I. English 101 for ESL
Students
II. Information
Provided by This Module
III. What Is "Good" Writing? A Theoretical
Dabate
IV. A.
Sequence of Activities in a Ten Week Course
IV. B. Activities
V. References
English 101 is a composition course required of all students at Kennesaw
State University. The requirements, which this module follows, are that
students must write three essays and at the end of the quarter, write a
portfolio consisting of one revised essay and two revised journal essays
that is graded by a committee of three instructors. The instructor grading
the first three essays does not belong to the committee, enabling students
to write to an audience besides their instructor.
English 101 for ESL students is an elective. Foreign students may choose
a regular English 101 section if they wish. At Kennesaw State University,
ESL students are varied in age, ethnic background, and in prior English
instruction. Some have received English instruction at foreign universities,
while others have received instruction at American high schools, colleges,
and universities.Step 1: Have students work in pairs to consolidate
their lists to come up with the best set of interview questions.
Step 2: One student will then assume the role of interviewer, and
the other the role of job applicant. The pair should decide what kind of
company is hiring, what position must be filled, etc. (The teacher may
need to make suggestions, or provide a list of companies and positions
for the students to choose from).
Step 3: Encourage students to rehearse their role-plays and perform
in front of the class.
To accommodate instructors who must teach students from varied backgrounds and learning styles, I tried to suggest how instructors might vary or adapt the module's activities to suit their particular students.
The module a describes a method of teaching the writing styles favored in two academic communities. First, the writing style that most English departments favor is introduced, followed by the writing style favored in other academic disciplines such as business and the sciences. ESL students will learn to write expository and narrative prose and to adapt their grammar and style to their audience and purposes. Thus, they will learn to write for academic audiences outside the English department, a skill which few English departments at the college and university level currently teach. Because the course is geared to suit students not majoring in English, these students may view the course as more than a formal requirement, and may be strongly motivated to learn.
Is there a distinct style of "good" writing? Joseph M. Williams (1990) argues that good writers follow a narrative model, stating that narratives are among the first kinds of discourse we learn, are fundamental and basic to human behavior, and that all apparently expository or informational prose has a narrative behind it that should be displayed.
Douglas Biber's (1988) research illustrates the grammatical characteristics of the narratives so highly prized by Williams. Biber performed a statistical analysis on a large body of English and American writing and speech consisting of millions of words in order to determine the predominant types of discourse, and their representative grammatical features. Biber's analysis showed that two of the predominant discourse types were informational and narrative, and that six grammatical features characterized narrative discourse, of which three are relevant for the purposes of this module: past tense verbs, perfect aspect verbs, and present participial clauses. The other three grammatical features of narrative discourse were thirdperson pronouns, public verbs, and synthetic negation (Biber, 1988). Thirdperson pronouns are found in narratives because narrators were often concerned with other people's actions. The other three grammatical features of narrative discourse were thirdperson pronouns, public verbs, and synthetic negation (Biber, 1988). Thirdperson pronouns are found in narratives because narrators were often concerned with other people's actions. Public verbs like "report" and "explain" describe indirect discourse. Biber could not explain why synthetic negation (forms of negation using "neither," "nor" and "no" instead of "not") appeared in narratives. I could not see how studying these features could help ESL students in a composition class.
Here is an example of how they might function together in a narrative:
Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; and putting on a mask of black silk and drawing a [short cloak] closely about my person, I suffered him to hurry to my palazzo.
There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honor of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. (Poe, 1994, 186)
The past tense verbs are very precise and specific to give readers a clear picture of the action being described. Instead of "leaving," the servants "absconded." Participial clauses add to the imagery of the passage: "Thus speaking. . . putting on a mask. . . drawing a short cloak closely about my person. . . ." The past perfect aspect marks actions in past time with current relevance (Biber, 1988, 223). In this passage, past perfects are used to describe past events with continuing results; the narrator "had told" his attendants not to return until morning and "had given" them explicit orders so that they would not distract him from his current purpose.
According to Biber, narratives characterized by the presence of the past tense, perfect aspect, and participial phrases are written in the "verbal style" in contrast to the "nominal style" more characteristic of informational writing. The St. Martin's Handbook, a muchpraised composition and style manual commonly used in English 101 (and strongly influenced by Joseph M. Williams' dictates on style), advocates the verbal style, telling students to "use strong, precise verbs instead of weak, catchall verbs and instead of nouns" (Lunsford and Connors, 1995, 364).
Biber found that most academic writing was informational rather than persuasive in character, and that its typical nominal style had the following grammatical features: nouns, prepositional phrases, present tense, the passive voice, relative clauses, coordinators, conjuncts (transition words"moreover," "however," etc.), and subordinators. Here is an example of the nominal style from a government publication:
In order to give a more detailed appraisal of the work done in modern language courses, it is convenient to consider separately the different facets of language study. Nevertheless it must be emphasized that, if language is to be successful, there can be no question of dividing up the work into rigid compartments. . . .
The initial oral training is too rarely continued and developed in the later stages and many pupils do not progress beyond the standard of speech they had reached by the end of the second year. Many teachers feel that they cannot afford the time necessary for the development of oral work, but in most cases it is not additional time which is required so much as the more systematic and purposeful training in the correct use of more difficult speech forms. (Biber, 1988, 138)
This passage has many nouns and few verbs. If tense is marked, it is in the present, emphasizing that this passage describes current findings or the state of current affairs: ("training is too rarely continued," "teachers feel.") The clause "training is too rarely continued" exemplifies the agentless passive, used here because the writer wishes to emphasize training, rather than those continuing it. Relative clauses provide more information about nouns: "which is required" modifies "time." The prepositional phrases pack lots of information together by illustrating the relationships of nouns to one another: ". . . for the development of oral work." Coordinators and subordinators ("and," "if") indicate the logical relationships between ideas and sentences, important in informational discourse. Fulfilling the same role, a conjunct, "nevertheless," marks a concession. Nominalizations, nouns formed from verbs, are also characteristic of the nominal style because they can develop ideas and compress information into fewer words. For example, in the above passage, instead of stating "students develop oral work," the writer uses a nominalization to compress information: "the development of oral work." Also present are attributive adjectives, characteristic of a great deal of information being compressed into the fewest words. Instead of writing that "the training is systematic and purposeful," the author describes "systematic and purposeful training." Thus, ellipsis typifies informational writing.
Joseph Williams (1990), proponent of the "verbal" style, does not mince words in condemning the nominal style, stating that it is "turgid, indirect, unclear, unreadable, passive, confusing, abstract, awkward, opaque, complex, impersonal, obscure, inflated" (17). No doubt, some academic writing is like this, but Williams goes too far by condemning the nominal style as a whole. Janet Giltrow (1995) offers some adequate rebuttals to Williams' claims, arguing that the correctness of a style depends on the expectations of the audience for whom it is intended. In her view, English instructors have no right to impose their stylistic standards on other disciplines. Correctness of style depends completely on the writer's audience, topic, and purposeas does grammatical correctness. In the sciences, Giltrow (1995) argues, the nominal style is useful because it enables writers to compress a great deal of information into a small space. It is the grammatical features of this style which achieve this compressionthe nominalizations, attributive adjectives, and relative clauses. Readers like Williams might find the passage quoted above "unreadable" because the audience for whom it is intended is a specialized, academic community that assumes a certain amount of knowledge amongst its readers. Writers are not being elitist or exclusionary in using a jargon appropriate for a certain set of readers; they are using a shorthand which enables them to communicate effectively with one another. For example, when two nuclear physicists write to one another, they are not being elitist if they do not assume that their audience is not a "general" audience. Also, Williams might find the passage unreadable because it is relentlessly abstract and makes no attempt to entertain the audience with concrete verbs and imagery. But the writer's purpose was to inform, not to entertain. It is part of the academic culture of English departments to make emotional appeals with narratives, but it may not be so in other disciplines, and in fact, may indicate a lack of seriousness.
It may be reasonably objected that this module attempts to do too much by teaching two styles. Some may say, "ESL students will have enough trouble mastering one stylewhy burden them with two?" If we teach them only one style, we risk misrepresenting the academic community, and the subject of English by arguing that only one style should be written, with only one standard of grammatical correctness. Rather, students must learn to view style and grammatical correctness as a function of their audience, topic and purpose. It will be better for them if they can learn this lesson in English 101, rather than outside it by osmosis. Another reason for teaching the two styles together is that Biber's research shows that they are often mixed in with one another in varying amounts, depending upon the discourse community for whom they are meant; for example, press reportage is an instance of a genre with mixed styles (Biber, 1988, 136). Students will be able to understand these hybrid mixtures more easily if they have mastered both styles. Douglas Biber's quantitative research enables instructors to focus narrowly on the grammatical features of those styles.
Here I provide a brief summary explaining how the topics, readings, and activities described in section IV. B. might be ordered in a ten week course.
Week 1:
Topics: discourse markers and their role in plot structure
Readings: narratives
Activities: working with gapped texts
Week 2:
Topics: present participial phrases, dangling modifiers, comma splices,
fused sentences
Readings: narratives
Activities: sentence combining, textbook exercises relating to the grammar
features
Week 3:
Topics: tense and aspect, precise verbs, imagery, figurative language
Readings: narratives
Activities: cloze passage exercises, peer review workshop. Essay 1 due.
Week 4:
Topics: general organization of expository essays, role of discourse markers
in essay organization
Readings: expository essays illustrating causes and effects
Activities: identifying the parts of essays, filling in gapped texts with
discourse markers
Week 5:
Topics: sentence types, relative clauses
Readings: expository essays illustrating comparisons and contrasts
Activities: sentence combining
Week 6:
Topics: sentence types, relative clauses
Readings: expository essays developing classifications and divisions
Activities: sentence combining, peer review workshop. Essay 2 due.
Week 7:
Topics: definition in academic disciplines other than English, the relationship
of definition to readings covered in weeks 46, formal sentence definition,
nouns, present tense, nominalizations, static and dynamic verbs
Readings: expository essays illustrating definitions
Activities: identifying the grammatical features of definitions
Week 8:
Topics: grammatical features of formal sentence definitions
Readings: expository essays illustrating definitions
Activities: analyzing the grammar of formal sentence definitions
Week 9:
Topics: definitions, the passive voice
Readings: expository essays illustrating definitions, "Body Ritual
among the Nacirema"
Activities: group work identifying the grammatical features of the nominal
style
Week 10:
Topics: the passive voice
Readings: extracts from ethnography articles
Activities: peer review workshop. Essay 3 due.
General Description of Activities Related to Narratives
When writing narratives, students' purposes are to entertain, and to write by using the verbal style favored by the academic audience of English departments, while basing their own styles on the narratives provided by a reader such as Judith Stanford's (1993) Connections. The writers anthologized in Connections come from a variety of cultures and write narratives for a general audience about arriving in America, about their parents, and about their education. Students will then write on the same topics, using the essays in the reader as models.
In addition to the grammatical features of narrative writing noted by Biber, instructors should teach the discourse markers that show how the narrative is sequenced and organized. Words like "then," "first," "at once," "before," and "after" show readers the overall plot organization by illustrating the relationship of sentences and paragraphs to one another (Nuttall, 1996, 9496). Instructors should teach this grammatical feature first, because readers will interpret individual words in light of the discourse markers. Once students see the role of discourse markers in a text, they will gradually focus on increasingly smaller phrasal and wordlevel grammatical features of narrative discourse: present participial phrases, tense, and aspect.
Specific Activities Related to Narratives
When discussing a narrative essay or short story, the instructor might explain how discourse markers (transition words and conjunctions) keep readers abreast of the components of the plot such as the exposition setting the scene, the climax presenting the narrative's decisive action, and the resolution that draws the action to a close. When discussing paragraphing in narrative essays, consider explaining how writers' paragraphs relate to stages in the plot.
Instructors can show students how conjunctions and discourse markers bind a narrative text together by giving students a gapped text from their reader without discourse markers or subordinating conjunctions, so that they must recognize and supply these discourse markers themselves (Nuttall, 1996, 938).
Journal entries can give students practice with discourse markers, but to ensure that discourse markers appear in students' writing, instructors can give students short narratives composed of simple sentences, and have students combine the sentences individually or in groups. The texts themselves can come from composition textbooks like The St. Martin's Handbook, (Lunsford and Connors, 1993, 336) or from old narrative essays written by students. Because some students will probably write complex sentences, instructors can use this activity to discuss comma splices, fused sentences, and fragments, as well as the differences between phrases and clauses.
The stage is now set for a discussion of present participial phrases used by narrators for descriptive imagery. First, students must understand that phrases force the reader to make inferences from the context. For example, the sentence "Driving home from work, I accidentally went through a red light" is actually a shortened or elliptical form of "While I was driving home from work, I accidentally. . . " (Quirk and Greenbaum, 1990, 327). To help students understand how present participial phrases work, instructors might give students sentence combining exercises such as those provided by The St. Martin's Handbook (Lunsford and Connors, 1995, 183). Alternately, instructors can have students rewrite a passage from their reader that contains a large number of participial phrases into simple sentences. Another possibility might be to revise a student's essay containing short sentences that need to be combined together. To ensure that students learn to position present participial phrases near the words they modify, instructors should consider having students work on textbook exercises to correct dangling and misplaced modifiers. These activities can be done individually or in groups, at the instructor's discretion, so that the needs of the reflective and active learners can be addressed.
Now being familiar with the components of a narrative plot, students are ready to understand how shifts in tense and aspect also reflect plot shifts. Deborah Schiffrin's (1981) research shows that the historic present is sometimes used in the climactic section of a pasttime narrative to provide emphasis to the story's most important events, and that less important information like the exposition is described in the past tense to provide background for the climax.
To show how narrators use shifts in tense and aspect to foreground and background information in narratives, instructors have several options. If they wish to appeal to auditory learners, they can obtain a tape of a writer reading a short story and ask the class to identify the different parts of the plotthe exposition, climax, and resolutionand then notice any shifts in tense, and afterwards have a short class discussion about it. For reflective learners, a teacherled class discussion might be ideal, in which the instructor simply points out the tense shifts to students and asks them why a certain tense was used in a particular passage. To satisfy more active learners, the instructor can develop a cloze passage from a narrative in the reader, take out any verbs written in the perfect aspect or present tense and ask the students to work in groups to supply what they feel are the "correct" tense forms. This technique has several advantages. For one, an instructor can see if the class has any difficulties with tense and aspect. Secondly, instructors can compare students' answers with the author's, a procedure which should generate a class discussion explaining the rationale behind tense shifts.
Instructors teaching their students to write narratives should emphasize in their lectures that the verbs in the narrative style should be strong and precise, and thus conducive to the depiction of imagery. What does this mean? The St. Martin's Handbook uses the following quotation as an example of "precise" verbs:
A fire engine, out for a trial spin, roared past Emerson's house, hot with readiness for public duty. Over the barn roofs the martens dipped and chittered. A swarthy daughter of an asparagus grower, in culottes, shirt, and bandanna, pedaled past her on her bicycle. E.B. White, "Walden" (Lunsford and Connors, 1995, 364)
Lunsford and Connors argue that instead of the italicized verbs, White could have used more general verbs like "drove," "flew," "called," and "rode." However, the precise verbs are better for narrative purposes because they give the reader a vivid sensory impression of the actions they express. One way to teach the use of precise verbs would be to develop a cloze passage out of a textbook narrative. The students would have three verbs to choose from in completing the cloze passage: the precise verb the narrator chose, or some more general alternatives. Alternately, instructors could use the following activity adapted from The St. Martin's Handbook (Lunsford and Connors, 1995, 364). Students will be asked to bring a section of newspaper to class. The instructor asks them to list the headlines they consider most effective, and then divides the class into groups of three or five, and asks them to identify the most precise and vivid verbs and nouns. Next, the instructor asks students to rewrite the headlines with more general and abstract verbs and nouns. Finally, the instructor asks a member of each group to read a few headlines that used precise verbs and nouns, and some of the weak headlines with general and abstract verbs and nouns. This exercise would be a good way for students to distinguish between the nominal and verbal styles at an early stage in the course.
As a way of enhancing the visual images in students' papers, instructors can get their students to notice how writers use figurative languagesimiles, metaphors, analogiesto grab their readers' attention.
After students have learned to recognize how using tense and aspect can foreground and background information, how participial phrases, precise verbs and nouns and figurative language contribute to the imagery of their writing, and how discourse markers give it cohesion, they are ready to look for these items in the drafts that they bring to class for peer review. When forming questions for students to answer, instructors may ask students to evaluate how effectively the paragraphing, discourse markers, tense, and aspect reflect the essay's plot.
Informational Writing
In this portion of the course, students will write two expository essays based on model essays from a reader. For their first essay, students will define and classify, compare and contrast, explain causes and effects, or use a combination of these strategies. Like the essayists in Judith Stanford's (1993) Connections, students can write about their own personal experiences; as an alternative, they can discuss the essays in the reader. The instructor might assign paper topics that resemble the following:
Compare and contrast the atmosphere of an older established shopping area downtown with that of a mall. Use direct observations and interviews for your sources. (Stanford, 1993, 269)
Compare Peter Filene's assessment of the American male conflict with Paula Allen's description of the Native American woman's conflict in "Where I Come from Is Like This." (Stanford, 1993, 400)
The first expository essay is written in preparation for a second essay in which students write a definition of an abstraction and illustrate that definition by using some or all of the strategies they used in the first essaycomparing and contrasting, dividing and classifying, or explaining causes and effects.
In their journal entries, students might discuss their personal experiences by comparing and contrasting, dividing and classifying, explaining causes and effects, and defining.
When discussing the grammatical features of informational writing, I suggest that instructors start with the discourse markers, and then gradually shift their focus to increasingly smaller phrase and wordlevel grammatical features, because students will only understand individual words if they understand the discourse markers that give the text its organizational structure.
Activities
To give students a general idea of an expository essay's organization, instructors can lead a class discussion about an author's introduction, thesis, supporting points, topic sentences and so on, a procedure that might be effective for reflective learners. Christine Nuttall (1996, 107) describes several activities that might get active learners' attention. For example, instructors can supply a text of several paragraphs, with one paragraph omitted. Students would then have to point out where the paragraph belongs. Instructors can vary this activity by cutting out as many paragraphs as desirable from a text, and have students arrange them in the correct order. Another variety of this procedure could be applied to topic sentences. Instructors would give students a text missing the appropriate topic sentences, and students would then choose the correct topic sentences from a list of topic sentences, some of which do not appear in the text.
Instructors can then focus their students' attention on the grammatical features that give texts cohesion and coherence in informational writing: conjuncts (traditionally known as "transition words and phrases") and conjunctions, which collectively are called discourse markers. Nuttall (1996, 946) has divided discourse markers into several types: additive, adversative, and causal. Additive discourse markers introduce further ideas which the writer believes can add to or reinforce what has already been stated, words like "and," "moreover," "furthermore." Adversative discourse markers introduce information that is contrary to what has been expected or hopedwords like "but," "yet," "though," and "however." Finally, causal discourse markers indicate relationships of cause, intention, and conditionwords like "therefore," "thus," and the traditional subordinating conjunctions, "if," "unless," "because."
Nuttall (1996, 946) provides instructors with several methods that can help students in identifying and distinguishing discourse markers. Instructors can supply students with a text marked by gaps, and offer two or three markers for each gap in multiple choice style. To increase the activity's difficulty, instructors can supply a gapped text without choices; students would have to select markers from a list in random order. To increase the difficulty of the task, instructors can supply a text without any choices at all.
These activities will enable instructors to illustrate the grammar of comparison and contrast, of classification and division, and of causes and effects. "Additive" discourse markers will illustrate comparisons, "adversative" discourse markers will show differences and distinctions, while "causal" discourse markers will indicate causes and effects.
These reading activities provide an excellent opportunity to discuss subordination, coordination, and the sentence types: simple, compound, complex, and compoundcomplex. Instructors can have students work in groups to identify the kinds of discourse markers and sentence types in an essay from their reader. The instructor can then lead a class discussion on sentence types and discourse markers, and explain how they relate to the author's purpose: comparing and contrasting, dividing and classifying, explaining causes and effects. Sentence combining activities from style manuals offer instructors another way of teaching the same material (Lunsford and Connors, 1995, 191). Another option is to have students identify the sentence types in their first essay.
After analyzing complex sentences students will be prepared to understand how relative clauses concisely add information about the nouns they modify, and, for that reason, how important they are in expository prose. Instructors can extract paragraphs from an essay containing a great number of relative clauses, photocopy them, and have students identify the relative clauses by underlining or circling them. Students will see how relative clauses can compact information by rewriting the relative clauses as simple sentences. The following paragraph written by a Native American woman might be ideal for these activities:
I also remember vividly the women who came to my father's store, the women who held me and sang to me, the women at Feast Day, the women in the kitchen of my cubero home, the women I grew up with. None of them appeared weak or helpless, none of them presented herself timidly. I remember a certain reserve on those lovely brown faces; I remember the direct gaze of eyes framed by brightcolored shawls draped over their heads and cascading down their backs. (Allen, 1993, 352)
Notice how relative clauses serve the writer's overall purpose of division and classification. She wants to explain how all the women she describes differ from one another in certain respects, and relative clauses enable her to do that. ESL students will have no problem identifying the relative clauses beginning with "wh" words like "who," but students may have a great deal of difficulty recognizing that present and past participial phrases can function as reduced or elliptical relative clauses. For example, in the last sentence of the passage quoted above, the writer twice leaves out the relative pronoun "that" and the verb "were." The speaker actually means "I remember the direct gaze of eyes [that were] framed by brightcolored shawls [that were] draped over their backs." In general, ESL students have problems understanding when ellipsis is and is not permitted in English, and studying this passage will give them an excellent opportunity to grapple with this problem (McCarthy, 1991, 44). Instructors may consider putting a passage like this on networked computer terminals, and allow the students to supply all the information that the writer implies but not directly state. That way, instructors should also have a good idea of the students' reading and writing difficulties. Instructors also might point out how adjectives placed in front of nouns facilitate concision. Instead of writing that the Indians' "shawls were brightly colored," Allen describes "brightlycolored shawls." Instructors should try to point out that when students use ellipsis in their writing, they are leaving out information that readers can infer from the context. Therefore, instructors must emphasize that students should have as many different readers as possible for their essays. This message should reinforce the importance of peerediting workshops. When designing questions for students to answer when they read one another's essays in peerreview workshops, instructors may consider asking students to identify their introductions, thesis statements, conjuncts, subordinators, coordinators, sentence types, and relative clauses. Students may be more motivated during the peer editing sessions if instructors emphasize that their ability to identify conjuncts, subordinators, and so forth directly reflects their progress in the course, and that if they cannot identify all the elements listed above, they must seek help from someone.
The second essay will be a mixture of the verbal and nominal styles. Since some students will be discussing their personal experiences, they will be narrating, and should use the specific verbs appropriate for narratives. Also, their audience is their English instructor, who will expect them to write mainly in the verbal style. Nevertheless, students will be using some of the grammatical features of the nominal style favored in other academic disciplines, and for similar purposes. Their second essay, a hybrid of the verbal and nominal styles, will enable them to cross the divide between the verbal and nominal styles, and to see that many pieces of writing are not written in either one style or the other, but reflect a combination of the two.
After students have divided and classified, compared and contrasted, and have analyzed causes and effects, they will be ready to use these techniques to define abstract concepts. When introducing this topic, instructors might collect some definitions written by academic writers for an academic audience that does not include someone in an English department, and then show students how these authors compare and contrast, analyze causes and effects, and divide and classify to develop their definitions. Instructors may also consider assigning readings in which the authors use these same strategies to develop definitions for a general audience. Suppose that students have read several essays that deal with education. They might be asked to write on the following paper topic: "Compare and contrast the approaches of four different teachers described in the essays we have been reading. Use these teachers as examples to develop your definition of the ideal teacher" (Stanford, 1993, 202).
Consider asking students to make sure that their thesis statements are formal sentence definitions, because their writing will necessarily be pushed in a more "nominal" direction. Here is an example of a formal definition of "therapeutic supervision": "Therapeutic supervision is a form of social restraint which targets an individual as deviant and then, through management and monitoring of the individual's daily experience, seeks to adjust his behavior to conform to a recognized norm" (Giltrow, 1995, 191). It is important to emphasize to students that the best formal sentence definitions will use the same organizational pattern the writer uses in the body of the essay: comparison and contrast, division and classification, explanation of causes and effects. For example, in the definition given above, the writer classifies by stating what therapeutic supervision is, and divides by stating what it does. Instructors can collect several formal definitions like this one and discuss their grammar with the class. Having already studied how the diction in narrative writing tends to be visual and concrete, and in fact obtains its power from appealing to the senses, students will begin to see how abstractions with the opposite qualities have a power of their own, and operate as shorthand expressions for people within a certain discipline. As Giltrow (1995) argues, formal definitions focus on the word being defined itself, isolating it from "the accidents, mixups, and blurry boundaries of real life" (188). To do this, it would be a complete mistake to use the specific, concrete verbs that students used in their narrative essays. In fact, it might be a good idea to tell students to avoid the concrete verbs they used in their narrative essays, because these verbs are not abstract enough to provide an adequate summary. Let us return to the definition of "therapeutic supervision" given above. It uses present tense verbs, because the writer wants to describe or summarize the current knowledge about his or her topic. If the first sentence of the definition used a transitive verb capable of taking an object, it would describe an action rather than summarize an existing state of affairs. For this reason, the verb in the first clause of a formal sentence definition should be stative rather than dynamic. The actions associated with therapeutic supervision are instead expressed in nominalizations and gerunds: "supervision," "restraint," "management," "monitoring," "behavior." From studying good formal sentence definitions, students can also learn how prepositions play a more salient role in the nominal style, because they link the nouns and nominalizations together. The instructor might say that while in the "verbal" style the verbs play a central role in conveying the meaning of the sentence, in the nominal style, nouns and prepositional phrases take over the workload in conveying a sentence's meaning. Although formal definitions may be the only bits of prose they write in the "nominal style" for academic audiences, students should have a good understanding of how this style operates rhetorically. The body of the essay should be written in the "verbal" style, since students will be discussing the reallife instances leading up to their general definition.
During the last part of the course, students should read some examples of academic writing to understand how the passive voice is used in academic discourse. I suggest that the examples of academic writing be chosen from the same discipline, and hopefully relate to students' interests and needs. I chose articles from the discipline of ethnography, the study of a social group and its ways based on firsthand observation, because ESL students are in a sense ethnographers themselves, trying to understand the workings of another culture and trying to bridge the gap between their culture and American culture. Moreover, discussing ethnography allows the instructor to broach the topic of multiculturalism in Americathe idea that America is composed of a variety of cultures, not one monolithic, homogeneous culture.
I strongly suggest that instructors have students read Miner's (1993) "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema." This often anthologized piece has appeared in two readers I have seen, including Stanford's (1993). It is an article mocking American culture that was once published in American Anthropologist for a scholarly audience and written in the scholarly nominal style. It is a rare birda humorous scholarly article, so students should enjoy it. Here are the article's first two paragraphs:
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949: 71). In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago (1936: 326), but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American tribe living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tumahare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, the nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnishaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strengththe throwing of a piece of wampum across the PaToMac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the spirit of truth resided. (Miner, 1993, 12).
It is highly unlikely that ESL students will know that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and lived near the Potomac in Virginia (Mount Vernon), or know where the Antilles are, so instructors should explain this before moving on to the grammar of the passage. Students should understand how the writer uses the passive voice from reading this passage. For example, the writer uses the passive voice when he wants to emphasize or foreground Murdock's findings, rather than Murdock, and to emphasize Notgnishaw's heroic act of creating a nation, rather than the great Notgnishaw himself. In fact, the writer uses the passive voice throughout the article to discuss the "bodyrituals" of the Nacirema, their actions, rather than focus on individual members of the Nacirema tribe. Students should learn that the passive voice allows the writer to sound detached, scientific and objective, not focused on his feelings, but on his subject matter: "In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend on the native aversion to the natural body and its functions" (Miner, 1993, 5).
If they have time, instructors can point out the compound nouns characteristic of scholarly discourse: "clan organization" and "culture hero." Chances are that students will not have encountered many compound nouns in the articles they have been reading that are intended for a general audience. Instructors can point out that the compound nouns enable writers to compress a great deal of information into a small space. For example, instead of writing "This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to the ways in which clans organize by Murdock," the writer more succinctly states: "This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock." This same sentence could be studied for its use of a nominalization ("organization") and prepositional phrases that relate the nouns together: "with respect to clan organization by Murdock." The quoted passage also contains a relative clause to give information about nouns in a succinct manner: ". . .who was otherwise known for great feats of strength."
The next step in teaching this essay would be to have students work in groups, and try to find the following grammatical features: nominalizations, compound nouns, relative clauses and the passive voice. After identifying these grammatical features, they will be given the opportunity to write an essay about other rituals of the Nacirema from an anthropologist's or ethnographer's perspective. For example, students can go to sporting events or shopping malls and describe what they notice about Americans' leisure time rituals. Instructors may consider asking students to consult some outside sources on their topic before they begin observing.
In peer review groups, instructors may direct students to observe whether the body of the essay follows the organizational pattern outlined in the definition (comparison and contrast, etc.). Students may be instructed to carefully observe the grammar of the formal definition, which should contain present tense, stative verbs and nominalizations. Students evaluating the pretend ethnography papers directed at academic audiences might look for the same grammatical features, along with the passive voice.
Finally, instructors may consider distributing extracts from modern ethnography articles. In modern articles, many writers use the active voice because they believe that knowledge is "socially constructed" and maintain that ethnographers should therefore refuse to hide behind the impersonality of the passive voice, and directly discuss their personal experiences while compiling information (Giltrow, 1995). Here is a sample of an extract that instructors might distribute and discuss with students:
I borrowed some books from my informants and acquired a library of publications by current Latin American theorists to cope with the confusion of ideological currents and social movements that I found in the mining community. (Nash, 1994, 17; Giltrow, 1995, 332)
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