Journal
of Basic Writing
10/2, 1991, 4-32
Using a
“Write-Speak-Write” Approach For Basic Writers
Robert de
Beaugrande
Mar Jean
Olson*
ABSTRACT:
The authors begin by developing some reasons why basic writing is not at all
“basic,” but a serious challenge to theory and practice of the most advanced
stages in linguistics, psychology, sociology, and education. The authors go on
to advocate an approach focused on the communicative participants, rather than
on the language or the text, for assessing potential language competence as it
develops both in speech and writing, and for redefining the notion of
“error.” Finally, the authors present a pilot project in which the use of
speech is found to assist basic writers in producing writing that is improved
not merely in its length, fluency, and involvement, but also in its concrete
detail and organization.
Dilemmas
for Theory and Practice
It is not
surprising that basic writing should be a long-standing practice for which
academic research has been hard-put to supply a theory. Most theoretical work on
language has been aimed toward a high level of abstraction, where deviations
from general norms and standards are discounted or treated as marginal. Also,
the samples of language and discourse addressed in such work have usually been
in standard written prose, even when the researchers expressly declared the
primacy of speech over writing.” When language varieties were studied,
moreover, they were usually those current among some regional group and could
thereby be understood as localized norms in their own right.
After a
long delay, language research began to address the varieties belonging to social
groups as well as to purely regional ones. The evaluative or judgmental
implications at once became more acute. Labeling a dialect as “Low German”
does not carry negative implications (the “lowness” belongs to the low-lying
plains of northern Germany), but labeling one as “lower class” does.
The
so-called “deficit hypothesis” about social language varieties, formulated
in the 1960s and 1970s by a group around Basil Bernstein in London, offers an
instructive retrospect. Its proponents had been comparing samples of the speech
of “middle class” and “lower class” British children and finding that
the first group manifested a more “elaborated code” and the second group a
more “restricted code.” In his early work (he later found it unwise),
Bernstein cataloged the traits of the two varieties, which he at first called
“formal speech” and “public speech"-two labels referring to
situations rather than to traits of the “code” itself. But his labels for
the traits wore mostly code-based and resembled commonplace descriptions of
basic writing, even though he was purportedly referring to speech. In contrast
to the “accurate grammatical order and syntax” of the elaborated variety,
the restricted variety manifested “short, grammatically simple, often
unfinished sentences with a poor syntactic form,” along with “simple and
repetitive use of conjunctions,” “little use of subordinate clauses, and so
on (Bernstein 169f).
These
traits were construed as indicators of psychological deficits as well as
linguistic ones. Bernstein postulated an “inability to hold a formal subject
through a speech sequence,” a “dislocation of informational content,” a
“confounding of reason and conclusion,” and so on (169f). This diagnosis may
disturb writing teachers, who have good reason to consider such drastic
extrapolations unduly pessimistic and premature, the more so as we lack a
reliable consensus about how to draw direct connections between “form” and
“content.”
Predictably,
the same trend toward psychological extrapolation surfaced in American studies
of the speech of Black children, where social differentiation was correlated
with racial. When Bereiter and Engelmann (36) had trouble recognizing distinctly
articulated work boundaries in “the child's pronunciation,” the diagnosis
was an “inability to deal with sentences as sequences of meaningful parts.”
Thus, “the speech of severely deprived children” was believed to signal “a
total lack of ability to use language as a device for acquiring and processing
intonation” (34, 39).
This kind
of extrapolation is ominous in view of the already confused educational policies
in the Anglo-American world. The project to make education as general as
possible and to base its success criteria on “merit” rather than wealth and
privilege led to an uncritical faith in standardized testing. At the top of the
hierarchy was “intelligence testing,” which claimed to measure a unitary,
innate intellectual competence unrelated to social and cultural
situations-despite the uncanny correlations, already shown by Cyril Burt in the
1940s, between IQ and parental income. A College Board Report presented the same
finding for the SAT scores of 647,000 students tested in 1973-74.2 Evidently,
measurements of “Intelligence” and “aptitude” address not so much the
innate competence or fixed scholastic potential as the complex and variegated
social situations in which some students develop their competence and realize
their potential while others do not. This problem cannot be resolved merely by
eliminating socially marked content (if that were possible) or introducing the
content of a presumed “subculture.” High pressure test-taking, especially in
abstract problem solving, is itself such a heavily acculturated middle-class
activity that it cannot measure the competence of lower-class children. The
“myth of the deprived child,” which, as Herbert Ginsburg has shown as a
close corollary of the “deficit hypothesis,” is a product of narrow
middle-class preconceptions about the relevant modes of being “intelligent.”
In the
past, most standard intelligence and aptitude tests have not included a free
writing sample, not so much because the hubris of testmakers like ETS is limited
(it isn't) but because the time and expense of scoring it would cut into
profits. When language items have appeared on a test, they typically assumed the
more tractable and ominous form of multiple-choice questions about tricky points
of grammar that would not even come up except in rigidly standardized prose
(like “Vote for whoever/whomever is best qualified”). Under recent pressure,
the inclusion of writing samples is growing as a token gesture, but we doubt
that the testmakers will provide scoring techniques which genuinely measure
anyone's intelligence or aptitude from a writing sample and certainly not those
of basic writers, who may be even more effectively discriminated by the newer
tests.
Thus,
academic conceptions in linguistics, psychology, and standardized testing have
united to reinforce, with more technical and protected rationales, the old
folk-wisdom that nonstandard speech and basic writing are signs of inherent low
ability. If even theoretical specialists are unable to transcend this
folk-wisdom, the prospects are much bleaker for practicing teachers and
administrators, and bleakest of all for the learners themselves. The danger
persists that we may all take it for granted, at least secretly, that nothing
decisive can be done. The eminent linguist Sir Randolph Quirk once told me I
simply shouldn't expect everybody to learn how to write well: “You can't teach
a dog to grow persimmons,” he added.
When
research findings and the diagnoses drawn from them tally with discriminatory
social and racial attitudes, the researchers face three distinct choices. They
can, as Arthur Jensen has done over the years, contumaciously insist that their
findings represent “scientific facts” we must face, whether we like it or
not: Blacks and poor children are inferior, period. Or, as Bereiter and
Engelmann did, they can treat the findings as a factual condition we can resolve
by remedial education: the children are inferior now, but can be “remediated.”
Or, as William Labov has done, they can scrutinize the underlying
predispositions that led to such an interpretation of the “facts” and can
provide other facts and alternative interpretations, showing for example how the
same “deprived” Black children manifest impressive communicative skills in
other types of situation: the children are not inferior, but are made to appear
so by the skewed relationship between their own culture and the educational
contexts we have created for them.
Most of
us, including composition teachers, do suspect that writing plays a major role
in psychological development and social advancement, but the relevant contexts,
conditions, and causalities are hard to establish. The widespread
nineteenth-century notion that merely transcribing texts word for word would do
the trick is no longer seriously maintained; but an empirical study of grades 1,
3, and 5 in the mid-1980s showed that two-thirds of the total class time spent
writing-the total itself being only 15% of the school day-still consisted of
word-for-word copying in workbooks (Anderson et al.). Around the same time, a
study of secondary schools found that less than 10% of the students' time in
English instruction itself was spent writing connected prose (Hansen et al.).
Under conditions like these, the potential of writing for psychological and
social progress cannot be properly assessed, and the discouraging results
obtained so far tell us very little about what might be achieved under more
favorable conditions, provided we had the means to identify and create them.
To meet
that provision, we must address a whole gallery of troublesome questions, such
as:
(1)What deserves to constitute the core or norm of a language?
(2) What brands of language should be distinguished, and by what
criteria?
(3) What evidence can a given brand of language provide about the
psychological or social status of the people who speak or write it?
(4) How are a person's speech and writing related to each other, and how
does each contribute to development -of one's potential?
(5) How can we gauge current writing skills?
(6) How can we differentiate these current skills from potential skills?
(7) How can we create conditions for encouraging the realization of this
potential?
(8) Where do writing skills fit in the overall picture of human
abilities?
(9) Where do writing skills fit in the overall picture of intellectual or
academic progress?
For a
long time, these questions were seldom raised, presumably because institutions
believed that conventional education would deal with them in practice, at least
for learners who were sufficiently meritorious, dedicated, gifted, and so on,
whether or not we had any theory to explain how. Recently, such questions have
been much more frequently raised but will keep getting confused with each other
as long academic standard prose continues to be the pervasive dominant standard
both for describing language and for judging academic abilities. This prose
tends to form a closed circle which not only keeps the outsider from entering,
but also hinders those of us who have mastered it from communicating reliably
with those who have not.
Basic
Writing as a Linguistic, Psychological, and Social Phenomenon
A
material improvement in the situation of basic writing presupposes a
comprehensive statement of what it is rather than what it is not. At least three
crucial standpoints can be distinguished.
From a linguistic
standpoint, basic writing is essentially a written language variety
reflecting the writer's speech patterns, filtered only through some
autochthonous strategies of transcription and deprived of all the expressive
means not amenable to these strategies. From this standpoint, the central
problem is that the resources of speech for expression and elaboration are not
inferior to (more “restricted” or “dislocated” than) the resources of
writing, but different. Caution is needed lest we assess this difference
mechanically because we are distracted by the flagrant disparities in English
between speech contours versus written orthography and punctuation. If we can
genuinely free ourselves from our preoccupation with errors — a goal which has
been frequently advocated and rarely achieved3 — we may, by dint of
conscious exertion, overcome the destructive bias of equating basic writing with
“misspelled” and “mispunctuated” writing. As word processors become
widely available, the instruction in spelling should be shifted away from
episodic memorization of a sole correct spelling toward thematic heuristics for
approximating a plausible spelling well enough to use spell-checking
programs efficiently.
So far,
linguistics has examined the more important organizational differences between
speech and writing only occasionally, as in the work of the Czechoslovakian
scholar Josef Vachek.4 Even linguistics has been unduly influenced by
the “folk belief, typical of a written culture, according to which spoken
language is disorganized and featureless,” as “'demonstrated' by
transcriptions in which speech is reduced to writing and made to look like a
dog's dinner,” due to “the disorder and fragmentation” in “the way it is
transcribed” without “Intonation or rhythm or variation in tempo and
loudness” (Halliday xxiv). As far as I know, Michael Halliday was the first
major linguist who completely abrogated this folk-wisdom:
The
potential of the system is more richly developed and more fully revealed in
speech. Spoken language responds continually to the small but subtle changes in
its environment, both verbal and nonverbal; and in so doing exhibits a rich
pattern of semantic [and] grammatical variation that does not get explored in
writing. . . . Spoken language can “choreograph” very long and intricate
patterns of semantic movement while maintaining a continuous flow of discourse
that is coherent without being constructional. (xxillf, 201)
Halliday's
vision suggests that part of learning to write is learning to restrict the
richness of elaboration, rather than to enhance it. Halliday's argument bears
directly on the research that led to the “deficit hypothesis,” with which he
and his wife Ruqaiya Hasan were initially involved. Researchers like Bernstein
and Hawkins in the U.K. and Bereiter and Engelmann in the U.S. were evidently
proceeding on the assumption that the only relevant resources for
“elaborating the code” are those typical of standard written prose, the same
variety linguistics had often treated as the most basic and general
instantiation of language. This outlook can see only a “deficit” in
varieties that use alternative resources. The transformation of spontaneous
speech written down without regard for intonation, tone of voice, emotional
nuances, and so on is compounded for the speech of a specific social or racial
group whose pronunciation and grammar are further removed from standard
orthography, e.g., in terms of marking the boundaries of words or the number and
tense of verb forms.
Any
genuine solution presupposes a description of the language based directly on
speech rather than on writing. Like his teacher J. R. Firth (23), Halliday (xxiii)
has called for a “grammar of spoken language” but has not yet provided more
than an outline of it. His most important strategy, in our view,5 is
to shift the focus from the exhaustive segmentation of sentences, typical in
both traditional grammar and linguistics, over to the functional expression of
experiential and communicative categories, such as “mental process” or
“circumstance.”
From a psychological
standpoint, basic writing might be described as a rudimentary stage in which
the learner's expressive strategies were retarded or indeed arrested before they
could be developed and refined to tap the special resources of written prose,
such as the opportunity to reconsider and revise one's choices. However, this
description entails a possibly fictional assumption that a “normal”
rudimentary stage of writing in fact occurs during language development. In some
cases, writing may not have appeared on the agenda at all. Such was the
situation of a group of college-age Sudanese refugees in a camp in Haifa,
Israel, who were supposed to be prepared for education. They spoke only Amharic
and had never written any language. To make literacy more accessible, I
recommended a strong orientation toward their spoken culture, such as writing
their most familiar songs and stories down first in Amharic with the Hebrew
alphabet, then in Hebrew, before attempting to teach them the standard grammar
of Hebrew — a language whose dependence on writing included the remarkable
reanimation of the language from scriptural sources during the nineteenth
century.
Moreover,
Halliday's argument indicates the perils of associating “spoken” with
“rudimentary.” If one's speech skills were fairly well developed during the
stage when basic writing was leveling out, the written texts should consistently
reflect at least some speech-like elaboration. But if one's speech skills were
not developed, the written texts should show little consistency except what
might arise from the basic writer's guesses about the organization of writing,
whose creative and ingenious quality, as Mina Shaughnessy first pointed out, is
routinely overlooked by teachers who judge the results purely as academic prose.
It is
therefore essential to uncouple the issues of psychological development from
those of linguistic development. For example, we could examine the ability of
basic writers at various ages to give and follow instructions for performing
tasks of varying complexity, using speech and writing alternately. Or we could
have them read a story written down by another basic writer and retell it in
both speech and writing. However, such probes would have to be carried out under
conditions where the learners would not be self-conscious about their language,
and, in the bounds of conventional schooling, this might be difficult.
From a social
standpoint, basic writing is a highly specific variety of language whose
users create it more through individual efforts than through communal consensus.
Its audience is solely the writing teacher or a similar institutional
representative. It therefore carries a chiefly “metacommunicative”
significance, indicating how the writer proceeds rather than conveying a
pertinent message.
Although
users of basic writing constitute a recognizable minority, the latter is not
defined in terms of writing skills per se, and the prospect that they might be
organized to assert their human rights is virtually nil. The discrimination to
which they are subjected is nowhere regulated by statute. And since the current
trend in court decisions is to legitimize discriminators against nonstandard
speakers of English (on the fiction that the problem is individual and personal
rather than social or racial), nonstandard writers have little to hope for in
the future.
The
social diversification, to which “equal opportunity education” was intended
to be a response, is reconverting today upon a steadily constricting bottleneck
of economic opportunities whose scarcity counsels more urgently than ever
against any deviations from the standards recommended for “upward mobility.”
Moreover, minorities are increasingly suspicious that they can be integrated
only if they consent to being estranged from their own language and culture. And
even if they should consent, they have no guarantee that a distinct improvement
in individual status will ensue; or that such an improvement might not be used
as an alibi for leaving the social disparities themselves unaltered.
From an educational
standpoint, basic writing is the product of the disequilibrium between two
contrary tendencies: to make education more general, but to continue centering
it on a special variety of language and culture whose users form an ever-smaller
minority as the educational process expands. This minority not merely enjoys an
enormous advantage throughout their personal schooling, but also continues to
serve as evidence and pretext for a wishful model of the hypothetical student at
whom the average textbook or instructional method is usually aimed. Their
exceptional success furnished a justification for retaining these materials or
altering them only in cosmetic or gradual ways.
Thus,
higher education has admitted a nontraditional population of students, yet has
continued to discriminate them indirectly by making standard prose a central
yardstick all across the curriculum yet not providing genuinely workable means
to describe it in their own terms, let alone to produce it. This impasse is
unlikely to be relieved until we can make a much more encompassing assessment of
how basic writers come to be “basic,” and what their current skills and
future potential might be. We must above all understand the conditions of basic
writing as a linguistic, psychological, and social phenomenon in its own right,
and not as a mere negation of some other phenomenon or as an anarchy of
deviations and disruptions. This understanding should help us to appreciate not
only why basic writing has the traits it does, but why it presents such a
challenge to both theory and practice.
The
Language versus the Participants
We can
encourage such understanding by orienting our theories and practices toward
communicative criteria. The focus of attention would then be the participants
rather than the language or the text, which has occupied center stage in nearly
all areas of theory and practice in traditional grammar, linguistics, and
composition. Such an orientation has recently been advocated both in writing
research and in the evaluation of students' products, but because the means for
implementation are not well accounted for, we continue to focus on language and
its formal properties, whose “correctness” appears to offer us a convenient
and straightforward frame of reference.
Dispassionate
examination of communication in a wide variety of settings, including other
languages than English, leads to a significant conclusion: formal correctness is
not crucial for communicative success. The process of “pidginization,” which
improvises an intermediary language for everyday use, proves that formal
correctness can be extensively relaxed without adverse effects on one's ability
to communicate. By building a bridge between the languages of the participation
groups, the pidgin is the only practicable medium in such settings. The pidgin
English spoken in Ghana, for example, is the only medium of nationwide
communication among the speakers of more than forty indigenous languages.6
Its elementary but flexible structure-which might well be counted a
“deficit” by the research cited in this paper's first section-enables it to
accommodate the diverse formative principles of these languages without
jeopardizing comprehensibility. On the other hand, British English, the language
of the former colonizers, is ridiculed by pidgin speakers as “booklong,” a
term which points up the Ghanaians’ awareness of the close link between
standardization and extended written texts.
At first,
the Ghanaian values seem paradoxical: the very features that count as markers of
correctness in British schools count in Ghana as errors-more social errors than
formal ones. But this paradox disappears if we adopt a communication-oriented
definition of “errors": — a class of language events not intended but
perceived as negative metacommunicative signals about the speaker or writer
rather than about the message. Errors are disputatious because different people
or groups vary dramatically in their “error-consciousness,” that is, in
their ability and disposition to perceive and interpret such signals.
Composition textbooks, such as the recent one falsely claiming that “a
sentence fragment doesn't really say anything” (Glazier, 67), often imply the
dubious theses that errors entirely blot out the message, and that a high level
of error-consciousness is therefore both widespread and desirable and should be
internalized while learning to write. Since basic writers know better from their
own experience in conversation, they understandably resent being asked to
internalize an attitude that inaccurately disqualifies their own language as a
means of communication. Most of the error-consciousness in the English-speaking
world is either the property of English teachers or the product of their
ministrations to propagate it.
This
communicative redefinition of “errors” illustrates the proposed focus on the
participants. The traditional focus on the language or text, in contrast, has
helped to entrench the pernicious notion, dear to self-appointed guardians of
language like Wilson Follett and Edwin Newman, of an error as a tangible
absolute for all participants and contexts. This notion reinforces the
folk-belief, cited above, that everyday speech is crammed with errors. Only by
shifting our focus to communicative participants can we hope to bring about more
tolerant and enlightened public attitudes about language, as advocated by Anne
Gere and Eugene Smith in Attitudes, Language, and Change.
This
newer focus reopens the question of which participant groups have the right to
decide what is or is not an error. In the past, this right was simply seized by
persons whose claim to authority was based chiefly on their own exaggerated
error-consciousness, and who felt free to inflate the catalogue of supposed
errors with their personal whims and dislikes, as Dwight Bolinger has shown. And
as long as errors are held to be tangible absolute's, none can ever be removed
from the list, and whoever disputes the wrongness of any censured usage gets
rebuked for “destroying standards” and Corrupting the language.”
The
participant orientation has been largely neglected in linguistics, which
remained language-oriented to the point where, in generative grammar, the
“speaker-hearer” faded away into an idealization devoid of nearly all human
qualities, like the “abstract automaton” invoked by Chomsky.7
Recently, however, linguists working in “pragmatics” and “discourse
analysis” have shown how many important regularities of language must be
described in terms of participants.” The problem at present is that attempts
to draw the full consequences of this insight are still hampered by the
language-oriented theories and
terminologies inherited from the past.
A
participant orientation would offer a means to reappraise the difference between
speech and writing. An intriguing finding in research so far has been that only
a few people, among them trained public speakers and radio broadcasters, produce
spoken texts that closely resemble their written texts in linguistic terms. The
large majority, including most academics, exhibit two quite divergent brands of
language in one mode versus the other. Speech transcripts from videotapings made
here at the University of Florida, for example, displayed English professors
speaking in ways fairly similar to ordinary freshman writers.
If the
same participant demonstrates such consistent patterns of diversity irrespective
of skill level, speaking and writing must involve at least partially different
types of competence, which can and often do develop in quite divergent ways.
Many problems regarding usage, particularly in America, have arisen from the
tendency to overlook this potential difference by extrapolating naively from one
modality to the other. One of these problems is the misconception that if
writing is to be standardized, we must first standardize speech to resemble it
as closely as possible. This idea entrains writing teachers in an endless
crusade far beyond either our authority or our capacity. We extend our already
overdeveloped error-consciousness to cover the students' speech as well as their
writing, and end up asking them to adopt a brand of speech which, within their
peer group, might count as a conspicuous (and possibly ludicrous) deviation,
like the “booklong” British English in Ghana.
Another
problem in confusing speech with writing is the belief that because the speech
competence of our students has been essentially stabilized by the time they
enter our classes, we will not be able to influence their writing competence
very materially. The fact of the matter, we suspect, is that our methods and
textbooks are largely designed on the — increasingly wishful — assumption
that the learners' writing competence has also been at least partially
stabilized by that time. Our methods and textbooks work best when this is so,
e.g., among children of middle-class or upper-class families maintaining a
literate environment, but are otherwise ineffectual; and the lack of
stabilization among basic writers is readily misunderstood as a disability to
develop competence at all, irrespective of age.
Yet
another problem arises when basic writers also confuse speech with writing. By
projecting their difficulties with writing over onto their speech, they acquire
a mistaken feeling of incompetence to use the language in general. Their major
language resource to invest in writing, namely their speech competence, thus
gets disqualified as a liability, leaving them with the sinking sensation of
trying to start from absolute zero, which really is impossible. We should thus
not be too surprised when basic writers pass through years of schooling without
attaining functional literacy and become steadily more alienated from the whole
enterprise.
To
recover their motivation, basic writers need to accept two beliefs: that their
speech competence is a key resource, not a liability, and that it does not have
to be transformed before their writing competence can develop. These beliefs can
be fostered through an approach which actively encourages them to invest their
speech capabilities and helps them to appreciate how writing differs according
to its own particular conditions and purposes. The main focus would be placed on
recognizing and controlling potential problems involved in those differences and
on exploiting the resources specific to writing.
In such
an ambience, the task of writing can be decomposed into subtasks whose number
and scope are tailored to fit the group of learners at hand. This principle
obliges the basic writing teacher to adapt the design of instruction to each
group. The added demands on the already overburdened teacher can be offset,
however, as the students become steadily more capable of evaluating and revising
their own products. The traditional task of “correcting papers,” which
improves the teacher's competence while leaving the learners crucially dependent
on outside reactions, is thereby transferred to the learners. The teacher's
function is then to identify problems and suggest strategies, whereas the
learners must find and alleviate the specific instances on their own.
Tasks and
criteria must be carefully designed lest the learners' error-consciousness be
raised in an inhibiting way. Teacher-performed correction raises this
consciousness only vaguely and disconcertingly by suggesting that errors are
frequent if not unavoidable but also that the teacher alone is competent to find
and remedy them. Instead, we must try to convey the message that most issues of
usage depend on what suits the context and purpose and do not demarcate a
borderline between “right” and “wrong.” Learners should become attuned
to potential problems at the same time as they acquire strategies for
identifying and alleviating them. The resulting consciousness will then be more
focused and more practicable than that fostered by teacher-performed
corrections.
One
reason for the meager and undependable results of traditional “remediation”
is that it fails to take the writer seriously as a communicative participant
with a concrete social history. Such remediation is often one more rehearsal of
the same methods that led to the basic writer's predicament in the first place.
The metalanguage imposed by the materials is not helpful because it is either
too technical (e.g., “finite verb,” “gerundive”) or too vague (e.g.,
“a sentence” is “a complete thought”) to apply to real communication.
Noncommunicative drills merely become steadily more meaningless through
recapitulation. Error-consciousness is intensified but no effective or
practicable strategies for applying it are inferred. Creativity is not rewarded
but discouraged as a further source of errors. Finally, the remedial
situation-even the term “remedial” invokes the spirit of the deficit
hypothesis-and its disappointing outcome reinforce the learners' belief in their
own incompetence in the language.
Paradoxically,
basic writers most need the help we are least prepared to give. We are still not
adequately informed about their language abilities and about the nature and
origin of their problems. Our curriculum represents to them a ladder with the
lower rungs missing, rungs which are supplied by learners from more literate
backgrounds. Our preoccupation with upholding and protecting unrealistic
“standards” keeps our offerings out of reach. And emphasizing mechanics as
the basis for good writing is tantamount to recommending rigorous training in
pronunciation as the proper basis for effective speaking; the term
“mechanical” itself invokes the alienating quality of the repetitive drills
often applied to these issues.
Materially
improving the state of affairs requires much comprehensive work in both theory
and practice. We should observe and record spontaneous speech under real-life
conditions, and pay close attention to those resources of expression and
elaboration which do not carry over into written samples in standard
orthography, such as indicators of personal interest and involvement. We should
then compare these speech resources to the corresponding resources of standard
writing. Finally, we should develop workable training programs for mediating
these resources to basic writers on whatever level they may be encountered.
A Pilot
Project
A pilot
project with basic writers might help to make some of the arguments advanced
above more concrete. Mar jean Olson, a graduate student in English here at UF,
was delegated to conduct a special writing class within the Office of
Instructional Resources Special Program for Athletes. Like many basic writers,
these students had invested their talents in sports, where their success stood
in a far more tangible and reliable ratio to their efforts than in English. The
cliché that athletes are “not intelligent” no doubt reflects their
frustration from trying to correlate their intellectual development with
stringent and uncreative school assignments and attaining unpredictable and
uncontrollable results.
Preliminary
contacts and interviews indicated that-again like many basic writers-these
students were articulate and animated speakers. We hoped that these abilities
could be deployed to improve fluency, i.e., how easily and extensively
the students produce texts, and involvement, i.e., how strongly they can
identify the writing activity with their personal priorities. These two factors
should help to counter-balance some of the more debilitating effects of the
intense but vague error-consciousness instilled by traditional instruction.
In that
semester, the contingent assigned to Olson consisted of fifteen University of
Florida scholarship athletes. Instead of writing a formal paper on an assigned
topic, they were to “choose a game they played and explain it to someone who
wouldn't know how to play it,” first in writing, then in speech, and then
again in writing. For the first session, students had half an hour. The second
session took place one week later, when each student attended an individual
conference. During their monologues, which were recorded on tape, Olson listened
attentively, but tried not to display conspicuous encouragement or disapproval.
At the final session during class one week after the taping, the students were
given both their first drafts and the typed transcripts that Olson had made from
their recorded speech, plus written instructions saying: “Here is what you
wrote when you explained a game that you play, and here is what you said. Read
through both, and then explain the game to me in a final draft.” The time
allotment was again half an hour, as in the first writing session.
We
conjectured that this approach might encourage the students to view writing as
an open, multistage process of drafting, comparing, and revising. This view
could work against the problem commonly reported (e.g., by Lillian Bridwell)
among inexperienced writers who, when asked to “revise” a paper, follow the
first draft much too closely and incorporate a few cosmetic minor changes (of
presumed “errors"), focusing on grammar, spelling, and penmanship. Our
design interposed a spoken version produced long enough after the first draft
that the students could not repeat themselves. The contrast between the first
draft and the spoken transcript could draw attention to the open relationship
between content and expression. This contrast was highlighted by the graphic
appearance of the transcript. Instead of standard punctuation, we used one slash
mark for a short pause and two slash marks for a long pause; stressed words or
word-parts were written in upper case. This means of transcription retains at
least some of the intonation and avoids the interpretations we would have to
make by inserting our own punctuation. The compendious Survey of English Usage
at University College, London, directed by Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum,
has adopted similar conventions for its spoken corpus.
We
expected that the first written draft would be relatively low in fluency and
involvement, whereas the spoken second version might be substantially higher,
since participant orientation is naturally more direct and conspicuous for
spoken communication than for written. Ideally, some of this increase might
carry over to the written third version. For the purposes of the project we
disregarded the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, or grammar, which could be
introduced later on, after fluency and involvement have improved.
In the
first session, the students indeed showed scant involvement and visibly fretted
about making errors. They manifested no significant motivation to be informative
or personal. On the contrary, they appeared to feel restrained by the very
activity of writing from conveying what they thought and felt. In the speaking
session, the students proceeded with noticeably greater freedom and confidence,
displaying more animation, direction, and conviction.
These
tendencies did carry over to the writing of the third version. The students
appeared to be encouraged by having usable sources in front of them. This time,
the familiar questions posed in the first session did not appear, such as,
“How long does this have to be?” or, “Do you want a whole page?”
In nearly
all cases, the final draft was not only longer than the first, but also superior
in several ways we shall try to describe. Although these final drafts still did
not conform to conventional composition standards, the remaining defects were
largely mechanical. For example, words the student had misspelled in the first
version and Olson had spelled correctly in the transcript often turned up with
the original misspelling in the final version, such as “furst” for
“first,” “elven” for “eleven,” and “cassel” for “castle.”
The missing “-s” from plural nouns and third-person singular verbs also
tended to stay missing. Evidently, the writers were not focusing enough
attention on spellings to notice the discrepancies between the first version and
the transcript, especially when a dialect form was involved.
The
openings of the three versions produced by one student clearly signal an
increase in involvement and enthusiasm:
(1) Miss olson, I play the game called chess. Chess is a game on a
checkerboard. The board is for checkers.
(2) chess is a GREAT game I if you DON'T play chess / you're REALly
missing something / there's NOTHing like sitting down to play a game // you COT
TO CONCENTRATE // WATCH your men when you play chess
(3) You really should play chess. It's a great game. Chess is a game that
is played on a checkerboard. It needs two people to play it. What you need to
play is concentration. You sit at the board with your men.
Whereas
the original (1) opens with a dry statement that the writer “plays a game”
“on a checkerboard” and spends a sentence on explaining the name of the
board, the spoken version (2) opens with a declaration of enthusiasm and goes on
to project the feeling of actually being in a game. The written version (3)
follows up, again expressing enthusiasm (albeit more restrained) and taking the
viewpoint of “sitting at the board with your men.” The “checkerboard,”
omitted from (2), is retained in (3) but without the banal explanation of its
name.
A more
complex and interesting relationship obtains among these three openings:
(4) Football is a game where guys play on a field. The field can be out
of grass or artafischal turf.
(5) Football has TWO teams // there's ONE ball // EVERYbody wants to get
that ball one way or the other // the GATor field has 120 yards to it
(6) The University of Florida Football team is called the Gators. I play
on this team and am proud of it. We play on Florida Field. The football field
has 120 yards to it. Our field is made of artafischal turf but you can play on
grass.
We see a
similar rise in personal involvement along with the dramatic change from version
to version. The. original (4) opens impersonally, and the focused end position
of the sentence goes to “field” rather than “game,” suggesting that
“field” is the main topic. Version (5) focuses first on the “teams,”
tells what every team member “wants,” and then turns to one particular
“field” the speaker knows from experience. Version (6) further raises
personal involvement by citing the writer's own “team” and declaring his
“pride” in “playing on” it. Taking “play” as a main topic makes the
transition to a particular “field” much less abrupt than it was in version
(5). The overall topic flow is smoother and more concrete, and the writer's role
as participant in the activity has replaced the abstract content orientation of
version (4). This shift of focus toward participants, which calls to mind the
trends outlined for language research in this paper's section, “The Language
versus the Participants,” may well have been encouraged by having interpolated
a spoken session into the writing procedure. Additional evidence of greater
involvement came from the ending of the spoken version, which had no equivalent
in the written ones:
(7) football has lots of action and you'd just LOVE it // I could talk
forEVer about football
A
discourse analysis of a complete set of three versions from the same student may
bring out some organizational trends that register the student's positive
achievement and underlying skills beyond the concerns of mechanics, as proposed
in the previous sections. For convenient reference, these versions and their
constituents are numbered, which of course was not the case in the versions the
students saw. The written first version (8), the spoken version (9), and the
written third version (10), ran as follows:
(8.1) I play basketball for fun. (8.2) It only takes a ball and hoop.
(8.3) That's it. (8.4) You lucky if you got a hoop. (8.5) There ain't no net
were I live. in Gainesville. (8.6) You try to cruize the ball down the hoop.
(8.7) Its easy. (8.8) The court you are on about two time as long across length.
(8.9) Its good if you see lines. (8.10) Lines are were to stand. (8.11) You
can't go pass them. (8.12) You start from the jump. (8.13) Go to your court.
(8.14) Play your half till you go down. (8.15) when you sink a baskit. (8.16)
Win
(9.1) You play basketball all by yourself it you want to / (9.2) it's SO
good / (9.3) sometimes when you don't want ANYbody / I mean NObody to tell YOU
WHAT to do // (9.4) basketball has a hoop // (9.5) you and the hoop / (9.6) MAN
/ that's CLASsic // (9.7) BUT/ when you play your BROTHers
/ you stick to rules // (9.8) only when there's rules do SOMEbody win //
(9.9) I don't care a whole lot about winning because it's a COOL game whether
you win or lose // (9.10) SO / you got the BALL // (9.11) I play Wilson / (9.12)
then the court // (9.13) let's see // I might play CEment or gravel or dirt //
(9.14) it REALly doesn't matter // as long as YOU know where your lines are //
(9.15) that's SIDElines / (9.16) you CAN'T go out them sidelines // (9.17) at
the ends of the lines at the ends of the court hang the hoops / TEN feet up //
(9.18) SO // after you got the ball and the hoop and the court / you need the
PEOPLE // (9.19) basketball games have two team // (9.20) you got your FORwards
/ two of them // (9.21) you got two guard and a center / (9.22) the center /
he's the TALLest and he stand around the basket // (9.23) you know / he REbounds
// (9.24) the guard is the MASter of the dribble // (9.25) he moves you
downcourt / (9.26) OR / you can pass // (9.27) when you SHOOT / you SCORE //
(9.28) a game has a halftime // (9.29) and in the LOCKer-room / you can talk
strategy // (9.30 YOU know / you talk about man-to-man or about zone DEfense
(10.1) I play basketball here in Gainesville. (10.2) I like to play all
alone because than nobody bothers me. (10.3) but I like to play with people too.
(10.4) When you play with people you got to have rules. (10.5) The rules are to
stay in the lines. (10.6) The lines go around the court. (10.7) The court is
about two time as long as its wide. (10.8) The next rule is that you cant foul
the other guy. (10.9) You cant touch or hurt him. (10.10) Than the next rule is
that you gotta shoot to get points. (10.11) you shoot the round ball thro the
baskit. (10.12) I like to shoot the Wilson ball. (10.13) When you play ball you
can play gaurd if you dribble. (10.14) You play center if you are a tall player
and than you rebound. (10.15) You play forward if you shoot good. (10.16) A team
has two guard, one center and two forward. (10.17) It don't matter if you play
man to man or zone defense. (10.18) You get points when you shoot. (10.19) And
you win when you score the most point before time. 21
The word
count shows a typical curve, 91 words for (8), 228 for (9), and 174 for (10). By
comparison, the averages for the whole group were: first version 102 words,
second version 150 words, and third version 139 words. This curve shows the
length of the written third version consistently moving up toward the length of
the spoken version-an encouraging trend. Moreover, the longer versions showed an
appreciably wider range of vocabulary.
The first
version (8) is highly typical for basic writing: short, choppy sentences and a
miscellaneous flow of topics without an evident plan or logic. Compared to the
opening version (11) of a series on football we shall look at in a moment, the
tone is positive, putting “fun” in the key end position of the opening
sentence (8.1) and devoting a later sentence to the “easy” quality of
“cruizing the ball” (8.7).
The
active agent of (8) alternates between “I” and “you,” closely but
fuzzily identified with each other. In view of the way the later versions
emphasize the student's fondness for playing basketball alone, the absence of
the rest of the team in this first version seems significant. The writer's
tactic for discovering and organizing content in (8) appears to have consisted
in mentally taking up a position on the court and reviewing what would be
visible: “ball” and “hoop” (8.2-4), “court (8.8), and the “lines”
whose capacity to be “seen” is expressly commanded (8.9-11). This approach
through mental imagery reminded the writer of some amenities he has not always
been “lucky” enough to have, such as “hoop,” “net,” and easily
visible “lines.”
Again
typical for basic writing is the rough and episodic topic flow, whose key words
are: “basketball - ball - hoop - court - lines - play - win.” The opener
announces the game and its goal, i.e., “fun” (8.1), the prerequisites are
named (8.2-5), and the action of play commences abruptly (8.6). Instead of
carrying the imaginary player through to the score, as did the original football
text (11) shown below, the topic shifts over to “the court you are on” and
thence to the “lines” circumscribing it. Then, we are just as abruptly
returned to the play, now (finally) at the proper “start,” which oddly is
mentioned before the player has even “gone to your court” (8.12-13). The
perspective next jumps from the single play to the whole “half,” belatedly
invokes the scoring move of “sinking a baskit,” and ends with a monosyllabic
adjuration to “win (8.14-16).
The
spoken version (9) is quite superior in involvement, concreteness, and
organization. The student's enthusiasm is featured at greater length than in (8)
— e.g., “SO good” (9.2), “CLASsic” (9.3), “COOL” (9.9) — and
justified as an existential compensation for situations in which you have
somebody “telling YOU WHAT to do” (9.1-3). This justification is followed up
with a somewhat philosophical observation, reminiscent of Rousseau or Thoreau,
that “rules” are created only “when you play your BROTHers” and
“SOMEbody” has to “win” (9.7-8). The writer's previously asserted
enjoyment of playing alone is now logically linked to his “not caring a whole
lot about winning because it's a COOL game whether you win or lose” (9.9).
Personal involvement is also increased by stating his predilections regarding
types of “ball” and “court” (9.11, 13).
The topic
flow is another major change over version (8). The perspective of the opening
statement suggests that the topic might be not just “basketball,” but in the
speaker's solitary enjoyment of it. This statement naturally calls for
explanation since the game is supposed to be played by whole teams. The
explanation indicates, as we saw, a personal ratiocination about the
organization of society versus sports.
Then
comes an unmediated topic shift, using the conversational transition marker
“SO,” over to the ordinary requirements like “ball,” “court,” and
“hoops” (9.10-18) with greater experiential detail than in version (8),
e.g., the stipulation of the “hoop” being “at the ends of the court” and
“TEN feet up” (9.17). Having gathered up these requirements, the speaker now
moves on to the “teams” and the players' positions, all of which rated no
mention in version (8). The enumeration moves from the front players ("FORwards")
toward the “center,” who stands out by height and location (9.20-23). Rather
like the basketball itself, the perspective is rapidly passed from player to
player, so that it is not clear who the “you” might be (9.25-27), unless it
covers the team as a whole. The portrayal concludes not at the end of the game,
but at “halftime,” thus getting the “you” into “the LOCKer-room” to
“talk strategy,” such as “man-to-man” or “zone DEfense” (9.28-30).
The third
version was noticeably influenced by the interposed spoken version, but
developed a somewhat different organization. Concrete details are added again,
e.g., “the court is about two time as long as its wide” (10.7) and “you
cant foul the other guy” by “touching or hurting him” (10.8-9).
The topic flow is better controlled as well. “Playing basketball” is announced as the topic proper in a sentence of its own, and the “playing all alone” is reserved for the second sentence and thus made to seem less topical than it did in (9). The justification for this solitary preference is rendered again, but in a sufficiently different style from the spoken version as to suggest that the student has some sense of overall conventions of writing; compare: “you don't want ANYbody // mean NObody to tell YOU WHAT to do" (9.3) versus "nobody bothers me" (10.2); or "when you play your BROTHers / you stick to rules" (9.7) versus "When you play with people you got to have rules" (10.4). The philosophical rumination is more terse here, however.
The "rules" are used
now as a strategic topic for grouping together the "lines," the
"fouling," and the "shooting," each being presented as one
instance of a "rule" (10.5-10). Since the content of these instances
is not parallel, the grouping is a trifle bumpy, but nonetheless reveals a
feeling for the need to make the statement sequence more coherent than it was in
the spoken version. By placing the "shooting" at the end of the list,
the writer leads up to the high point and can dilate upon it to bring in the
significance of the "basket" and his preference for one brand of
"ball" (10.11-12), which had previously been situated among general
conditions before play started (9.4-5, 10-11).
The next topic grouping is the
team and its members, where consolidation and parallelism have once more been
improved over version (9). Now, the "you" is the common agent who may,
if meeting the respective stated qualifications, "play" either
"guard," “center," or "forward" (10.13-15). Only
after this parallel listing is the team totaled up and its positions counted
(10.16). The writer brings in the issue of "man to man or zone
defense" as an aspect of "play" (10.17) instead of as a subject
for "talk" in "the locker room" (9.29-30), and thus ends up
still on the field, citing the accumulation of "points" and the
"winning" at the final "time." Thus, the end of the text
coincides with the end and goal of the game, yielding the kind of convergence
that (to expropriate a phrase from Frank Kermode) promotes "the sense of an
ending."
The evolution was still more
significant in this set of three versions:
(11.1)
Football is a real easy game to watch but a hard to play because you get beat up
but its more harder because the rules are hard. (11.2) Furst off you needd a
place to play and a ball. (11.3) And some people. (11.4) Then you line up.
(11.5) Then the quarterback snap to his man. (11.6) If You read your man thats
hard. (11.7) If your man catch the ball you can score. (11.8) You can run the
ball to. (11.9) But the quarter back he has lots of plays. (11.10) You score and
the other guys get the ball. (11.11) You need elven guys. (11.12) And the same
thing again. (11.13) You gotta get points to win football.
(12.1)
football's NOT hard to play // (12.2) you get a BALL
(12.3) the ball is brown (12.4) // THEN / you gotta get enough PEOple to
PLAY // (12.5) SO / you gotta get eleven strong MEN / (12.6) they make ONE team
/ (12.7) you have TWO team // (12.8) THEN / you throw a QUARter to see who play
the ball / (12.9) heads or tails / YOU pick // (12.10) you start at the FIFty-yard
line // (12.11) THERE / you line up you face your man // (12.12) SO AFter you
line up / you GOTta get a PLAY // (12.13) you pass OR you run // (12.14) BUT /
you COTta be GOOD cause you're going to the OTHer end of the GREEN // (12.15)
WHEN you CROSS it / you get the GLOry // (12.16) that what my HIGH school coach
CALL points / GLOry // (12.17) they're the GOLD / or whatEVer YOU want //
(12.18) BUT / FIRST / you GOTta get to the END zone // (12.19) make SURE you got
a good KICKer / a real dependable foot // (12.20) ANYway / AFter you line up /
the FUN parts start // (12.21) on.DEfense / you got TACKlers / CORnerbacks / end
/ free-safety / and backers // (12.22) they're ALL big TROUble // (12.23) on
OFfense / THEY got the ball / (12.24) THEY got the quarterback // (12.25) he
call the play // (12.26) sometimes // he be a BOMBer or a SHORT-yard passer //
(12.27) you got HIM / you got ENDS / guards (12.28) // THEN / you got the
quarterback // (12.29) he called the CENter / (12.30) he the BIG man // (12.31)
you got backs on DEfense // and you got TACKles (12.32) / EVERYbody's got a job
to do // (12.33) AND / if YOU do YOUR job / YOU / win the game // (12.34) STILL
you don't ALways win // (12.35) BUT / it's ALways fun to play football
(13.1)
Glory is what you want in football. (13.2) Thats what you get when you cross the
endzone and score. (13.3) You furst need eiven guys. (13.4) And you line them up
on the line. (13.5) You need two team. (13.6) Furst you need one team that got
tacklers, cornerbacks, ends, freesafety and backs. (13.7) There defense. (13.8)
Next you got the other team. (13.9) On the other team you need ends, gaurds, and
one big center. (13.10) That team play offense. (13.11) But most important on
offense you got the quarterback. (13.12) He be the one who throw the ball.
(13.13) He hand off the ball to. (13.14) You see the offense is the ones that
got the ball. (13.15) Only the team who got the ball can score. (13.16) You
score when you cross the endzone like for a touchdown. (13.17) You score to when
you kick a feild goal. (13.18) Thats the glory, the score.
The differences in length were
again typical for our whole group: a short written first version
(108 words), a long spoken second version (244 words), and a written third
version falling in between (140 words). The greater length of version (12) over
version (11) is accounted for partly by a wealth of added details: a “brown”
ball (12.3), “strong MEN” (12.5), “the FIFty-yard line” (12.10),
“TACKlers / CORnerbacks / end / free-safety / and backers” (12.21), “a
BOMBer or a SHORT-yard passer” (12.26), “ENDS / guards” (12.27), and so
forth. This enrichment of concrete detail is all the more marked in view of some
rather empty stretches in version (11), such as “And some people” (11.3) or
“And the same thing again” (11.13) (presumably meaning eleven more players),
plus the wordy pessimistic opening about how “hard” the game is (11.1).
Version (12) opens with an optimistic reversal by proclaiming that “football's
NOT hard to play” (12.1).
The rise
in length also reflects increased involvement, witness the expressions conveying
immediate experience and personal viewpoint: “THEN / you throw a QUARter to
see who play the ball, heads OR tails” (12.8-9); “THERE / you line up you
face your man” (12.11); “You GOTta be GOOD cause you're going to the OTHer
end of the GREEN” (12.14); “WHEN you CROSS it / you get the GLORY”
(12.15), “my HIGH school coach” (12.16), “make SURE you got a good KICKer
/ a real dependable foot” (12.19), “the FUN parts start” (12.20),
“they're ALL big TROUble” (12.22), and “it's ALways fun to play”
(12.35). This increase, which we observed in the texts of several other students
as well, suggests that the students were somewhat uncomfortable about reporting
or displaying their feelings in the first writing situation, but more at ease
when speaking about the same topic. We need to investigate in more detail how
far personal expression is systematically discouraged by the standard school
writing instruction with its unrelenting emphasis on “formal styles” and its
straitlaced avoidance of “opinion and emotion” as well as the first and
second person.
The flow
of topics was fairly jerky and miscellaneous in the first version (11). The flow
opened with the “hardness” of the “game” and its “rules,” cited
“place,” “ball,” and “people” in vague terms, and “then” went to
the “line up” (11.1-4). In the play itself, the perspective of the active
agent vacillated confusingly among “quarterback,” “his man,” ‘you,”
“Your man,” and “the other guys” (11.5-10). The number of players and
teams followed as an obvious afterthought (11.11-12), and the ending capped a
series of statements (11.1, 2, 3, 13) that would apply to many games, not just
to football.
The topic
flow of (12) is far smoother and more coherent. The flow opens with the claim
that the “game” is “not hard” after all (12.1), cites the ball and the
people in more concrete terms “brown,” “strong” (12.2-5), and puts the
number of players and teams in a logical place (12.5-7) before starting the
action moving. The speaker evokes the toss of the coin, the exact location of
the “line-up,” and the “play” (12.8-12). This time, the agent focus is
consistently placed on “you,” zeroing in from your whole team (12.10-12) to
the individual player (12.13-15), who successfully completes a touchdown.
“Your man” is reserved this time for one of the opposite team (12.11), and
the confusion of agents is gone. Version (12) then sticks to the point by naming
a “dependable foot” as a requirement (12.19)
— the only passage suggesting how the game got its name. We then flash
back to the “line up” and the “fun parts” just about to “start,”
thereby getting the teams back into the handiest array for naming the types of
players, of whom only the “quarterback” had been mentioned at all in version
(11). Some of them are introduced along with helpful comments about what they
are or do. The repetition of “quarterback” in (12.28) was apparently needed
to define him further as “the CENter” and “the BIG man” (12.29-30). The
“DEfense” gets less focus and development than does the “OFfense”
(12.21-31), probably because the latter viewpoint applied to the “you” who
dominated the “play” (12.12-18). The flow then goes fairly logically from
the players to their respective “jobs,” whose well “done” performance
leads to “winning the game” (12.32-33). The final point of having “fun”
even without “winning” (12.34-35) has no correlate in the written versions,
and, as did samples (2), (7), and (9), again suggests the higher enthusiasm we
might expect from spontaneous speaking over writing.
The third
version (13) follows (12) more than (11) in its presentation. of details, such
as: “tacklers, cornerbacks, ends, freesafety and backs” on “defense”
(13.6-7), “ends, gaurds, and one big center” on “offense” (13.9-10), and
“You score when you cross the endzone” (13.2, 16). The “score” for
“kicking a feild goal” (13.17) is mentioned for the first time. One
important statement indicating involvement has not only been preserved from the
spoken version (12.15-16), but given new prominence by occupying the strategic
initial and final positions: “Glory is what you want” (13.1), and “Thats
the glory” (13.18). The trend among the three versions thus runs from the
pessimistic tone of (11) that opened with players “getting beat up” and with
“rules” making the game so “hard” (11.1), to the more optimistic tone of
(12) with the game being “not hard” and “fun” even without “winning”
(12.1, 34-35), to this peak of optimism with “glory” first and last.
The topic
flow of (13) also differs from that of (11) and (12). Placed in lead position,
“glory” attains topic status and leads naturally into the action of
“scoring.” The flow shifts back to the prerequisites “you furst need”
(13.3). This time, the topic proceeds from the occasion of “lining up” and
embarks directly on the players and positions of the two teams. Now, an attempt
is made to even out the coverages of “defense” and “offense” by making
them partly parallel (13.6-11). This sequencing, without skipping from
“DEfense” to “OFfense” and back (12.21-31), prepares the way for zeroing
in on “the most important” person in running the play and getting the
“score” (13.11-15). The strategic nature of this arrangement is especially
clear: unlike (11) and (12), version (13) ends on the highest note and ties the
end back to the beginning-both hallmarks of well-written prose on more advanced
levels.
Undeniably,
the written third version (13) is superior in organization and flow both to (11)
and (12), and at a degree of subtlety and strategy one might well not expect
from a basic writer. The intervening speaking session clearly had a positive
effect on the evolution of the text in terms of fluency, involvement, and
concrete detail, but the subsequent writing went considerably further in terms
of far more sophisticated aspects than the “mechanics” so often drilled in
basic writing classwork. We see some hallmarks of good prose already emerging on
rudimentary guises, even though the student was probably not aware of them as
such.
All the
students we looked at followed a similar pattern with regard to their sources.
In each case, the written third version utilized material left out of the
written first version but covered in the spoken version. More importantly, the
flow of topic and the organization of ideas steadily improved. A conspicuous
case in point was the strategic deployment of beginnings and endings, which was
not fully managed until the third version. Psychologists, who have long known
that beginnings and endings are privileged in many mental processes, have
recently pointed to the role of these stretches of text for indicating the topic
or plan of the discourse. This factor is patently more crucial for written texts
than for spoken ones, and our basic writers examined here seem to have shown at
least an intuitive appreciation of the difference despite their overall lack of
standard writing experience. At least, we see no other way to explain why these
basic writers so consistently picked different and more effective beginnings and
endings for their third version than for their previous two versions. Further
investigation should probe whether switching modes between speech and writing
reliably yields occasions to reconsider one's selection and relative focus of
topics and viewpoints.
Conclusions
Although
a pilot study with fifteen basic writers who happened to be excellent athletes
allows no general conclusions, some interesting tendencies emerged. The
interposed speaking session evidently had positive effects on the process of
reworking the written paper. The students were apparently freed from the typical
revision tactic of basic writers who cling slavishly to their originals. The
versions increased not merely in length, fluency, and involvement-which we had
predicted — but also in concrete detail and strategic organization of topic
— which we had not predicted.
In this
approach, the divergences between speech and writing are not construed as a mere
hindrance to instruction or an indicator of low intelligence or ability, but
actively enlisted to encourage detachment from the first draft and to invest the
learner's prior language skills. In the process, we can also refine our
knowledge about speech skills by gathering more and more on-site data. In
addition, detailed discourse analysis of the kind we have illustrated here
brings home Halliday's point about the complexity of speech that has gone
unappreciated for so long.
A
reasonable next step might be to use such a technique on a regular basis for an
entire experimental course in basic writing. If, as seems likely, it is not
feasible for the instructor to prepare transcripts on a steady basis, the
students could work in the third session by replaying their own tapes, provided
such a tactic does not interfere with the outcome. We should also explore how
far apart the sessions should be spaced, since intervals of a whole week would
be too long for most curriculum frameworks.
A
particularly difficult issue is how such a write-speak-write approach might be
coordinated with more conventional work emphasizing mechanics. Because basic
writers have usually been alienated by an overdose of such work with poor
results, the potential benefits of a write-speak-write approach might be reduced
if mechanics were stressed too early. A better option might be to proceed with
write-speak-write alone for a time sufficient to encourage a shift in attitude
and an increase in confidence. As word processors become higher-powered and
generally available, much of mechanics, especially spelling, might well be dealt
with through student-paced sessions using appropriate software.
How much
time and effort will be needed to make a real difference for basic writers is an
empirical issue widely misunderstood as an administrative or curricular issue.
Empirical evidence indicates that the usual period of “remediation,”
typically one or two semesters, does not suffice; but the design of the
remediation is, for reasons we have attempted to expound, often inappropriate to
begin with. A further factor is the prospect that a change of approach to the
teaching of basic writing in the elementary and secondary schools could greatly
ease the problems we are now facing at the college level.
If we
expect basic writers to change themselves, we need to change ourselves at least
as dramatically. Writing teachers have long harbored a justified mistrust of
theories and their conversion into practices, because theorists typically
devoted too little realistic concern to the basic problems of writing. The trend
toward socially relevant and participant-oriented models of discourse offers a
welcome occasion for basic writing teachers to voice their problems and
requirements. In return, they should be willing to reconsider their own
entrenched assumptions about what the priorities and standards in general should
be, and about the role and significance of errors in particular. Recent trends
in these directions are already very encouraging.
The
highest goal of theory and research about discourse should be to support the
human freedom of access to knowledge through discourse. This goal may sound
unfamiliar and disturbing in view of the narrower and more abstract goals of
past research, and the mechanical or puristic loyalties of past instruction. The
inability to use writing for oneself and for others in pursuit of this goal
remains a hindrance to freedom in “the free world” and everywhere else. We
must therefore untiringly confront the tasks of change, affirming their enormous
difficulty, but also their supreme urgency.
Notes
(by
Robert
de Beaugrande)
1
This theme
is retraced in the original works of prominent
linguists in my latest book, Linguistic Theory (1991).
2
See Allan Nairn's comprehensive and alarming scrutiny of the ETS as
“the corporation that makes up minds,” available through Ralph Nader, P.O.
Box 19312, Washington, DC 20036.
3
For an assessment of this advocacy by authorities like Maxine Hairston
and Joe Williams, see my book on Text Production.
4
Extensive references are provided in Chapter V of my Text Production.
Unlike my book, Vachek's valuable deliberations were inspired not so much by the
politics of literacy and composition in the U.K. and the U.S. as by the
perspective of a special Czechoslovakian “functional” brand of ',structural
descriptive linguistics” for which we provided an overview in my 1990 report
to the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, to be published shortly, under the
title “The heritage of functional sentence perspective from the standpoint of
text linguistics,” in the new journal Linguistica Pragiensa.
5
I offer a comprehensive reading of Halliday's work in Ch. 9 of my 1991 book on Linguistic Theory.
6
I follow here the findings of a thorough survey conducted in Ghana by
Joe Amoako, later my student at the University of Florida.
7
In a recent interchange with Chomsky in issues 11.1 and 11.2 of the Journal
of Advanced Composition (1991), I have undertaken to demonstrate in
some detail the scientific incoherence and the self-centered intellectual
debility of his engagement with language. I
would consider it unwise that we try to apply it to basic writing, as Rei
Noguechi suggested, quite apart from the problems its extravagant
terminologizing would create for our students.
8
These trends are surveyed in two recent papers of mine, once in the
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics for 1990 and the other in the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
9
I undertook to implement this approach in a student textbook (Writing
Step by Step). But the textbook was not specifically designed for the type of
basic writers described by Mina Shaughnessy, even though I hoped it might be
easier for them than the usual textbooks. I
could not be more specific because I lacked a consistent population to work
with. My university does not have a special track for basic writers, though
studies at our Writing Center by Wilia Wolcott and Dianne Buhr have called
attention to the special attitudes of such students.