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Nancy Grace is an expert in composition and rhetoric, as well as 19th and 20th century American Literature, 20th century British Literature, and English as a second language. She also specializes in Beat Literature, James Joyce and gender. An associate professor of English, chair of the department, and director of the writing center at The College of Wooster, Grace received her bachelor’s degree from Otterbein College and her master’s degree and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. She has been a member of the Wooster faculty since 1987. The author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature and The Tutor Handbook, Grace is currently researching "Teaching Writing in an Introductory Liberal Arts Course." Grace is a member of the Modern Language Association, The Association for Integrative Studies, The Hemingway Society, the Midwest Modern Language Association, and the National Council of Teachers of English. |
What have we done to the English Language?
It’s a question many people have been asking, particularly in regard
to the writing skills of young people today. Nancy Grace, associate professor
of English at The College of Wooster, sees the results of scholastic English
programs firsthand when those students enter college, and she has some strong
opinions as well as some surprising thoughts about the current state of
affairs.
Are the writing skills of students coming out of high school better or worse than they were 25 years ago? This is a difficult question to answer since we don’t have many comparative studies that assess these differences, and the ones that do are in some ways like assessing apples and oranges: the kinds of writing that students are asked to do now is much more varied than it was 20 or 30 years ago. As a teacher of composition for 20 years, I see no marked difference in the quality of writing. Many students leave high school as extremely strong writers; many are still struggling – and there are a host of reasons for each case, innumerable variables that are extremely difficult to identify and quantify. My sense is that more students are being trained to enter college now than 20 years ago, so more students are receiving more intense writing instruction, and that’s all for the good. Are students reading as much quality literature as they should be? I’m not sure what "as they should be" means. Many people from my generation grew up reading comic books; many others from that generation and earlier grew up with very little exposure to reading and thus lacked the skills to read more than a local newspaper (the eighth-grade reading level). I’d love to see young people read more, particularly a range of stylists from David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison to Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf, to Emerson and Melville. Such reading is at the heart of good writing. And many students are exposed to some of these writers in high school and then later in college. How would you describe the general state of students’ literary skills entering college today? More students are more literate. With the push to provide a college education for every American, the public school system is now trying to prep a greater range of students than ever before for college. This is a difficult task, and not all school systems are succeeding, especially considering the inequitable way in which public education for grades K-12 is funded (a good example is the State of Ohio, which has yet to construct a court-ordered equitable system to fund our schools), but many teachers work heroically to do so, and we see more young people with the basic skills necessary to enter college. Are strict grammar and usage lessons being taught in middle school and high school as diligently as they once were? No, and I’m glad that they are not, at least not the way grammar and usage were frequently taught in the schools. By that I mean the disassociation of such instruction from the instruction of writing. There are numerous and well-conducted studies that show how teaching grammar divorced from the context of constructing real discourse does little if nothing at all to improve one’s writing ability. So, while I believe that grammar instruction is useful, and by "grammar" I refer to the surface-level description of how words interact and not to the fundamental way in which the brain processes words, it is a waste of teacher and student time if it’s not taught in a dialectical relationship with the composition. Drilling students in grammar rules is punitive at best. How has the electronic media, particularly television and the Internet, affected the literary and language skills of young people? The Internet, particularly the use of e-mail, has created a new hybrid language system, and many young people use it with great dexterity. The internet has also put a veritable treasure trove of information at our fingertips, so students can quickly access information that would have taken them months to get or would not have been available to them prior to the internet. They can also communicate with people around the world – instantly – and this improves the knowledge-making process. Of course, the negative side is that it’s much easier to plagiarize than it used to be, and there are hundreds of sites that sell term papers shamelessly. Instructors have to be more creative about their assignments to avoid plagiarism, but this is ultimately a good thing; there’s nothing more boring for a student than being asked to write in response to a hackneyed assignment. What needs to be done to improve the verbal skills of students? Students need to be in classrooms that promote the use of language for real-world purposes, that engage students in assignments that are meaningful. This involves combining reading and writing assignments. Students also need classroom activities that allow them to discuss their ideas with others, to try out their knowledge and refine it through conversation. We also need to pay teachers a great deal more for the hard work they do, to stop the incessant focus on assessment that hides the problem of a nation that devalues education while at the same time its political leaders claim that it’s a national priority. We need better trained and brighter young people in education, but this will not happen until the system respects intelligence and creativity more so than bureaucratic marks of professionalization. |
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| Last updated: January 10, 2006 · For more information, contact John Finn | ||
