MacDonald's "Erasure of Language"

You may notice that my article selection seems a bit disconnected.  My narrow goal in this course is to reflect on and improve the way I teach my AP English Language course, which is designed to replicate (I’m sure many college instructors would challenge my word choice!) first-year composition, so my interests have to do both with what happens (and doesn’t) in FYC classrooms and with the relationships between college and high school composition instruction.  In accordance with the stereotype of secondary teachers in our field, I am most interested in how ideas are applied in practice—pedagogy growing from theory and research, not theory or research for their own sake. I see the value of the latter, but they’re not for me.  And so, when I choose an article for this blog, it somehow fits within these interests—realities in FYC classrooms, the relationship of that reality to high school instruction, and ways I can practically apply knowledge of that reality to my own secondary classroom.

 MacDonald, Susan Peck. “The Erasure of Language.” College Composition and Communication 58.4 (Jun 2007):585-625. Web. 16 May 2011.

I find that working at the sentence level of both students’ and other authors’ work has far greater benefits than a grasp of grammar or style; if students understand that meaning arises not from the writer’s genius or the text’s Gestalt, but from the precise combination of words and sentences, then they come to see both analysis and writing as within their reach.  In this article, MacDonald traces the declining interest in language within the rhet/comp community and notes that current trends have minimized the value of working with language, emphasizing instead “theory and the social” (issues of race, class, and gender) (590).  These current trends have long made me feel guilty about my own interests, so MacDonald’s article offers a sort of permission to care about language use. 

MacDonald continues to win my heart by presenting quantitative research on the topic (another unfashionable practice I appreciate).  She searched the titles of CCCC sessions over fifty years and found a dramatic decrease in those regarding language.  She compares the way our field defines its problems—in a fluid, shifting way—with the way hard sciences define theirs—in a way that allows consistent work toward increased knowledge.  She does not argue that our approach should change, but does note what is lost: we “have a tendency to throw out good, past work whenever a new preoccupation attracts our interest” (592).  MacDonald also shows that what attention has been paid to language in the 21^st-century has focused on problems—problems for ESL students, for nonstandard English speakers, for students unprepared for academia.  MacDonald laments that language study “does not, for instance, include a love of the melodies … of English, a theoretical interest in how language functions, … or a scholarly interest in the verbs of Shakespeare and the verbs of public documents” (595).

MacDonald then argues that the 1974 resolution on students’ right to their own language created binary thinking that has persisted: either teachers teach Edited American English, or they “recognize and…value nonprestige dialects” (600).  She reveals resulting problems in reduced grammar instruction and makes a case for teaching clauses and punctuation explicitly.  She also notes complications arising from the demographic shift in American colleges and from disconnects between linguistic and English studies.  All of these problems point to a need to return to grammar instruction, out of fashion since the 1960s, albeit through different methods.

In her conclusion, MacDonald recommends goals for our teaching of language, three of which sound similar to my own values:

•  Recognizing parts of sentences and how they function—without being overwhelmed by metalanguage but also having the metalanguage required for understanding and choosing options to communicate
• Understanding the variations of "plain" versus nominalized language, active versus passive constructions, scholarly versus popular prose style that the rest of the working world grapples with every day and has few tools for discussing
•  Understanding how both literary and nonliterary writing achieve their effects (617)

At the heart of MacDonald’s argument is the point that language instruction has been marginalized because of assumptions that its intent is unfair and judgmental remediation. In my own practice, I have found value in exactly the kind of language instruction that she advocates as an alternative.