Monday, September 5, 2011
It is Labor Day in the US. Our friend, Wally, and his partner, Nok, are here in Cape Town for the long weekend. Wally is a diplomatic courier for the US State Department, currently stationed in Pretoria. As a federal employee, he has a Labor Day holiday. So he and Nok had a long weekend in Cape Town (“The Mother City”). They took us to a very fine restaurant in Stellenbosch in the wine country. The restaurant was modern chic, with beautiful art everywhere. The food was in the style of nouvelle cuisine (Yes, I needed to eat soon after our lunch!). The front of the dining area was all glass and overlooked a beautiful, orderly vineyard. Beyond the vines, and providing a backdrop, rose fairly steep hills, mini-mountains. They appear to be formed from multiple layers of sediment, so that the sides are striped in layers. Green appears in patches, in contrast to the grey-brown of the craggy faces. Clouds move slowly past the peaks, some getting caught in the tips of the mountains. They hang there, making it overcast at the tips. Down below, where we stand watching, it is sunny, green, clear and warm. Today is a welcomed difference from the cold, wind and overcast of the past few days.
Earlier when we sat at brunch, Wally and I have a meandering volley regarding the role of accuracy in writing. He has made himself the editor of all communication that emerges from the US Embassy in Pretoria. He does this, he says, so that the messages that come from the embassy do not have errors in punctuation, grammar, spelling. He says that these miscues interfere with understanding, and that it wouldn’t look good for official communications to have errors in them. He brings the discussion to the learning of these language competencies. It would be easy for me to simply agree with him and let it go. I may never see Wally and Nok again. But something tugs at me. I suggest that accuracy may not be a very good goal when trying to teach younger ones to write. But, he argues, the learners will engrain bad habits that will then need to be unlearned. HMMM, I‘ve heard this argument before, and have mixed feelings about it. First of all, I think it is easier to learn literacy in mother tongue, and research supports this belief. Secondly, if young literacy learners are to continue to use literacy in their daily lives, there needs to be a motivating context for their initial learning. Richard learned English and literacy starting in Kindergarten, and his distaste for “things of schooling” is limitless. He has re-learned to enjoy reading in his adult reading habits (much the same as myself). Kids who learn literacy in mother tongue are thought to continue with literacy habits later in life?? Finally, and my strongest reaction, one that I couldn’t share (and therefore one of the reasons for this entry), is Wally use of the mistakes he finds.
If Wally can recognize the nature of the writing mistake, then he can be said to also know what should have been written. That means, following Goodman’s early miscue work, that not only was Wally able to understand the writers’ messages, he was also able to reconstruct the writers’ miscue in rendering it. If the writer’s miscue had truly interfered with Wally’s comprehension, he could not have known the writer’s intended meaning, and could not have categorized the “error.” All of which is to say, communication was not the rationale for Wally’s will to accuracy.
Instead, it is necessary to put Wally’s efforts “on behalf of his colleagues” must be placed into the “will to accuracy,” or the power to correct others with the false goal of “making it right.” Before Samuel Johnson, spelling was variable. Readers had the task to make it mean, based on the writers’ phonological representation. With standardization in spelling, and our acceptance of standardization, we are responsible for accurate representation. Likewise, with grammar. Since there is a system of recognized usage, we all agree to write to the rule system. All of which is designed as a contract between reciprocally arranged language users. This all seems to support Wally’s desire for absolute accuracy in language representation.
I wonder if my resistance is just petulance toward constraining rules, the vestiges of the 60’s cultural upheavals, mostly directed towards mindless authority. As far as young learners, it seems counterproductive to put the rules on the front end of learning. Learn the rules and then try to use them. In fact, Wally inadvertently made the same point. He told a story about a crash course in Thai before he was stationed there. As he spoke, Nok, who is Thai, listened as Wally tried to “get it right.” During a crash course in Thai, Wally learned “very proper Thai” only to realize that when he tried to speak what he learned, native Thai speakers appeared to be put off because his usage was stilted, formal, and just not spoken by real people. Wally said he realized he had been linguistically flim-flam-ed with book Thai. I wasn’t alert enough at the time to realize he was making my point. It probably would have been rude to point it out anyway. As far as Nok, I’m not sure about his stance toward this exchange between Wally and me about Nok’s native tongue. I think he was watching as Wally’s spoiler. Several times when Wally was choosing examples ranging from plural formations, phonology, and graphemes in this tonal language, Nok would say “No, we don’t do that.” And smile, dare I say, impishly.
What of second language learners coming into school, coming to literacy? If the learning is based on accuracy of representation, rather than successful communication of the message, it still seems a counter productive approach. The dusty old theory from both emergent literacy and reading miscue analysis suggests strongly that the first place to work and teach is meaning making. The first comment from the teacher references the meaning made or not made. The teacher, or ultimately, ALL other readers’ first response is about the message. The response can be restatement. I know from empathic listening training in counseling, that simply stating back what you heard (or read) is a powerful reinforcement for the speaker/writer. If the responder can reword and still communicate the message, all the better, as long as the reader/responder doesn’t change the meaning. This is finer grained than it appears. The risk involved in changing the words is significant. This is especially true for younger and at-risk language learners. Change the exact words and you have changed their message. Beyond restatement, teachers (and other readers) sometimes have a reaction to the writing. It can be physical. A reader can smile and look at the writer. I sometimes get goose bumps when I am moved by what I have read. Readers sometimes render an evaluation: “Wow, this is really good.” Of course that feels good to the writer (especially better than “Wow, this is really bad.”) But the readers’ power to render good is axiomatically balanced by their reciprocal power to say bad. Since this power binary is learned earlier, in non- literacy contexts, even young writers know to be wary of “this is good.” Further, and evaluative comment like “this is good” does not tell what about is good. The lack of specificity does not move the writer to productive growth, arguably the job of the teacher. We learned from behaviorism (yes, it was a powerful predictor of outcome behavior) that if you want a particular behavior to be repeated, our reinforcement must cite the desired behavior as specifically as possible, in terms that are as close to the physical observation as possible. Saying “This is really good” leaves the alignment of writing behavior/strategy and laudable outcomes (from the teacher’s perspective) up to the guessing of the student. Feels good, doesn’t reinforce targeted behavior.
After recognizing the message teachers may attempt “a correction.”
Writing Change – writing to make change; changing writing
How to talk about writing with students
The first approach is communication. With a real audience, will they get it? Needs to be a task that matters to the writer, about content they know, for people (who will read) that the writer cares about. Second, writing that has social consequences, writing that persuades or transforms. In this situation, writing has a social life – writers, whatever age, do this work with an expectation that their writing will have an impact on their readers. The writing is successful to the extent that it provokes social change. It necessitates that the writing situation is grounded in real world issues, ones that are significant to the writer. This raises for me the question of potential for change that is made possible by the a priori structuring of the task as the onset. It can’t be that the teacher can determine “real world” significance of a writing project for a particular learner. It is more a matter of negotiating, scaffolding between the teacher and the student. Teacher talk in a writing conference:
“So, you writing about X. Who do you think will read about your X when you finish? What do you think they will say about X (content)? What do you think they will say about the way you have written it (writing style, craft)? Is there something that you wish they would do when they finish reading it (social impact)?”
Given a writer’s answers to these provocative, yet non-directive questions, the teacher as guide must choose the most productive entry point to guide the revision toward the writer’s goals (as stated in their answers).
Teacher’s entry point on message in the writing: “When I read “_______,” I don’t know what you mean. Is there another way of writing that might be clearer to your other readers?”
Teacher’s entry point on writer’s goal: “You said you wanted your readers to _______ when they finished reading. I don’t get that feeling when I finish reading. Is there any way to get your readers more involved in what you are writing? If your reader get more involved, it is more likely that they will feel the same as when you wrote it.”
Teacher’s entry point on mechanics: While framing individual words: “Does that look right (for a given word)” While framing a sentence: “Does that sound like language (for grammatical miscues)
Teacher’s entry point for style:
Teacher’s entry point for structure: Take it back to the audience and purpose. “If you are trying to accomplish X, and your audience is Y, what part here doesn’t work?” “Who is your audience? Imagine yourself like them, pretend you are them. Now if X read _________ (picking a specific bit of writing), what would you think?”
Wally took a class in literary criticism at U of T Austin. In the class he was introduces to poststructural thinking. He claims he is a “foundationalist” unaffected by the class. But he also admits that PS severed his connection to organized religion. How is it that he is captivated by Foucault’s discursive construction. I guess I’ve never considered that PS eradicates the physical world, or that paying attention to discursive construction means that there can’t be a real world out there. It’s just that our understanding what ever “it” is is mediated by our perceptions of it and by the language we use to represent it. So, I can feel the heat from a rock in the sun as a physical sensation. But as soon as I call it “warmth” the sensation is mediated by my categorization of it. All the other times and situations that have been labeled “warmth” are by association part of the use of warmth. Rather than arguing about THE nature of reality, it makes more sense (in both senses) to argue for the multiple realities, to be mindful of as many versions as you can hold, and only settle for a particular version when you must make sense – in order to resolve ambiguity at the threshold of overload, breakthrough, exhaustion, excess. Relinquish control of meaning until you must select a “reasonable” interpretation. Meaning is the reduction of unlikely alternatives. This was Frank Smith definition 3 decades ago.
Wally and Nok took us to an old Afrikaaner farm, now a vineyard – Constansia Uitzig. There was a spa, hotel, and a great restaurant. I had risotto made with wild mushrooms and wrapped in pancetta. Then a rare sliced beef layered over slices of shaved parmiagian cheese, over a mound of rocket. These are some of my favorite things. Then I had a banana pudding cake soaked in and drenched with a caramel toffee sauce. It was sooo good.
Wally mentioned that he had just finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty and had lent it to Trevor. I got very excited, as I’ve never talked much about Hollinghurst and how much I enjoy his writing. I’d just finished his new book The Stranger’s Child and had just used his writing style in it to try and explain my take on Kathryn Stockton’s (Queer Child) idea of lateral development. In an email to Tom Crisp, I had written that Hollinghurst introduces a plot sequence, one that the reader what completed for closure, for confirmation/disconfirmation of prediction. And Hollinghurst will deliver on the reader’s desire for what is not yet there. But first, Hollinghurst fattens up the story, laterally develops it with description, with background, with contributing or contra-factual information. All while the reader waits in suspension. The reader, hungry for resolution, is delightfully, ludically teased by this extra, good stuff, but stuff that is different from what he originally desired. It is a sado-masochistic tension between reader and writer that is occasioned by the “crafty” Hollinghurst fattening me up, bending my will, sideways. So, when Nok drove up in front of our apartment in Mowbray, already late for their flight back to Jo’burg, I hurried up to our apartment, grabbed The Stranger’s Child and sent it off with Wally. Nok and Wally move from Pretoria to Ft. Lauderdale in October. I hope we get to see more of them. I mentioned to Nok and Wally that I had spent some time this am writing about our lunch yesterday. I didn’t really ask permission to do so, but felt responsible for letting them know I had written about them.
Last night, Mastin Prinsloo, my faculty contact at UCT, emailed to ask me if I wanted to shift my paper at the RASA conference to a plenary session. I guess it doesn’t matter a great deal. I have a guaranteed larger audience and more time. I felt honored, worried whether I had enough stuff to say for show and tell. I’m vaguely nervous about it but I’m just talking about the past work of the CLC. I have a keynote, a movie, and handouts. I can also see if anyone wants to signing up for a copy of the formative design paper.
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