Gordon, Have you tried asking students to say what they
already know about language? Do you know about Walt
Wolfram's marvelous curricula on dialects? Long ago,
Shirley Heath worked with teachers in the Carolinas,
turned students into ethnographers of language use in
their communities. A recent collection of articles
 co-edited by David Bloome and Ann Egan Robertson
reports similar ethnographic projects of students
"Students as ethnographers of community and language"
or something like that. Asking students to make use of
the intelligence they have acquired in the environments
they've learned to negotiate has pay-offs both in terms
of motivation and the collaborative building of knowledge
that's so valued by schools. Language is so fascinating and
students who do not speak the dominant dialect/language are
so much more aware of language than the "good" students --
why not tap into their curiosity, intelligence, and other
imaginative resources that are by now well developed?
Begin with what they know and build it up systematically.
That's my recommendation, anyway.
Judith


t 11:22 PM 1/8/99 -0500, you wrote:
> GORDON RIVES CARMICHAEL writes:
>
>>A few years before I retired, I began to
>> detect a noticeable deterioration in the quality of writing my young
>> officers were capable of producing. To be kind, their grammar was
>> deplorable. Now, I am also finding that the newer/younger students are
>> arriving with those poor grammar skills, and I find fewer and fewer
>> students devote much time at all to reading (in my opinion, perhaps THE
>> key to good grammar) - any reading, from newspapers to books. They are
>> basically non-readers who feel reading is a waste of time, and, even
>> worse, boring! They can sometimes just about make me weep with their
>> indifference to reading ...
>
>Alas, but this is so true of today's students.  I teach high school English
>(in an inner city charter school) and face an uphill battle with reading
>and writing (and, consequently, grammar - which I am untypically strong
>with).  They complain about every reading assignment - even when THEY
>select the books.  Getting them to revise any piece of writing is next to
>impossible (my journalism students have written so little that I've
>postponed the publication of the school paper indefinitely).  If I work on
>reading or writing they complain that it's "boring" and that English is
>supposed to be about "adjectives and stuff like that;"  but if I teach
>grammar, they turn off completely.
>
>I think the problem is that their lives outside school are so stressful and
>full of stimuli (mostly negative ones) that everything we do in school is
>terribly anti-climactic.  Also, in the wake of television, video games, and
>rap music, there isn't enough stimulus in silent reading to keep them
>interested for more than two minutes.
>
>I guess what I'm doing here is asking if any of you have similar
>experiences, or if you've used some strategies that work to get past this
>reluctancy.  I'd love to hear from you.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Paul D.
>


Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183

Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake