 184, 
M: Formality Continuum/Style, 185, 
N: Transitional Expressions, 187, 
O: Phonological Patterns and Processes, 188, 
P: Acoustic Characteristics of Speech/Word Stress, 189, 
Appendix, 191, 
Glossary, 197, 
References, 207, 
Index, 221, 

CHAPTER 1

Linguistic Obstacles to Better Teaching and Learning

An Urgent Problem in Higher Education

Authors such as Hacker and Dreifus (2011) and Arum and Roksa (2011) have reported that college students do not show significant learning in several essential skills. As outlined in this book's introduction, various studies report that the crucial skills necessary for academic success – and that also appeal to employers – are exactly those skills that college students are not mastering: studies show no demonstrable gains in critical thinking and abstract reasoning skills, or in writing competency, either in the sophomore year or at graduation.

Why might students not be learning? Who and/or what is to blame? A review of the literature finds blame placed everywhere: professors value research over teaching (Hacker & Dreifus, 2011); colleges put too much emphasis on social life and sports (Nathan, 2005); secondary schools are falling down on their job of preparing college-ready students (Greene & Winters, 2005); and so on.

Arum and Roksa (2011) call for changes to the academy that challenge educators and institutions of higher learning to monitor learning as closely as do schools at the lower grades. Yet, it seems that college professors are better scholars than teachers. Pedagogy is rarely part of a PhD student's education, yet today's professors do want to be reflective teachers (Behrens & Kandel, 2006; Fink, 2003; Nilson, 2010; Weimer, 2010). Hacker and Dreifus (2011) argue that colleges and universities need to place teaching above all else. Delbanco (2012) agrees: PhD programs should infuse pedagogy into the curriculum so that scholars are also trained as teachers.

One asset to any educator looking to develop pedagogically is a better understanding of how language works and the role language plays in student learning in colleges and universities.

Language at the Core of Education

It is not trivial that reading and writing are two of 'the three Rs' of education. Students need to learn not just to read and write but also to do so at the level that their teachers expect. Leamnson (1999: 39) says that '[l]anguage is a particularly pressing problem in the education of freshmen'. The task, then, is more complicated than being literate, and it begins (or should begin) early. Cummins (2008: n.p.), talking about primary to secondary schooling, believes that 'a major goal of schooling for all students is to expand students' registers and repertoires of language into these academic domains'. Others agree that gaining mastery in language use at the academic level is a long-term endeavor. Shatz and Wilkinson (2013: 115), speaking about English language learners (ELLs), say, 'Students' school achievement depends on their being proficient in the language of classroom instruction and textbooks'. I argue that this is true of all students. 'Participating fully in all classroom activities requires thinking and talking in ways that incorporate literate language and precise vocabulary. From elementary to high school, such skills are the sine qua non of success. For all students, developing full academic language proficiency takes at least a decade of schooling' (italics added) (Shatz & Wilkinson, 2013: 115).

There are reasons to guide students to better mastery of the English expected at school. Learning, demonstrating that learning, becoming a member of the academy: all take linguistic skills. Lankshear and Knobel (2011: 108) say, 'Within "prestige" subjects like English and science, exam success is largely a function of the ability and disposition to reason and argue in particular ways and to extrapolate from and interpret what is given in texts, as well as (to some extent) to absorb, recall and reproduce information, including that provided by teachers in class'. Taking the argument one step further, we see that many researchers make the connection between language skills and cognitive skills: mastering academic English allows students to think more critically.

To illustrate, Arum and Roksa (2011) report that college students fail to gain specifically in three areas: critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills. The authors identify language as being foundational to all three skills. Language mastery also manifests itself in all modalities: not just writing but reading, speaking and listening. A report from the US National Center for Literacy Education (2013: 3) supports this connection by calling literacy 'the center of all learning' and a necessary component of college readiness. A report by the Carnegie Corporation (Graham & Perin, 2007) finds poor writing skills, even at the basic level, among those graduating from college. These graduates cannot write at a sufficient level of competency to be successful in college or in most workplaces. Some statistics in this report are staggering: 50% of entering students are unprepared for the work; 70% can't write at an academic level; and 25% of students entering community colleges must take remedial writing courses.

How much opportunity, though, do first year college students have to acclimate to the language demanded by professors through reading and writing assignments? According to Arum and Roksa (2011), quoting data from a recent student satisfaction survey, 83% of first year college students report that they are not assigned essays that are 20 or more pages long; and that the same is true for 51% of seniors. Without this linguistic demand, say the authors, students have little chance to practice and polish crucial skills. If faculty demand more reading and writing, giving a benchmark of 40 pages a week of reading and 20-page essays in each course, each semester, we would see students improving in their abilities to write better, think critically, and infuse their work with complex reasoning.

Other obstacles to such mastery of academic English, however, present themselves. There is agreement that being a skilled user of academic English is necessary for success in college. Further – and unfortunately – most agree that academic English is not a language form that is naturally acquired; instead, educators need to teach it (e.g. Snow & Uccelli, 2009). Kutz (2004) believes that academic language is not, but should be, 'opened up and translated by the professor into the informal language that will make it accessible' (2004: 87). This is not an easy task. Impediments include how new college students deal with an unfamiliar way of using language, one different from their daily encounters with social media and even high school English; issues related to those whose home dialects are not standard English, such as ELLs and non-native speakers; lack of communication between high school and college teachers; and obstacles that reside in the linguistic assumptions of professors, who often cannot fully convey the demands of academic language to students.

Obstacles to Mastering Academic English

Invisible criteria

The obstacles to student mastery of academic English go beyond a lack of opportunities to use the language form. Students also need to understand what it is linguistically. What is academic English? Although it goes by different labels (a brief review of the literature finds the terms academic language, school English, school language, academic genre, academic register and academic discourse), educators and scholars agree that academic English is a dialect of the English language that is considered appropriate, even necessary, to tackle the demands of college work.

Lee (2011: 105) gives a typical definition of academic English as 'clear, concise, unambiguous, and accurate; it is factual and backed up by evidence'. While there is general agreement that our students need academic English, definitions such as the one Lee reports can be vague and subjective. In fact, what constitutes college-level rigor in general has been called ambiguous (Perin, 2006). Further, calling academic English clear and concise might even strike some as ironic. A stereotype of academic English is that it is stuffy 'academese': prose that is 'difficult to read, complicated, or pompous' (Lee, 2011: 104). (To illustrate: in my email inbox yesterday was a notice of a conference featuring psychologist Steven Pinker giving a talk with the title, 'The Sense of Style: Why Academic Writing is so Bad, and How to Make it Better'; and a website being passed around my college is one for a jargon generator that allows the user to easily 'speak education' through randomized strings of verbs, adjectives and nouns, such as to prioritize multi-dimensional functionality; http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html.) Cox (2009) calls academic English obtuse, contorted and dense, while Graff (2003: 1) criticizes academics for making 'ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities'. Hacker and Dreifus (2011: 135) likewise find fault in professors' use of language: 'The bulk of academic research is so arcanely expressed that it is beyond the grasp of outside audiences, even if they are college graduates. Most academics write and speak solely for their faculty peers, in a style and syntax akin to foreign languages'. The result is that many examples of academic writing fail to function as helpful models for students. Many scholars obscure, not clarify, with language, says Graff (2003). Academics might be excused for obfuscating with one another, but as educators of undergraduates we need to do better, have a firmer grip on the nature of academic English and help students move toward fluency in those forms.

Many academic authors want to sound smart, says Green (2009: 34), who sees academics struggling to find the balance between being understood by their readers and not seeming too simplistic by experts in their own fields. 'If we [scholars] use everyday language, we run the risk that other academics will view our work as substandard due to an often-unchallenged belief that the simple is necessarily simplistic. Conversely, by using the academic language we are developing, we increase the odds that other academics may interpret our writing as alienating and [...] gibberish'. Students are less part of the equation since many non-textbooks are written for those already in the field, making students who encounter the professional literature feel out of their league. Some scholars would prefer more down-to-earth language themselves. Wareing (2004b) asks teachers to read a text written by education developers and reflect on what she labels irritants in the writing. She finds that readers dislike specialist terms that are not thoroughly explained; abstraction, especially that caused by passive sentences; personal pronouns; figurative language; abstract nouns; and non-standard mechanics and punctuation, especially words in italics. As a solution to better, clearer academic writing, Green (2009: 42) says that 'it makes sense to expose new academics to a wider range of academic writing to overcome some of the linguistic barriers'. We should not see complex thought as having to be conveyed by complex language. In other words, 'it is possible to demystify [...] writing conventions while maintaining intellectual rigour' Green (2009: 44).

First-year college students and relationship to language

The average first-year student experiences difficulties transitioning from the language demands of high school work and the language used in social media to the academic discourse demanded at college, nor can it be easily mastered without overt guidance. College students bring to campus a variety of English dialects that do not always align with standard English, i.e. a range of 'Englishes' (Behrens & Sperling, 2010; Clark, 2013; Trimbur, 2008). The typical entering college student has also logged in many hours on social media sites and is already fluent in a genre that can, and often does, vary considerably from the one demanded at college (Lenhart et al., 2008). Further, those first-year students who are of traditional age, i.e. 18 years old, are still developing their linguistic systems, adding to a repertoire of dialects and registers being acquired (Andrews, 2006). And the odds are good that their English will display some generational differences from their older teachers.

A useful parallel to the aim of acquiring academic English can be seen in the pedagogy of second language teaching. ELLs need help in lowering their level of anxiety so that they are comfortable learning English as a new language (Krashen, 1981). The same can be said of native speakers, who experience anxiety as they move from social uses of English to more academic uses (although the two student populations differ in a number of other ways). Such transitions can be rocky. All teachers seem to have stories of receiving student papers in which the writer tries to sound academic but instead winds up producing ill-formed, convoluted syntax that neither sounds fluent nor conveys a clear message. Some beginning students can at best produce a bad imitation of academic writing, which might not be surprising when one considers the poor 'academese' (as discussed above) that students encounter in numerous texts:

Students can try to be overly academic at the expense of clarity. We all have seen papers and books whose [academic] authors have overcomplicated the language of a text or speech to the point of sounding pretentious or stilted. They use sentences that are too long, they use too many clauses and 'SAT words,' and the message ends up being too concentrated or muddy to make sense to the reader or listener. (Zwiers, 2008: 39)

While the traditional first-year college student is still forming an identity as a language user, the good news is that this population understands very well the connection between language and identity, 'that the adoption of the code words of their respective social networks simultaneously establishes and symbolizes their identity, their group affiliation, their belonging' (Andrews, 2006: 33). New college students, then, are familiar with adopting the right code for the right end result. Many professors, though, do not acknowledge that the language systems of younger students are still in transition; we might well assume that a recent high school graduate, and now first-year student, is a fully formed college student ready to do scholarly work. While most acknowledge that vocabulary as a body of language knowledge continues to grow, educators should also consider skills in syntax, pragmatics and discourse as part of the learning process. Of course, the college student body also includes many non-traditional-aged students, either returning to their studies or enrolling for the first time. This population also faces language demands that should be – but rarely are – articulated and addressed in the classroom.

Faculty, then, should not just be teaching content; we should also be teaching students how to use language. Encounters with their academic texts are not enough. Nathan (2005) reports that many students are not doing the assigned reading, more so as they approach their senior year than as first-year students; and she blames time management problems for this situation. While workload issues are indeed a challenge, it could well be that a lack of reading strategies contributes to the time burden that students feel. Nathan also reports that conversations of an academic nature among students before or after class are limited to such topics as what the assignment was, if anyone did it, will it be on the exam, etc. Most students do not discuss what they are studying, the content of courses. Talk in the dorms about academics, says Nathan, makes up about 5% of the total talk that she measured. Students, then, do not get much practice using the argumentation devices of academic English, either.

English language learners and non-standard English users

While mastery of academic English is crucial for success in college, it is even more crucial for students who do not have facility with standard English or opportunities to use it in various domains: such students as ELLs and those whose native dialects constitute non-standard forms of English.

More and more immigrants are going to college in the USA (Arum & Roksa, 2011). It seems to be more common practice in the ELL classroom than with native-speaking students for teachers to deliver lessons about grammar and discuss more overtly facts about language (Nassaji & Fotos, 2011). ELL students, however, do not always engage in academic discourse the way that native speakers do. Zwiers (2007) reports that the ELL population tends to be 'linguistically enabled' by teachers: these students receive less feedback than do native speakers when their language productions (writing and speaking) do not demonstrate academic syntax and vocabulary. In other words, the academic bar is set lower; less is expected of them. Even academic idioms – such as the frequently used 'Let us now turn to' – and linguistic communication patterns common to the classroom are culture-specific and potentially alienating to non-native speakers. One very Western discourse pattern in classroom interactions, for example, is the so-called initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) pattern (also called initiation-response-feedback or IRF), whereby the teacher initiates talk, the student responds, the teacher evaluates the response and the exchange ends. Not understanding such a pattern can create obstacles to active learning for students new to a culture (Zwiers, 2007). (See Appendix for more on ELL resources.)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Understanding Language Use in the Classroom by Susan J. Behrens. Copyright © 2018 Susan J. Behrens. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Multilingual Matters Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 178309978X
• ISBN 13: 9781783099788
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 234
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile