Essay drafts

Your Philosophy/Approach for working with oral features in writing

Cover Memo: I would like some feedback on how I should elaborate on my answers. Should I add more examples or should I bring in any scholarly arguments? Overall, does the organization of my answer make sense?

            My philosophy for working with oral features in student writing is to approach it in a culturally sensitive and supportive way. When working with students with oral features, I believe it is important to approach it with open mind and willingness to communicate to them about their situations. Oral features can occur in both native and non native students’ writings. Speech often bleeds into writing because many students hear the sound, but does not know how to write them down properly.

My key strategies in dealing with this situation are communication and assessment. When working with students who are struggling with speech interference issue in their writings, I often try to determine whether the student aware or unaware of the difference between speech and written English. Sometimes, the student may be writing the words down as they hear the sound but may not know the correct way to spell it. Since English vocabularies often have a lot of silent sounds and spellings that may not look the same on paper, a lot of non native speakers find this extremely difficult to deal with. Students who emigrate from another country that may have different phonetic systems or generation 1.5 students who acquire English orally may have this problem as well as those native speakers who rely on technology to communicate daily.

After I assess whether the student is aware of the differences in written language and speech, I proceed to show them how it is correctly spelled. I believe the best way to have students memorize vocabulary is to write it in a sentence. If the problem is something that involves grammar rule such as plurals or possessive pronouns, I go over them on the board and have the student use it in a sentence in a correct way to see the difference. I also scan their papers to see if there are any parts they did it correctly so that they can visually compare these two answers from their own works.

Your Philosophy for working with dialect features in student writing

Cover Memo: I would like some feedback on whether I answered the question right. Should I Be more elaborate and back my argument up with specific examples from the articles we’ve read so far?

            My philosophy in working with students with dialect features in their writing is again, communication. Without proper knowledge of what their background is, it would be difficult to assess how to help them or encourage them. My first and foremost strategy is communication in this case. For example, if a student comes from a certain ethnic background, they may have trouble using correct idioms. When student uses words such as “delivered” in place of “saved,” then this may be due to his or her own cultural background with different usage of words.  However, writing in different dialect can interfere with student’s success because not everybody can understand that dialect outside the group.

            In order to avoid such shock, I usually have a conference with a student to see what his or her cultural background is and explain to the student that although their dialect is important and unique to bring into the academic voice, it is better to acquire Standard English for the academic papers and dialect for fiction writing or poetry writing. This alone can save me such trouble when working with dialect features in students’ writing because I can take what they have written and explain to them that this is not how Standard English uses that particular word.

            Closing the gap between each regional personality and Standard American English is difficult. One group would like to preserve his or her voice but Standard American English imposes their language onto already linguistically marginalized groups in America. One of my key strategies is to visually show the difference on the board and read it out loud to let the students hear the difference. I also allow my students to be exposed to many different types of narratives ranging from poetry, short stories to academic articles. I use this opportunity to explain to them that it is not that dialects are bad to keep but to expand one’s linguistic horizon; one must learn different dialects and voices before turning to Standard American English to write them out for the public audience.