The Language of Writing

How Foreign Languages Illustrate the Challenge of Writing

Like speakers from different countries, our students come to us from different classrooms in different cities and states.  Each student will have been exposed to different assignments and expectations.  Further, we don't know the kinds of reading and writing that our students may have been doing outside class.  This, of course, is the foundation behind Universal Design for Learning — we want to adapt our teaching to meet each individual student where they're at.  But knowing this doesn't necessarily help in the moment.  Yes, I am very aware of the fact that each one of my students comes from a unique background.  Unfortunately, most students don't know what that means.  Beyond a "we didn't really write essays in school" to a "my literature teacher had us do this series of book reports that was incredible," I rarely hear what my students actually learned about writing.  Instead, I'm left with reports of their experiences and the words they place on the page.  And in many cases, what I hear them say doesn't at all match what I read in their papers.

In the past, I attributed this to a common problem we see in education.  Sometimes, it seems that students forget what they've learned the moment they leave the classroom.  And this, I think, is likely supported by neuroscience.  According to one study, our minds recall entire events rather than focusing on singular details, and another study indicates that a key component of intelligence involves forgetting irrelevent details in order to focus on critical information for making decisions.  So, speaking as an adjunct faculty member in the humanities, I can honestly say this: my students might remember sitting my classroom, but their brains likely deprioritize much of the information I tell them.

This is hardly a groundbreaking announcement.  But part of the problem, I think, comes in our conception of writing.  When students come to class, many perceive the writing assignments as simply a product you produce, and then the class is done.  Certainly, I have students who love the process — I myself "liked" research papers — but many students don't sense enough change in their writing to feel that they've "gained" anything.  They show up, they track down the number of sources I tell them to track down, and then they write about it.

On the surface, it might seem incredibly boring.  And for many, many generations of students, writing classes — and the composition course in particular — have been seen as rites of passage rather than actually experiences of learning.  Worse still, this leads to damaging myths and misconceptions about writing.  Because we teach the "same" language that our students already speak, many people — students, parents, and teachers in other disciplines — believe that we have "failed" all those students who "can't write."

The reality, I believe, is that our students who "can't write" are simply developing their skills in the language of written words.  Yes, it's a language they already speak with lips and larynx, but that doesn't make it the same language they write with eyes and fingers.  Neuroscience may support this: a study of aphasia in stroke victims shows differentiation between written and spoken grammar.  As cognitive science researcher Brenda Rapp explained, "It’s as though there were two quasi-independent language systems in the brain."

Learning Grammar as a Model for the Acquisition of Writing

As with speaking a foreign language, writing well requires competency in a complex system of specific tasks.  In this, we can use grammar as a model for understanding the complexity of language.  Knowing the placement of nouns and adjectives may come naturally for many students, but not all.  During my first months of studying Arabic, I remember how strange it felt placing adjectives after the nouns they modify.  It seemed almost unnatural.  But then, for anyone who speaks French, Spanish, Thai, or Swahili, this is normal.  For speakers of Dutch, German, and Chinese, it makes perfect sense to place adjectives before the nouns.  As someone who only knew English and German, it never occurred to me that other languages would change something as fundamentally "fixed" as the placement of adjectives.

When I teach English 101, I can generally assume that everyone's nouns and adjectives will march forward across the page in the proper order.  As a native speaker of English bumbling my way into those first days of high school German, I never once made the mistake of placing an adjective after the noun.  In fact, for the genitive case — a variation of the possessive form — I struggled with placing "der Katze" ("of the cat") after the possessed noun "der Fisch" ("the fish").  In German, the phrase "der Fisch der Katze" would be a description of a feline eating dinner — in English, "the fish of the cat" would be seriously confusing.

So when my students arrive in English 101, it's easy to imagine that they're "ready" simply because they know how to place words on a page in the right order.  They've made it through high school and life, haven't they?

Then again, until German class, I was quite satisfied with my linguistic abilities.  I could read every single book my teachers gave me.  Up until the age of thirteen, I had a gift for language.  As long as the language was English.

That Dialect We Call College

In this way, I feel that writing — academic writing, in particular — is a foreign dialect for our students.  Because of this, those students who already excel at writing tend to do very well in our courses — for them, writing is no more difficult than speaking.  For other students — the ones who have never written ten-page papers, the ones who type with two fingers, the ones who prefer YouTube to novels — a composition course is more than simply a challenge.  For these students, it's like being dropped into woods behind a rustic European village and then being told to beg for food.  And maybe also an A.

"And by the way," adds your evil tour guide, the one standing by the chalkboard, "your begging must be formatted in 12-point Times New Roman, with a separate Works Cited page at the end."