[Englecturers] Fwd: Devoid of Content

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

I agree with Fish that most students don't understand that a sentence is a logical structure, and I agree that they need instruction in sentence-decoding and sentence-making. 

However, sentences that lack content also lack meaning. For example, here is a sentence I just grabbed quickly out of a stack of student papers: "Ideas are molded and actually performed by workers."  That's a grammatically correct sentence but not a clear one. Here's another: "What I am going at is that each individual whether they are employed by Wal-Mart or not is responsible to report unethical controversies surrounding Wal-Mart because one person cannot do it." These sentences have word choice errors that come down in part to a misunderstanding of what the words mean, of which words are commonly used in which contexts, and to a fuzziness about what the student him/herself hopes to convey by the sentence.

You can't begin to address these deficiencies without talking about content. So I do talk about content. I require my students to write on topics we've explored in class reading and discussion, often very specific topics, which not only discourages plagiarism but also turns students into neophyte "experts" who can critique each other much more pointedly.

I wish I could spend more time on grammar, which I really like to teach and talk about. But there's too much else we need to do. (In addition, it sometimes seems as though the more time I spend on sentence structure and grammar in a class, the lower my teaching evaluations go.)

Here's another topic entirely: My office mate, Charlene Musgrove, thinks there must be a correlation between the grade inflation universities in the US have seen in the last several decades and the increasing reliance on student evaluations of teaching in hiring, retention, promotion, merit etc.  What do you all think?

Cynthia Tuell