Oral? Academic? Expressivist? Vernacular?
The Mixed Mixed Messages We May Be Sending Our Students

This weeks question asks why is it that many students have issues with the transition from oral language to academic language.

I think the answer depends on what kind of students we are working with and what pedagogical practices we are using to work with these students. Our students come from a variety of backgrounds, many for whom English is not their first language. Some of our students come from a background with a strong dialect, like AAVE or Chicano English. Our students, whether they be ELLs, Gen 1.5s or those with dialects, tend to have very strong oral skills, which emphasize different abilities than written English does. Oral English, whether with or without dialect has more nuance, more expressivity and I would argue, more character, whereas written English and in particular written academic English, can be very dry and dense. Lets face it, we may really love what we’re studying (I know I do) but sometimes, the material can be a bit thick and murky and the last thing I want to do as a student is write in that manner.

In our first days of working with our FYCs we encourage them to express themselves however they wish; tackle pre-writing exercises and short missives embracing an expressivist ideal. Forget about grammar, forget about SLIPs, just get the words out of the head and on the paper. Why do we do this? To engage students, to meet them where they live, to gently move them into the realm of written thought and to reduce the fear-factor for them. Is it a right approach? Is it an effective approach?

I believe it is, but the journey of a fledgling writer from the comfort and simplicity of freewriting, journal jottings and personal narrative to the rigid structure of academic prose must be one of gradual steps, each lesson building on the last, and sometimes tracing back along one’s path. Writing academic is learning a new language. For both student and instructor, it requires practice and patience. If we push students too quickly into formal writing, we can lose them. They become frustrated and alienated when the language they have used all their lives is no longer acceptable.