If they have got something to say, why cant they just say it in English

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If they have got something to say, why cant they
just say it in English?

• Mary McKeever

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Central Tension in Mass HE System (Burton Clarke,
cited in Russell 2002)
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Academic Literacies

• WP students experiences of speaking, reading and
  writing before university
• The challenges they face at university
• What universities can put in place to help
  students become fluent readers, confident
  speakers and expert writers
• Literacy experiences of one student

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Speech development

• By the age of 5, spoken language is normally
  highly developed with ability to comprehend and
  produce grammatical sentences and a vocabulary of
  3,000 words.
• A natural part of early human development,
  acquired unconsciously and relatively
  effortlessly. (Kellogg and Whiteford, 2009)

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Talking and writing at school

• I didnt go to the best primary school. We did
  reading and things, but we didnt really do any
  pronunciations and anything. When I started in
  Year 7 my form tutor asked me a question and I
  said I aint going and the teacher told me off
  for using aint. And I didnt understand or
  know anything wrong with that. I thought that was
  a valid word, I didnt know any different. But I
  always remember that, and from that, I have
  avoided using that word.

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Telling me off for being different from how I
wrote

• I do find I write differently to how I talk. Very
  much. I wouldnt have wrote aint in an essay or
  in a story. So the way I spoke and the way I
  wrote were very different then. She wouldnt have
  picked that up from my essays. It was a telling
  me off for being different from how I wrote, if
  that makes sense. I always enjoyed poetry and
  writing poems but again, the way I would say them
  would probably be different from the way I wrote
  them. And again my family arent academic or in
  any education and I think the way I spoke was who
  I was surrounded by, my environment. Who I am
  writing for is a different environment.

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Academic speech

• I felt I couldnt just ask a question the way I
  would ask my friends a question. I felt like I
  have got to try to make this sound academic. For
  example I would say Me and my friend. That is
  what I would say in general everyday language
  but when I was talking to a lecturer I felt I had
  to say Amy and I or Amy and myself. I had to
  stop and think about that. It delayed me asking
  the question. I would have to reword it.

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Immersion in work talk on placement

• In my department at Rolls Royce there were all
  these men in suits, ties and shirts. It took me a
  while, but I did have to get into the formal
  meetings and start picking up the language -
  business terms, very technical IT terms. Very
  jargon- based organisation, very much they have
  their own acronyms for things. It was mainly an
  assumption on their part that you already speak
  like that because they are so institutionalised
  in their own way. So they dont see anything
  different, so they expect everybody to speak like
  that.

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Talking on placement and at university

• And I think after having the placement, coming
  back to university, not only did I feel I could
  contribute to the lectures, but I felt I had
  something to offer. I felt like a professional.
  Do you know what I mean? When I came back to
  university, I felt I could go and ask questions
  because that is what I would do in a work
  situation. To find out requirements, Id go and
  ask questions. So you learn something from an
  outside environment and you can bring that into
  your university life as well.

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I havent apologised for my opinion

• I felt that even if wasn't 100 sure of the
  answer, I could give it and sound convincing and
  not feel embarrassed or go red. I didnt
  apologise for my opinion. I havent apologised
  for my opinion. That has been one of the
  motivating things this year. I asked the
  questions I wanted to ask. I answered how I
  wanted to answer. I didnt let anything stop me.
  I felt it was my true opinion. I didnt try to
  give a text book answer. I would give my unique
  opinion and one thing I liked was when the
  lecturer would reflect and use that further in
  the lecture Based on what Katie said earlier.
  It just gives you that feedback that you are OK,
  that your opinion is valid.

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The trap of using the wrong word

• But you need somebody, or I felt I needed
  somebody, to tell me that that word wasnt
  usable. Just learning the grammar and the order
  of words as well. I feel I can still fall into
  that trap of using the wrong word. For me aint
  still has a meaning in an informal setting. My
  sisters will use it and I dont tell them it is
  wrong. It is their language and that is what they
  want to use.

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Becoming an Expert Writer

• Writing approximately 25 years of instruction,
  practice and immersion in all aspects of literacy
  practices.
• Learning a musical instrument mastery of both
  mechanical skills and creative production
• Expert Violinist 10,000 hours of solitary
  practice vs. amateur 1,500 practice (Kellogg and
  Whiteford, 2009 in press

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Grammar

• I think the reasons why bits of grammar were
  unclear was because I didnt necessarily have the
  best grammar lessons at school. All I remember is
  that I missed the first week of secondary school
  and they seemed to have covered a lot of the
  grammar in the first week. But my secondary
  school, they picked me up and they did a good
  job. But the only thing they didnt do, because
  of class sizes, they didnt give me the feedback
  I got at university.

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Writing at college

• The only writing I did in college was IT and
  graphics, so completely different to essay
  writing. It wasnt since school that I actually
  wrote an essay, a good two years earlier to
  starting university. So I didnt know how to
  approach it, so I just drew a spider diagram with
  the topic in the middle and then branch off all
  my different ideas. I never generally did essay
  plans because I never really saw the value in
  them. I just thought Ive wrote this much, I
  might as well just write the whole essay.

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How to write assignments

• To be completely honest, I dont ever remember
  being told about writing as such. You just get
  told what your assignment is and you are expected
  to write it. It is a subconscious thing you
  should already know. You are not told to write in
  a certain way. Some units they say we want a
  logbook or we want it to be size 1, but they
  dont tell you how to write it.

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Handwriting

• My handwriting has never been good and it has got
  worse since I have been using computers. I had a
  maths exams and I knew I got enough right for 55
  or 60, but I ended up with 40. Then I though
  back how I wrote in the exam and if it wasnt
  readable. I know I was messy. But just to get
  that feedback, some of it was unreadable and
  unfortunately you failed. That feedback would be
  brilliant because then you could improve. Not
  everyone is going to assume it is their
  handwriting or even consider that that could be
  the problem.

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Reading and meaning making

• Invisible, unprobed and unaided at university
  (van Pletzen, 2006 pp. 104-129)
• General assumption that students can learn
  independently from reading, will understand what
  they read and what they are supposed to get out
  it
• WP students can fail to learn formal knowledge
  from reading because they have little experience
  of the linguistic orientations that children
  from literate home environments acquire (Rose,
  2004)

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Reading, meaning and the text

• The meaning does not reside ready-made in the
  text or in the reader but happens or comes into
  being during the transaction between reader and
  text. (Rosenblatt 1994, p. 1063)
• Readers draw on their cultural capital or
  linguistic-experiential reservoir in speaking,
  listening, writing or reading. (Rosenblatt, 1994,
  p. 1061)

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Literacy at school

• I went to a poor middle school. It was very
  multicultural and English tended to be a second
  language and I think that is where the weakness
  stemmed from. I hadn't been taught from a young
  age. I was there for fours years. I would come
  home from school from a young age and you know
  how it is, you come home with books you have to
  read. Some of them would have the other language
  written on them. My reading wasnt very good back
  then, I think they were trying to teach the
  children two different languages at once. I think
  that is where the grammar weakness stemmed from
  because I didnt have 100 concentration on
  English.

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Link between reading and talking

• Because when you first read journals it is like
  this barrier until I could speak like that. It is
  not even just the big words that are used, but it
  is the way they write the sentences, putting them
  round the other way as such and of which.
  Those sorts of phrases are put in a different
  way, not the way you would probably say it. Again
  it is written differently to how you would
  pronounce it.

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Reading in my head out loud

• Because I tend to read in my head out loud, and I
  am trying to read it out loud in my second year
  and it doesnt make sense but that was before I
  would speak like that. So I think you pick up on
  what you read and you apply that in the way you
  talk without thinking. But that is what I found
  hard and difficult the phrasing of the
  sentences. Because I would read them out and Id
  think that is round the wrong way, it doesnt
  quite make sense to me.

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Reading as listening outside the tent

• You tend to read from an outside position. Thats
  the tent. They are all in the tent and you are
  outside it. You are listening in and you are
  trying to grab hold of what they are trying to
  say. But by final year, after reading so many,
  you understand. Because they are all very
  similar in the way they are written, you learn to
  pick out the bits that you actually need. You
  dont need to hear the whole conversation. You
  just need the bits that are relevant for you.

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Joining the tent

• Id say Im still outside it until I have
  written. I dont feel Ill be equal to them until
  I have written one because I dont think you can
  really join the tent until you have contributed
  to it. It is something I would really like to do.
  That would finish my journey at university. If I
  could get to that level, write an article of some
  description, something that interests me, and to
  contribute as well, because that would be
  contributing at the highest level really.

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Key inspirations speaking, reading and writing

• Elbow, P. (2000) Everyone Can Write. Oxford
  Oxford University Press.
• Thesen, L. and van Pletzen, E. (2006) Academic
  Literacy and the Languages of Change. London
  Continuum.
• Kellogg, R.T. and Whiteford, A.P. (2009)
  Training Advanced Writing Skills The Case for
  Deliberate Practice. Educational Psychologist in
  press