As a future English teacher, I've been given a very amazing opportunity to tutor English writing (100, 105 and 106) by the Center for Academic Development and Assessment, here at MSU. By comprehensively dissecting essays with members of our campus community, I've gained confidence in my own abilities as an educator. I'm also afforded other advantages, such as frequent tutor training.
I had one such experience of this on March 16th, during spring break, when I helped to represent our university at the New Jersey/Pennsylvania College Reading and Learning Association (a sponsor of my employer, CADA). For free, I attended many seminars pertaining to tutoring that could just as easily be employed in a larger classroom; the particular seminars I chose were, as expected of an English major, related to literature. One seminar honed specifically on technology.
It's common knowledge that text and chat lingo contribute to the distillation of students' output in writing classes. Although it's hard to believe, many students, even in college, do not know how to alternate between the informal lexicon they use with their friends and that reserved for authority figures. The job market is such that being able to express oneself in written and oral speech is pertinent to acquiring a respectable position. If graduated students reply to an extension of an interview opportunity with, "C u there," they are guaranteed not to get the job.
This is something every English teacher should learn to work around. We cannot simply tell our students to do something; we have to show them. The CRLA conference technology seminar gave great examples of what struggling teachers could do. At the very start of the class, as an introduction, students could be required to compose an email to their teacher about a pseudo-issue (an absence, request for tutoring, etc.). The teacher could then analyze with the class what about these emails was done right and wrong.
Another example dictated that English teachers (and perhaps teachers in general) should explicate to students the severity of social networks being abused by employers to pick and choose who gets what position. A volunteer's facebook status (not necessarily a student's, but perhaps a fake account's or a teacher's friend's account) could be dissected by the class. The teacher would pose the question, would you hire this person if you were an employer? In the example given during the seminar, it was the presenter's fiance's status. He wrote something along the lines of, "gotz a b in sceince. cn't bleive i passed yo," with gratuitous grammatical errors. In this situation, even if students write this way themselves, it's put into a different perspective for them and they acknowledge they would not hire this person, given the opportunity. It's not completely fair for them to have to censor themselves, but with the internet as public as it is, some wariness could be beneficial. The assignment students had to do as homework after this required them to copy/paste one of their own statuses and revamp it for a more formal setting.
I think using technology this way, rather than fighting is, is the only way to decrease its occasional negative impact on students.
My hesitation about promoting an uncensored online persona means we'd be promoting poor grammar and a potentially harmful habit. Yeah, there are times I shorten my language while texting or instant messaging a friend, but it's really rare and I usually only do it when I'm trying to type in a persona. People rarely type using capital letters and punctuation, and by making it okay in an online context, I feel like it makes it okay to do this in every day conversation. Back in the day when students would hand write everything, students would have to write faux letters just like they'd write professionally. True, there was no such thing as shorthand internet lingo, but still, how you convey yourself in every setting is important. I think the activities you mention here are really great and could be really helpful in the classroom to promote better internet grammar. It's strange to see that a lot of internet language has found its way into daily conversation and are even in dictionaries now. It makes me wonder what internet grammar may find its way into our future language, especially our formal language.
ReplyDeleteSomething interesting is, when certain lingo becomes very seminal, it transforms into a more universal lexicon and may even be appropriated by the dictionary. However, it would still be frowned upon; bad grammar typically is. We have to make our students understand this without depriving them of their fun online personae. If you tell someone they can't do something, they'll only want to do it more, so I'm glad educational seminars like this one are doing more to incorporate this. Ignoring it won't help.
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