Tuesday, February 17, 2009

How to help?

Sentence from a student's essay:

"I find out for the potential concept from reading to encourage my ability of learning."

I don't know what this sentence means. Can anyone help me?
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1 comment:

David Beard said...

It means that the great disservice that traditional English teachers (and by this I mean old-school secondary ed and lit-trained comp teacher) do to their students is:

tell them that they write in a different voice from which they speak.

I can't imagine a student who would speak that sentence.

Instead of teaching students to write differently than they speak (because somehow how they speak is off, wrong, or unacceptable), we need to teach them better ways to express themselves orally. A deeper and wider range of oral expression will lead to better writing; learning to write differently than we speak just creates schizophrenia, which I think this sentence demonstrates.

But then, blog responses are where I say wild and crazy crap.

February 18, 2009 at 2:45 AM

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