Building Writing Confidence with Speaking: An Analysis of the Write-Speak-Write Method

Brittany Zayas

Professor Lynn Reid

ENGL B8104 Basic Writing Theory & Practice

13 December 2016

Building Writing Confidence with Speaking:

An Analysis of the Write-Speak-Write Method

In “Using a ‘Write-Speak-Write’ Approach for Basic Writers,” authors Robert de Beaugrande and Mar Jean Olson analyze the biases behind pedagogical theories on basic writing and introduce a pilot project that demonstrates basic writers’ ability to use speech skills in revising written work.

De Beaugrande and Olson break down the main standpoints from which to view basic writing and its implications. The first is linguistic, which views basic writing as a type of language that displays the writer’s natural speech patterns. The second is psychological, wherein the basic writer’s abilities reflect the point in development where their writing skills were atrophied. The third is social, which links the writing to the writer’s social group and suggests a move into a different writing style is a move out of their social group. The fourth is educational, which allows for all learners to join in, but alienates them by favoring the socioeconomically privileged.

The project itself centered on fifteen scholarship athletes at the University of Florida, who were told to explain their game of choice to an inexperienced audience. First, they would write the composition in thirty minutes. Second, they would, a week later, be recorded explaining the same topic aloud to Olson. Third, another week later, they would have thirty minutes to write a revised draft using the original writing sample and a transcript of the recorded monologue as sources. Results showed variance among individuals in quality, technique, and voice, but overall showed that students were both more engaged and more verbose orally. Additionally, the students tended to combine elements from both the first draft and the transcript to develop stronger beginnings and endings for the final draft, resulting in lengthier and more structured final drafts.

From the outset, de Beaugrande and Olson seek to dismantle certain presuppositions about basic writing, touching on the classist and racist implications of some basic writing instruction, as it can dismiss dialects associated with poor or minority populations as simplistic and inferior forms of communication. This presumably allows the speech of the wealthy or majority populations to guide the standard of proper communication (6-7). Despite their belief that one of the many problems of remedial courses is failure to “take the writer seriously as a communicative participant with a concrete social history” (De Beaugrande and Olson 16), the authors do not disclose any personal history of their study participants. All we are told is that these students are dependent on their athletic skills, due to being on athletic scholarships, and have long been lumped into the category of basic writers. It is possible that de Beaugrande and Olson wanted to keep the focus of the study on the material results and not bring in the complex variable of students’ personal history, as it would raise other issues.

Nevertheless, dialectical attributes do not obscure the students’ intent, and actually can give more insight to what they mean even when word choices are weak. When working with basic writers as a writing tutor, I saw this often and whenever I asked a student to explain their thought process behind a confusing word choice, there was generally a strong reason as to why. A more experienced writer might defend it as a stylistic choice, but a basic writer may not know to do that, just as they might not know how to phrase a culturally-specific idiom in a way that is clear to all readers. Yet this does not mean that the dialect itself is the problem. This is why Sarah D’Eloia advocated for structural equality of all languages or dialects, stating that “no language or dialect is inherently any ‘better’” or “intrinsically any more ‘logical’ or ‘illogical’ in the way it segments reality into grammatical categories and combines grammatical categories into words, phrases, clauses, and sentences” (D’Eloia 6). Every language or dialect has its own logic, and an understanding of that logic is necessary before corrections are made. Whether or not an academic standard must be met, if an instructor means to build on a basic writer’s knowledge of writing, they must understand the foundation it is built on. In view of this fact, Kroll and Schafer point to errors as “clues to the linguistic and cognitive processes” of students’ minds (242). In other words, errors should give instructors insight into the student’s intent and perspective, as well as how the standards of academic discourse can best be explained to them. Errors, or deviance from writing standards, must not be viewed as roadblocks, but as tools, with which to build on a student’s writing.

Another tool that instructors should not neglect is an understanding of the way basic writers communicate orally, as many basic writers, especially those in de Beaugrande and Olson’s study, are more comfortable expanding on ideas aloud. Their speech may be in dialect, as well, and studded with fragments, run-ons, and subject-verb disagreement. That being said, most people, even the highly educated, speak differently than they write—de Beaugrande and Olson note a University of Florida study where transcripts of recorded English professors looked similar to the speech of freshmen (14). One might also think of presidential candidates, who are typically highly educated members of the elite, but when recorded and then transcribed, use constant filler words such as ‘um’ or ‘ah.’ Speech errors do not necessarily indicate ignorance, but if used repeatedly, they can indicate either a linguistic misunderstanding or the speaker’s logical intent within their dialect. Whatever the case may be, the speech of basic writers is a “key resource, not a liability, and…it does not have to be transformed before their writing competence can develop” (De Beaugrande and Olson 15). Instructors ought to draw from this resource, and encourage students who lack confidence in writing or who write only the bare minimum to write as they would speak, and then grammar errors, when seen in clear patterns, can be corrected. [this was the paragraph that was missing]

There must, however, be some kind of grammatical standard, especially in written academic discourse. Resolutions like the Students’ Right to Their Own Language are well-intended, but that was proposed in 1974, and it is clear not much has changed. Some in the field of basic writing instruction may hold to it. Yet overwhelmingly in not just English departments, but in offices and courtrooms and other places dominated by the highly educated, there is a belief in a Standard English. The standard exists. It is not helpful to basic writers to say such a standard should not exist and then simply ignore it, denying students access to a standard that they may need to attain to if they want to be successful. But there is no reason any culturally-crafted standard should be used to shame students or block them from communication. It should not also be the altar upon which certain groups must sacrifice their own language and culture if they want to be rewarded with inclusion. As de Beaugrande and Olson note, even estrangement from a culture where non-standard English dialect is prominent will not guarantee certain groups inclusion, especially when social exclusion is based on numerous biases (11).  A standard should not be something that everyone needs to reach, but something that brings people together.

In many ways, education is accessible to the general public in the Anglo-American world, and is not given based on race or class. We tend to ascribe more to a meritocracy, which in theory seems fair, but has its own set of problems. Standardized testing is impersonal, not taking background into account, so it cannot be explicitly biased, but it is implicitly biased in that it leans in the favor of those with standardized academic preparation. IQ and SAT testing do not reflect the “innate competence or fixed scholastic potential as [much as they do] the complex and variegated social situations” of the test-takers (De Beaugrande and Olson 6). Test preparation is, as de Beaugrande and Olson point out, a “heavily acculturated middle-class activity” (6) and it is not fair to use it judge students whose foundational education was not curated towards high-level tests. The standard of correctness is biased towards those who create it: the elite.

The kind of non-standardized assessments, as used in de Beaugrande and Olson’s study, is not often seen in the testing of pre-college students. The only opportunity for students taking the SAT to demonstrate their own thought processes beyond the process of elimination within multiple-choice has always been the essay, which has, since March 2016, become optional (“SAT Essay”). Students are told that only certain colleges require it, so many students who are insecure in their writing abilities may willingly opt out, and apply only to colleges who do not require the essay. De Beaugrande and Olson wrote their piece in a time where the essay was required for the SAT. However, they do remark that many standardized tests that do not include a writing sample do so because the time and manpower then needed cuts into test companies’ profits (6). They suggest that at least token writing samples do seem to be coming up in standardized tests more often. Unfortunately, twenty years later in America, capitalism is still inextricably tied to success, even in testing, as can be seen from the 1.5 billion dollar profit made by British conglomerate Pearson in its manufacturing of US textbooks, K-12 tests, and teacher certification programs (Singer).

Thus a problematic meritocracy is little better than an openly discriminatory classist or racist avenue to success. It lends to the barrier between social groups, where those who cannot understand the preferred mode of communication cannot enter that elite space, and it also as de Beaugrande and Olson describe, “hinders those who have mastered it from communicating reliably with those who have not” (8). If grammatical standards purely exist to establish superiority and inferiority, grammar and writing become tools of oppression. As Paulo Freire said, “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision making is to change them into objects” (253). If basic writing instruction emphasizes dialectical superiority, it is no less oppressive than a violent act of discrimination, because it has the same effect on non-elite communities and persons. It forces them to choose between assimilation and risking cultural erasure, or being barred from establishing relationships with other communities and being cemented into a low position on the social ladder.

The very purpose of language should be to foster communication and understanding. Education should be a major force in that. Ideally, language standards should be used to create a common ground, especially within writing, as in the absence of facial expression or audible tone, expression and tone can only be indicated by phrasing and structure. Basic writing instruction, therefore, should allow “students [to] enjoy the wider range of options opened to them by fluency in the standard dialect” (D’Eloia 9). One of the many ways that can be done is by encouraging students to gain comfort and confidence in the act of writing by writing about topics they are invested in. As a writing tutor, when advising students on research topics, my advice was always to choose something they felt strongly about, as that would make the task of unpacking the information much easier. To push struggling writers into writing coherently in a subject they are unfamiliar with forces them to start out doubly handicapped and can diminish self-confidence. It is more beneficial for a basic writer to focus on how best to get across an idea they actually feel strongly about or a subject they truly understand than attempt to explain content they are unfamiliar with in an academic language that they do not fully know. It is more useful for an instructor to be able to focus on cosmetic errors in grammar, as well as areas that need expanding or rephrasing, rather than trying to unravel whether the problem is the student’s content knowledge or Standard English skills. Also, the whole point of students building writing skills is for them to be able to use writing in whatever career path they choose, not be an expert in every field.

Correspondingly, in their surveys of community college students and faculty, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau sought to determine what purposes writing might be used for in academia and beyond. They went beyond basic writing and English instructors, and spoke to faculty in various fields. In scientific fields, which are often associated with individuals who may not be as adept at writing as they are with hands-on knowledge, there was a great need for clear writing skills. As one occupational therapy professor said, “[I]f one of these students is teaching a [patient’s] family member about how to care for someone, they need to be able to write out very clear instructions….which could actually really hurt somebody if it isn’t done correctly” (Tinberg and Nadeau 41). Even in fields like accounting, professors felt that grammatical errors made it “difficult to access a paper’s content” (Tinberg and Nadeau 42) as they wanted writing that got quickly to the point in a succinct way. The conclusion Tinberg and Nadeau came to was the one that English teachers always want to get through to students: writing is an essential skill for anyone in any walk of life. This holds true for athletes (such as those in de Beaugrande and Olson’s study) as well as academics. When my teenage students who insist that they want to be athletes say they do not need to learn how to be better readers and writers, I remind them that they will need to be able to understand contracts and emails if they want to be independent and successful. In the same way, de Beaugrande and Olson state that the purpose of their field is to “support the human freedom of access to knowledge through discourse” (30). That freedom of access is attained through study in writing and critical thinking.

Writing skills can give students a voice, whether that means putting together a solid resume or explaining their concerns about a political candidate on Facebook. Sternglass, in her close study of a student called Linda, displayed how writing strengthened a basic writer’s voice, providing a mode where she could take apart ideas that had long been swirling in her mind. Linda herself stated, “The more I wrote, the more I understood what I was writing about” (Sternglass 248). The samples Sternglass includes in her paper compare and contrast Linda’s early essay on women’s role in society with a later essay on the same topic. There is definite growth in Linda’s writing, as she touches on ideas she had brought up before and builds on them to fit them into a larger analytical framework (Sternglass 249-250). A similar growth is seen in the drafts of de Beaugrande and Olson’s student athletes. In the athletes’ final drafts, they used the best pieces from their transcripts, though they rewrote them in more formal language. They did not always take care to correct spelling errors, even those spelled correctly in the transcripts, and transitions were still rough. But overall, the athletes picked stronger beginnings and endings (De Beaugrande and Olson 28). One student’s opening statement went from “Football is a real easy game to watch but a hard to play because you get beat up but it’s more harder because the rules are hard” in the first draft to “Glory is what you want in football” in the final draft (De Beaugrande and Olson 25). By going over the same topic twice, students were able to excise unnecessary information and place important information in more prominent sections. The athletes, like Linda, now had a better idea of what they wanted to say, and with re-reading their work, now felt more confident. They did not become technically strong writers, in terms of academic English standards, but they became clearer and more impactful in their expression, which is key to successful writing.

Studies like these show that there is a capability in basic writers, even if they may not have a natural affinity for writing. This matched what I have seen in working with basic writers as a tutor and a teacher. Most are indeed more comfortable with oral explanations. If you ask them, however, to write down something they just explained excellently aloud, many basic writers will hesitate and say they do not recall what they just said. The very thought of writing is intimidating and creates a sort of mental block. The method I have used to deal with that is similar to that of de Beaugrande and Olson. I would write down whatever they said—either in notes or in full exact sentences—and then give that to the students to revise. The important thing is always to get students to put the words on down, even if they are fragments or run-ons. A written sentence can always be adjusted.

De Beaugrande and Olson’s study focused on the hypothesis that students’ final drafts would be strengthened by them reviewing the transcripts of their oral explanation, so did not discuss voice. But voice is demonstrated in each of the athletes’ pieces, especially the informal transcripts, and also in the formal structures of the final draft, which still retain their word choices and individual perspective. That voice is what often gets lost in discussions of basic writing, as the debate goes back and forth between focusing on grammar or just getting students to write. Students ought to be able to express their voice with as much clarity as possible. This means they should be able to use their own unique cultural figures of speech, but should do so within enough structures of standard grammatical correctness to make it as unambiguous to a broad audience as possible.

---

Works Cited

De Beaugrande, Robert, and Mar Jean Olson. “Using a ‘Write-Speak-Write’ Approach for Basic Writers.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 1991, pp. 4-32.

D’Eloia, Sarah. “Teaching Standard Written English.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1975, pp. 5-13.

Freire, Paulo. “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education.” Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, 8th edition, edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, St. Martin’s Press, 2008, pp. 242-255.

Kroll, Barry M., and John C. Schafer. “Error Analysis and the Teaching of Composition.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 29, no. 3, Oct. 1978, pp. 242-48.

“SAT Essay.” CollegeBoard, https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/inside-the-test/essay . Accessed 10 Oct. 2016.

Singer, Alan. “Pearson Education—Who Are These People?” The Huffington Post, 9 Sept. 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/pearson-education-new-york-testing-_b_1850169.html . Accessed 10 Oct. 2016.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language (1974).” Conference on College Composition and Communication, http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/srtolsummary . Accessed 11 Dec. 2016.

Sternglass, Marilyn S. “Writing Development as Seen Through Longitudinal Research: A Case Study Exemplar.” Written Communication, vol. 10, no. 2, April 1993, pp. 235-61.

Tinberg, Howard, and Jean-Paul Nadeau. The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.