Teachers Need to Learn What They May Have Acquired

Insight #3 from reading Dana Ferris's Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing:

One of my favorite moments in the Ferris book is when she says this:

Being a fairly competent user of the English language does not in and of itself prepare teachers to diagnose and respond to student error and to explain grammatical concepts in English (48).

Her words made me do a happy dance around my office and then made me realize that this sentence applies to me also. Just because I researched lots of grammar constructions in my IEP (Intensive English Program) teaching days doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do now. 

So, basically what Ferris is saying is that if teachers really want to help their multilingual students improve language-wise, they will have to hit the books to learn consciously some of the language knowledge that they acquired unconsciously (see my first blog post where I talk about the difference between acquisition and learning). 

For example, one of my favorite activities in my writing tutor development course (English 260) is when I give the new tutors a “knowledge” quiz.  The point of the activity is not to test what tutors actually know but to talk about how to use the many resources available in the writing center—so that both tutor and tutee are learning.  One of the questions on the quiz asks about the rule for creating comparative adjectives.  That is, why do we say someone is prettier but someone else is more beautiful?  This is a rule (with a few exceptions) that all native speakers can follow but most (unless they are TESOL-trained) cannot articulate.  If you’re curious, the rule involves number of syllables and –y endings (any ESL grammar textbook will provide that information).  Two years ago, SK, a tutor who was an international student from the Ukraine, amazed her classmates by rattling off the rule because, of course, she had learned this rule in her English (EFL) class in the Ukraine before acquiring it as a writer/speaker here in the U.S.  In order to help a multilingual student who hasn’t acquired this bit of language knowledge, a teacher or tutor needs to consciously learn it so that they can explain it/articulate it.

Actually, this learning/acquisition dynamic holds true for much of what we teach in our writing classes.  Teachers and tutors have typically done so much reading and writing that they are unaware of the complexity of what they are doing (think about driving a car as an experienced driver versus that nervous 15-year-old in driver’s ed).  For me, the key to being a good teacher involves trying to make explicit many of the things that I learned simply by a lot of exposure to academic reading and writing.  That involves breaking things down, creating lots of models—both of process and product, and also doing research.

Ferris’s argument here is that teachers who want to provide effective error feedback need to develop a set of knowledge and skills that they don’t have simply by the virtue of being a native speaker of English (I realize, of course, that many teachers may not be native speakers, and that position might give them an advantage in this process). 

So, how do we help writing teachers and tutors who work with multilingual writers to develop the knowledge and skills they need to be effective?  Ferris has some good ideas (more about that later) but how can one use methods from an MA-TESOL context in other situations?  I plan to continue to grapple with this question but also to investigate how other instutions may be tackling it.  That is, CLC needs to be supporting multilingual writers effectively IN the classroom as well as outside of it.