Nice article, Roger.  And I'm happy to report that while the universities may fall short, the colleges seem to have some things in line.  Here at Conestoga College, in both our diploma courses and in the bachelor degree courses, we follow the pedagogy which focuses on teaching audience as a construct--something beyond the teacher and which requires that the students think about who really will read the things they write.  We acknowledge that they start off looking at "teacher as audience" but try to help them move forward.  We also tell all of our writing faculty to stop focusing on teaching grammar in isolation as a way to get through the hour but to contextualize it--have students go back and look at the errors in their papers and try to understand why they made them . . . and why they're errors.

But that message certainly doesn't extend to other departments who keep pushing the traditional ways, nor to administration which places all writing courses in the first semester of the first year of a 4 year degree or 3 year diploma--and then wonders why they aren't better writers at the end of it all.  Thanks for another cogent and pointed attempt to try to move things in writing instruction.

Sandy

-----Original Message-----
From: casll-l: Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning (Inkshed) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Russ Hunt
Sent: September-11-13 5:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: University Affairs article on student writing

Nobody will be surprised to hear a distant voice from the Maritimes cheering at this sentence:

"However, our data shows that instructors across the university rarely ask students to write for any audience other than the instructor."

I also, of course, made agreeing noices at this comment: "It is a complex topic, but the upshot is that teaching traditional school grammar outside the context of student composing doesn't lead to better quality written products."

(I guess it does lead to people knowing that, um, "data" was a plural noun in Latin . . . )

-- Russ

> A short piece i wrote for University Affairs on student writing came
> online today:
>
> http://www.universityaffairs.ca/Article.aspx?id=112086
>
> The comment area at the bottom might be a good way to extend or
> elaborate this conversation.
>
> Roger Graves
> --
> Roger Graves
> Director, Writing Across the Curriculum University of Alberta
> www.ualberta.ca/~graves1
>
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Russ Hunt
Department of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/

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