All Posts Tagged With: "grammar"

Slang just might make a new Canadian feel more like everyone else

English as a Second Language (ESL) now goes by the new, politically correct name of English Language Learning (ELL), in official recognition of the fact that immigrants new to Canada may know more than one language already. That doesn’t, however, make the average ELL student a champion of political correctness. At least it’s doubtful that Amira Azad, an Iranian Muslim woman in her mid-40s, had cultural sensitivity on the brain when she interrupted our ELL tutorial on the prepositional phrase. “May I ask a question?” she said, and then leaned closer to whisper: “Tell me please, what is the difference between a slut and whore?”

“The first sleeps with a lot of men,” I answered when I recovered, “and the second gets paid to do the same.” “Oh,” she said, “same in Iran.” Amira (who, like the other students interviewed, requested that her name be changed) asked roughly 30 similar questions that day, compiling a mini lexicon of English curse words and expressions that she covered with her hands every time the program supervisor walked by. Writing down the definition of “bitch,” she noted: “Thank you. My sons will be punished.”

As someone who’s been volunteer-teaching ELL at my local library in Halifax for the past three years, I assumed that people like Amira immigrate to Canada and learn English for a “better life.” But we seldom ask exactly what kind of English is most relevant to that life. A 2007 survey of ESL students by the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education cites the ability to use English in daily life as the single most important goal for learners; above both employment advancement and access to higher education. Chinese immigrant and English language learner Michelle Wong (who also asked that her real name not be used) points out that “everyday English” is far removed from textbook English. “In [textbook] English you have lots of grammar rules,” she says, “and I noticed people were not always following these rules. They used slang and swear words and it confused me.” To remedy her colloquial gaps, Michelle enrolled in a free, student-driven ELL program at the Halifax Regional Library (the same program I volunteer with, and Amira belonged to), where her volunteer tutor briefed her in conversational English, Western profanities and, finally, the answer to something that had been puzzling her for a long time: the definition of “funky.”

Frances Smith-McCarley, the coordinator of the program, is a street-speech activist in her own right. Helping students grasp not only English grammar but the naughty parts that go with it is, she believes, a lesson in survival skills. “What most concerns me,” she says, “is when our students hear racial or religious swear or hate words and may not know that they or their children are the victims of discrimination.” In other words, Amira didn’t have to cover her notebook when Smith-McCarley walked by. In fact, she didn’t need a notebook to begin with.

This is something David Burke, author of The Slangman Guide to Dirty English, has been preaching for 20 years. Burke, an American writer, has written over 50 books and products specializing in cross-cultural slang and idioms—many of which have been distributed to ELL programs around the world. Burke acknowledges that making the vernacular and the profane respectable hasn’t been an easy battle. “I was once the ESL bad boy,” he says. At his first TESOL conference (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Arlington, Texas, in 2001, an incensed fellow attendee told him that he had no business teaching informal language, and that his disregard for “pure English” would sully the name of ELL education everywhere. “She caused a scene so loud,” he says, “other teachers came over to my booth to watch!” The showdown came to an end when the purist made the mistake of telling Burke he really ticked her off. “Tick you off?” he said, “That’s slang.”

Nowhere is Burke’s obsession and message more applicable than in this country, where Statistics Canada estimates that by the year 2031, one half of the population over the age of 15 will be foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent. A Canadian citizenship hopeful won’t find the sort of language on her citizenship test that she’d find in one of Burke’s books, but just because she isn’t required to know English slang or swearing to become a Canadian doesn’t mean she won’t need it in order to feel like one.

Everyday language, the discourse of everyday people, has never worried about being politically correct. What’s ironic is that our Canadian fear of cultural imposition (always the mosaic, never the melting pot) might end up disadvantaging the very people we’re trying not to impose on. Knowing the proper place to use “slut” and “whore” might not be polite, but it’s just as important as etiquette when it comes to building an identity in your new home. Amira’s only complaint about Canada was that its native citizens were far “too nice.” Fortunately, her sons weren’t.

Profs from St. John’s to Victoria have had it with the wreckage of bad grammar

First year students arrive on campuses with their laptops, an iPod, an iPad, a Twitter account, a personal blog and a Facebook page. “They are so expressive and they have so much to share,” says Margie Clow-Bohan, director of the writing centre at Dalhousie. “But the writing skills need work.”

Most of Clow-Bohan’s colleagues would say she is too kind. The class of 2011 is opinionated and expressive but they can’t structure an essay, don’t know how to write an introduction, write paragraphs that are two pages long, and have murderously bad grammar. This is the lament of professors from Victoria to St. John’s. “The grammar sucks and the writing is awful.” So says Paul Budra, associate dean and English professor at Simon Fraser University, about the quality of the essays he sees: fragments, comma splices, apostrophe, pronoun and agreement errors, and tense mistakes. High school teachers are failing students, he says. “There’s this emphasis on expressing yourself, on this idea that if you get it on the page, it will be fine,” he says. “It’s not.”

“Universities teach subject matter, not writing,” says Richard Stren, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “It is assumed that by reading academic articles, students will absorb how to write. It doesn’t work. I gave out a lot of Cs.”

“Teachers are afraid to teach grammar,” says Visnja Cuturic, an ESL instructor who teaches grammar and academic writing at the University of Toronto. “They know the rules instinctively, but they can’t teach them. And rote learning is a thing of the past.”

I know this first-hand. I teach a college English class at a downtown college in Toronto. The first time I collected essays from my students, who are a variety of ages but have all received a high school degree, I was stunned. Subjects didn’t agree with verbs. Sentences started on page one and kept up the fight until page two. Commas were either used not at all or appeared in startling places. It wasn’t that there weren’t any ideas in the papers; it was that they were so buried by the wreckage of bad grammar it would have taken the jaws of life to free them.

“I believe writing well is intricately tied up with thinking clearly. As a responsible citizen, you have to grapple with issues at a very deep level, and if you can’t do that on the page, you’ll have trouble,” says Ginny Ryan, director of the writing centre at Memorial University in St. John’s. MUN students come to her writing centre for hour-long sessions; the students get one-on-one attention from a graduate student in their discipline. Since 2008, MUN engineering students are required to write an essay on ethics. Ryan visited the engineering classes and taught essay writing to the students. “It’s difficult to escape MUN without some kind of writing skill,” she says.

Dalhousie requires students to take two “writing-intensive” courses before they graduate. Erin Wunker, an English professor at Dalhousie, teaches a year-long introduction to literature class, which is considered writing intensive. Wunker doesn’t make it an easy ride. “I wear them down,” she says. “I tell them they’ll use these skills if they are writing a persuasive demand for a raise or explaining, in a cogent fashion, the source of a patient’s illness.” Wunker matches students with a peer-editing buddy. “They’re not allowed to write sycophantic, empty comments like: ‘I liked your essay!’ ” she says. “They have to write critical and thoughtful things, or they don’t pass,” she says. The improvement is astonishing. “The students always say they dreaded the peer editing but it turned out to be the most helpful part of the course.”

There are five writing centres at the University of Toronto where undergrads can get help from graduate students. “There was a sense that we weren’t reaching enough students,” says Sandy Welsh, a sociology professor and vice-dean of teaching and learning in the faculty of arts and science at the University of Toronto. Enter the Writing Instruction for TAs (WIT) program. Ivan Kalmar, an anthropology professor at U of T, teaches an introductory course with 1,200 students. The class is broken up into groups of 30 students, and each student attends eight tutorials, run by WIT-trained TAs. Every student submits an essay proposal before turning in an essay, and the TAs, Kalmar says, catch the big errors before the final paper comes in. “It’s an opportunity for students in a massive class to get one-on-one feedback,” he says. “The marks have gone up tremendously, and the students say the tutorials were the most rewarding part of the course.”

“We shouldn’t be waiting until smaller classes in the second or third year to introduce writing skills,” says Kalmar.