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 Student weblogging
for fluency, skills, and integration
The following was written in preparation for TESOL 2007 in
Seattle: Student weblogging for fluency, skills, and integration.
Demonstration, Writing IS, CC 3B, Sat. Mar. 24, 10:30-11:15. It follows
my comments only roughly. -Thomas Leverett, CESL, Southern Illinois
Univ., Carbondale IL USA 62901-4518.
This presentation:
[ Weblogs for fluency
(home) ][ Ways to use
weblogs ][ Kinds of
fluency ][ Integration ][
Weblogs
happen ][ New blogger, old
mac ][ Portfolios ][ Resources ][ Weblogs in
esl/bibliography ]
Red bleeds the paper: writing skills through correction
Publishing intermediate student writing on a weblog puts the teacher in
the center of a controversy that has been quite heated in the last
decade: to what degree should the teacher make grammatical corrections?
Does this help the student, and is it a productive use of teacher time?
Those who firmly believe that it is a poor use of teacher time may also
feel hesitant about actually publishing developmental work, and students
will surely be unhappy about seeing their own ungrammatical work
published, although a large percentage of native self-publishers are
ungrammatical also. Nevertheless the arguments of the no red ink
side deserve to be examined.
The arguments stem from the work of Krashen, but are best
summed up by Truscott (1996); I found them in Gray (2004). They argue
that students' grammatical development is independent of the process of
correction, and happens naturally regardless of what a teacher does with
a red pen; therefore, the teacher might as well hold on to the red pen.
A related argument is that red ink on a paper actually sets the writer
back, in terms of making him/her less confident, more aware of his/her
own shortcomings, less likely to take risks in the future. I actually
don't argue with either of these assertions; I have observed both in my
teaching.
Yet I continue to correct grammar (we call it "line-editing") on
everything that is published, because I believe in publishing, I believe
that that's what the students want, and I believe that on some level, it
helps them. I don't expect it to help them immediately; it may or may
not. I don't expect them to get right tomorrow what I corrected today;
they won't. But I believe that the boost that comes from publishing,
and communicating grammatically, one's feelings about something
important, is ultimately more helpful than the setback that occurs when
one notices that one's paragraph needs a lot of correction to be
considered standard.
In fact the biggest arguments against Truscott and his followers have
come from the students themselves, who consistently and avidly demand
correction in spite of any evidence that is presented against its
effectiveness. Such studies as Narita (2006) have attempted to show
that correction does have immediate positive effects, and countless more
have tried to show that "feedback" and "noticing" are crucial steps in
the process of acquisition for learners. I agree with these also, and
don't necessarily see a contradiction. My own philosophy can be summed
up below.
1. Students' acquisition process requires certain organizational
conditions in the student's brain, and is therefore not going to respond
immediately to most correction; it is mistaken to expect any given red
mark on a paper to have immediate results in terms of a student's
acquisition process. Nevertheless, grammatical marking is considered
helpful by the student, and I believe we can take their word for it that
it probably is.
2. Students want their own work, when published, to be grammatical and
appropriate; they get confidence from communicating successfully to a
public audience. As a result, even if the correction is of no value,
immediate or long-term, to the acquisition of grammatical rules, it is
still useful in this particular exercise, in achieving the larger goal
of successful and long-lasting communication in a public venue.
3. The best approach to grammatical correction in this exercise,
therefore, is for the teacher to correct their paragraphs, as simply and
directly as possible, before publishing; though it may be tedious,
simply try to determine what the student is trying to say, and help him
or her say it, grammatically and directly. When not sure of the
students' intended meaning, give the student possible choices, or ask. I
generally tell students that they may ask about grammatical particulars,
and that I would be glad to answer, outside of class, but that I am not
actually spending class time discussing grammatical rules, details,
etc.
Skill through practice
I teach higher levels as well as lower levels, and I'm always surprised
when a higher level student, who clearly has complex academic
textbook-reading skills, as well as grammar test-taking skills,
essay-writing please-the-teacher skills, or some other kind of charm, is
so thoroughly lacking in basic sentence-making skills. I'm inclined to
think, then, that somebody got it backwards: they taught this student
how to pass tests (like the TOEFL)- yet were unable to teach basic
writing fluency at a sentence level.
I am not the first to make this observation. My thinking has followed
along the lines of Peter Elbow* and Karen Hornick (1986), who have
argued for a writing curriculum that focuses on fluency and writer
comfort, as opposed to, say, a system where the writer may write four or
five papers in a term, all of which heavily graded for grammar and form,
and, in many cases, oozing with student discomfort at the very process
of writing that begat them. Students who are unable to write a sentence
without great amounts of self-pressure, students who have not
incorporated basic rules of capitalizing sentence-initial words, and
students who wait until the last possible minute to write a paper,
every time, or plagiarize heavily, due to lack of
self-confidence, and displeasure at the act of writing, show signs, to
me, that the system did not recognize their need to write more, all
along the path toward general fluency in all areas.
At the moment we have a large population of students who are relatively
fluent (though not always grammatical) speakers and listeners; they are
weak in reading and seem to especially dread writing. But why? If their
writing could come to reflect their speaking, and even approximate the
words they are able to understand and use orally, they would shine in
writing.
Another theorist who has influenced me is Marie Wilson Nelson (1991),
who basically argued that students learn grammatical structures at the
point when they need them for producing meaningful language in
meaningful situations; that is, one has to look at the organization of
their minds, because only they, the students, can determine when
something will be useful often enough to make it worth their while to
incorporate it into their production systems.
I combine these elements with a larger picture of what I really want of
a student, before they leave our program and go on to academic studies,
where they will not have the loving understanding of teachers who
embrace cultural diversity in production standards of standard academic
writing. Ideally they should have no trouble sitting down at a computer
and producing volumes of fluent writing on any subject. I would be
satisfied, just that they be able to sit down at the computer, write the
way they can speak, write what they know, and make it a close enough
approximation to standard English that it can be recognized, even if it
has some errors. And, I would hope that they could do this for any
class, in any subject, particularly one in which they have attended
class and have some idea of what the assignment is.
I am no different from more paper-and-ink-bound writing teachers in that
I'd like to see paragraphing skills, sentence skills, grammatical
skills, good spelling, good spacing and punctuation, in general a clean
product that the student can be proud of. I want the student to write
with strength and clarity; I want his/her paragraphs to hold together
and go somewhere. I want them to be interesting to read to passersby as
well as to me and to their classmates, and to the other teachers in the
program.
In addition I want them to develop ideas of thesis statement, topic
sentence, support, introduction, conclusion, etc., which will help them
in more formal writing situations later on, and which should ultimately
become part of their view of their own writing products that they will
carry with them. I de-emphasize these in this project, partly because
they are dealt with elsewhere (in writing class), but also because I
feel that students should have good general fluency, confidence and
ability to write before they start dealing with these. I also
believe that they are, to some degree, overrated. If teachers stress
them too heavily, then all writing products seem too similar, like an
elementary school class's wall full of five-paragraph essays. I like to
say to them that there's a time and place for five-paragraph essays, and
there's a time and place for them to just be able to write about things
they see and care about, and I'm working on the second one.
But I want them to do this not only in paper and ink, with double-space,
indentation, and a header, but also online, in block paragraphs, with
links where appropriate. And I believe that their online presentation
trumps their paper-and-ink presentation, in the sense that people will
be reading it forever when it is truly published; it will be analyzed,
copied, referred to; it will be crawled on by Google's spiders until the
end of time, whereas the paper form will most likely sit in a drawer,
perhaps be read by one or two people at most. So their online
presentation is much more important in the big picture, and I structure
the class and the grading to show that.
Lately I've been trying to incorporate my thinking into a set of
precepts which I use to guide my class lessons. The class in which I do
the most weblogging is not specifically assigned to teach writing at
all, yet I am chagrined to find that the formal Writing class is so
overburdened with its own objectives, with this particular population,
that getting on the weblogs is very difficult given the time allotment
that they have.
I have begun using the term "volume theory" to describe a philosophy
which believes simply that in order for them to have the same level of
writing fluency as they have other kinds of fluency, they must have
frequent practice, a sense of ease and comfort, and enough volume of
production to make it worth their while to learn the things that will
make that production easier and less stressful. From this idea I get the
following:
1. Teachers' time is precious, and so is students' time; therefore,
having students write more will necessarily cause some adjustment in
everyone's calendar and expectations. If you want students to write
more, and write as much as will be necessary for them to truly be
successful in becoming more fluent in writing, more comfortable with the
process, and more successful in incorporating good writing habits into
their systems, you will have to make that time available to both them
and you, in whatever venue you can.
2. If their writing inevitably leads to a finished product that is
formatted, spelled right, punctuated, and in general made to look
comprehensible and presentable, whether it be in a paper-and-ink format
or online, they will, by themselves, take shortcuts and start producing
better formatted, properly spelled, punctuated work right from the
start; life will be easier for them that way. The point at which they
start doing this on their own is your, the teacher's, target. You
can not force them to make their writing systematically cleaner, more
fluent, etc.; they will do it only when they are ready, and only when
they can clearly see that it will be useful to them from now on. There
is no way from here to there, except over large quantities of
work.
Dealing with the technology is similar to dealing with the writing. The
more they do it, the better they get, the more natural it is. It
becomes less a special thing that an eccentric teacher demands, and more
just a medium of expression that they have to master, in order to
communicate with each other and with other people around them. I know
from experience that their first tries at it will be tenuous,
conservative, sometimes vacuous; after a few times they loosen up and
begin saying more interesting things, and then, after a while longer,
they become more interested in being clearer and more powerful, and
saying things better. It is at this point that I know I have started
something that will ultimately have its own momentum and stay with them
long after they leave our program.
There are roadblocks to this kind of technological fluency. For example,
many students make a weblog, learn to use it, let it go for a week, or a
term, and then forget their passwords- why? They were told to remember
them, and, at the time, probably agreed to do it. It wasn't insolence or
rebellion. They simply weren't using the information regularly enough.
Similarly, they forget how to edit, how to publish, how to get out of
one dashboard and onto another, etc. None of these are rocket science,
though in some cases knowing the skills is dependent on knowing key
words used by Blogger, such as "Publish," "Sign out" or"Edit." On macs,
two tough nuts are learning double-space on Microsoft Word (document,
paragraph), and learning link code in making blog posts. WIth the link
code, even the best students have to ask several times, until they at
least figure out where they can find the information, even if it
is on a handout, directly in front of them.
With this in mind, I have collected a strategy in presenting weblog
assignments and carrying them out, that is, getting students to write,
edit, and publish voluminously. These are as follows:
1. Take time to show them the lab, the weblogs, blogger itself, and what
it means to have a weblog and publish on it. You don't want to have to
explain this after the process has started. Let the good students
explain it to the weaker ones.
2. Give them lots of choices of websites to look at. Have a good sense
of what they like and want to talk about; make the choices varied. Don't
corner any student into talking about religion, politics, or personal
experience that he/she is uncomfortable with. Don't make any of the
websites reading-intensive. Make weblog assignments a fun thing to do
and write about; make them want to choose, and be willing to write about
more than one of them.
3. I incorporate their writing assignments into speaking assignments, so
that they bring their papers to class, use them to speak to partners,
and hand them in at the end of class. Later, at the same time they are
updating their weblogs, they are aware of what their classmates are
doing and are waiting to read or at least see what their classmates have
put on theirs.
4. Line-edit what they write; help them say what they want to say. In
classes of over twenty people this can make weblog assignments a huge
burden to you; simplify your own experience as much as possible.
The advantage of line-editing first is that they can be more confident
that what they publish is readable and acceptable on some level, when
they publish it; it has, after all, been approved by the teacher.
5. You may have to explain how to make links several times before
students get it. It's worth it. Once they've made two or three of
them, they get better at it, and they don't generally forget it. They'll
be grateful that someone took the time to teach them the skill,
too.
6. Systematically use the comment function to get them to read each
other's work and participate in the community. I require comments but
make almost no demands on what form they take (though I sometimes
require questions). I tell them that personal comments can be erased by
the weblog-owner; comments placed outside of the class's assignments
(for example, on entries done for other classes) may not be seen by me;
thus they may not get credit for them. By the way, there are many and
varied approaches to the comments; some teachers have their students do
all their writing in the comments, so that the comments become a
repository of student work in and of themselves. For my classes, the
comments are a wide-open free-for-all of pure communication. This system
has both advantages and disadvantages (see p. 5). Comment
yourself. Share your own life and weblogs.
7. Do this as much as possible in a term; you will see a big difference
between being able to do two or three entries, and being able to do five
or six. They will get better at it. They will be able to do it in
their free time. They will spend more and more time reading each
other's work. They will start making comments naturally.
*I have lost the precise reference for Elbow in which he
says exactly what I am saying here; and, short of the real time required
to hike over to the brick-and-mortar library and retrieve it, I'll have
to just claim here that he said this, and then say, I'm not sure where.
bibliography
Gordon, S. (2005). Is technology
good for us? The Speculist blog.
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000444.html. Accessed
3-07.
Gray R. (2004). Grammar
correction in esl/efl writing classes may not be effective.
Internet TESL Journal X, 11, November.
Green, J. M. (1998). Helping
ESL Writers Grow.
http://w3.salemstate.edu/~jgreen/helpingeslwriters.html. Accessed
3-07.
Hornick, K. (1986). Teaching writing
to linguistically diverse students. ERIC Digest Number 32.
http://www. ericdigests.org/pre-924/diverse.htm. Accessed 3-07.
Leverett, T. (2006a, Aug.). This is your class
on weblogs. Teaching English with Technology 6, 3. IATEFL
Poland Computer SIG Publication.
http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_tech25.htm#cla
Leverett, T. (2006b, Aug.). Three ways to
integrate weblogging into your writing classes. Teaching English
with Technology 6, 3. IATEFL Poland Computer SIG Publication.
http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_tech25.htm#way.
Leverett, T. (2006c). Daring to enter
the blogosphere. Prog. Admin. IS, Paper, TESOL Convention, Tampa,
FL, Mar.
Leverett, T. and Montgomerie, J. (2005). Teaching teachers to
use weblogs, Internet Fair, CALL-IS, TESOL 2005, San Antonio,
March.
Narita, M. (2006). Changes in
Japanese EFL writing through a native English reader's feedback,
(pdf). School of Language Communication, Tokyo International University.
http://homepage2.nifty.com/barbra/SLW_Tamkang.pdf. Accessed 3-07.
Nelson, M. (1991). At the Point of Need. Heinemann Boynton/Cook
Publishers, Portsmouth NH. Available at Amazon.
Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing
classes. Language Learning, 46:2, pp. 327-369.
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Photo above (Leap of Faith) by Kurt Larsen.
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