Stanley Fish crows about his writing curriculum, and he's probably right to. He's getting students to really engage the analytical inner workings of language, which as got to be the best way to teach sentence-to-sentence writing skill (and he's right to marginalize the rest of writing, which can and should be handled elsewhere in a college education).
What struck me about his piece though was the extent to which these same skills are implicitly taught in a foreign language class. This is probably obvious, since foreign language -- albeit an invented one -- is the very pedagogical tool he's using; and yet Fish never takes that next step to look at where foreign language education can fit into the picture, pick up some of the slack. Learn one or two foreign languages, even at a relatively low level, and your English analytics go off the chart. It's true that foreign language classes don't confront this problem as directly or as elegantly as Fish's programme, and of course they require a significant commitment, but given that foreign language education is already institutionalized, why not call for its natural extension? I wonder if this is a careful compromise on Fish's part, calculated to favor Americans' xenophobia.
I wondered about that same thing when I read Fish's column yesterday (following a link from BookSlut).
I think he may use an artificial language to avoid the messiness of real-world languages. There's lots of cross-contamination between cultures which make language rules often just strong guidelines, especially for a mess of a language like English.
I know after reading the article I wanted to take Fish's class.
I think you are reading too much into it. It seems to me that he is trying to intrigue the students with a creative task. The problem with teaching sentence structure is that it is boring...it doesn't matter what language it is. This is probably the reason for English classes being content-focused in the first place. Who wouldn't rather write about what they think/feel vs. diagramming sentences? Teachers are always trying to come up with ideas to make learning dry subjects more interesting. I remember when I was in 7th grade, my English teacher gave us the task of listening to music (it was Frank Zappa's Burnt Weeny Sandwich), and writing an essay about what the music made us think of. He was trying to get our creative juices flowing. But Fish is dead on when he says that it didn't teach anything about HOW to write. (I got a C on that essay...it was too disorganized. Well, we weren't TOLD to make it organized. We were TOLD to write what it made us think about. How is a 7th-grader supposed to figure the organization part out for themselves?) I think Fish's idea is a brilliant way to get students immersed in sentence structure & have fun doing it.
Sarah -- I think it's a brilliant method too, I just think it's very similar to foreign langauge learning and therefore might hold some lessons for how foreign languages should be taught (eg to everyone).
What lessons...that everyone should learn a foreign language or two? I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea, but I guess I don't understand how Prof. Fish should address that in his Freshman English course.
Fish isn't just a prof, he's a major administrative bigshot over at UIC, and a major thinker on the national education scene. I don't think he needs to address this point in his class at all -- I just think the broader point is that this kind of alienation process (ie by making up a language, we look kind of obliquely at our own) is the same as what you get in a foreign language class, and that therefore we should be promoting foreign language education too. And since he is who he is in education, he should be the one promoting it.
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