First-Year Writing Teachers’ Emotions and Grammar Instruction: A Mixed Methods Study

Cheyenne R. Franklin

Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

In

Rhetoric and Writing

Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Chair

Carolyn Commer

James M. Dubinsky

Derek Mueller

Michael Rifenburg

September 24, 2021

Blacksburg, Virginia

Keywords: rhetoric, first-year composition, grammar, emotions, identity

First-Year Writing Teachers’ Emotions and Grammar Instruction: A Mixed Methods Study

Cheyenne R. Franklin

Academic Abstract

This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers’ experiences learning grammar

impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson

and Martha Kolln agree that some knowledge of grammar helps students’ rhetorical acuity but

not when taught with rules and isolated exercises. CCCC’s “Students Rights to Their Own

Language” and the work of scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have shed

light on the language-identity relationship and the damage that standardization inflicts on a

person’s sense of self. This pedagogical paradigm has created tension for writing teachers and

their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic. Joseph Williams wondered at the

rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay “The Phenomenology of Errors.” This

dissertation builds on Williams’ work, suggesting we look to teachers’ histories to understand

their emotions and find usefulness in these emotions. Using grounded theory, I code six

interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their memorable encounters with

grammar instruction. I then identify patterns in these stories and the interviewees’ practices and

compare them against the results of a nation-wide survey of over a hundred first-year writing

teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience I call epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the instruction impacts the learner’s sense of self. I

trace a connection between these encounters and teachers’ feelings of empathy for their students

and passion for grammar instruction’s reform. I argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can

help teachers locate points of empathy for their students’ experiences of grammars and promote

productive conversations about grammar instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that

educators of first-year writing teachers implement grammar-focused reflection into their teacher

training as a way of leveraging teachers’ emotions toward the topic of grammar to facilitate

productive conversations about grammar instruction.

In the first chapter, I question the impact of teachers’ emotional resonances from personal

encounters with grammar instruction. I introduce my emotional encounter with grammar

instruction and describe the emotional reactions I have encountered when attempting to engage

writing teachers in conversations about grammar instruction. After reviewing the project, I

situate my work in scholarship on emotions in composition. My findings respond to Joseph

Williams’ “Phenomenology of Errors” in which he explores why people respond strongly to

“grammar errors.” My work also contributes to inquiries in teacher training and the use of self

reflection as professional development. I suggest that student teachers reflect on their past

encounters with grammar to better empathize with their students’ experiences.

Chapter Two constructs a history of grammar instruction in America, from the 1860s to

the present, mid-twenty-first century. Through this review, I show how pedagogical debates and

language anxiety have always followed grammar and, depending on the person’s skill and class,

made it the source of anger, fear, hope, or shame. I highlight the social and educational shifts that

formed grammar around the ugly shapes of class and race discrimination, including the East

Coast’s development, regional dialects, and increased demand for education.

Chapter Three details my methods of investigation. Here I explain the rationale behind

my study design, which uses surveys and interviews. The interviews provided qualitative details

beyond what the heavily structured survey could and allowed teachers to describe their beliefs

and experiences in their own words. It was important to collect these first-hand accounts to better

understand the internal processes behind teachers’ reactions. The survey provided quantitative

data with which to identify overarching trends and test theories devised from the interviews.

These steps in turn indicated the generalizability of the findings. This chapter also explains my

use of Critical Incident Theory to write the survey and interview questions and my use of

grounded theory to code and analyze the data.

In Chapter Four, I present the results of the nation-wide survey and the six, one-on-one

interviews. By comparing responses to different survey questions, (e.g. number of respondents to

report having had positive emotions at the time of their experience and now hold negative

emotions toward teaching grammar), I determined that the teachers’ emotions at the time of their

experience did not correlate with any particular teaching practices or feelings toward teaching

grammar. However, 72% of all teachers surveyed and 89% of teachers who had “very negative”

emotions at the time of their experience reported that their experience has impacted their

teaching of grammar. This means grammar studies that hope to change teachers’ practices will

need to consider how to address teachers’ past experiences.

Chapter Five is the first of two analysis chapters. By attending to content and word

choice of survey and interview responses, I find that the teachers whose stories include evidence

of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction tend to show empathy for students' diversity

and the negative experiences their students may have had with grammars. Furthermore, most of

these teachers spoke of teaching practices they implement to serve multilingual/multidialectal

students. Teacher training can benefit from these findings since self-reflection on

transformational learning experiences could be used in teacher training to help teachers

appreciate the issues surrounding grammars and respond to them with sensitive practices.

In Chapter Six, I show how in addition to empathy, teachers with epiphanic encounters

also tend to feel passion. I use the term passion to designate heightened emotions, such as anger

or excitement, that compel teachers to teach new perspectives on grammars in classes and/or

social settings. I find that this emotion is not always pleasant for the teachers experiencing it, but

their beliefs in a more equitable teaching of grammars motivates them to spread alternative

understandings of writing instruction and grammars’ role in it. Additionally, this chapter

compares the survey data to the interview data and finds evidence that the pattern of passion

exists in this larger sample. This finding strengthens the likelihood that this trend extends to most

first-year writing teachers, making grammar-focused reflection a viable tool to motivate new

teachers to continue valuable conversations needed to spread new knowledge about grammars.

In the final two chapters, I present a lesson plan to be used to prepare student teachers to

address grammars in a way that honors students’ identities and language rights. This activity has

teachers reflect on their emotional encounters with grammar instruction and consider how their

students’ experiences may be similar or different. The discussion questions push student teachers

to dig deep into the complicated and uncomfortable issues surrounding grammar instruction.

After the lesson, students should understand the most common debates about grammar

instruction and have strategies to teach grammars rhetorically and respectfully.

First-Year Writing Teachers’ Emotions and Grammar Instruction: A Mixed Methods Study

Cheyenne R. Franklin

General Audience Abstract

This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers’ experiences learning grammar

impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson

and Martha Kolln agree that knowledge of grammar can benefit students if it is taught in context.

Scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have revealed how critical language is to

people’s identity formation. Because grammar is important but controversial, it is a point of

tension for writing teachers and their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic.

Joseph Williams wondered at the rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay “The

Phenomenology of Errors.” This dissertation builds on Williams’ work. I suggest that first-year

writing teachers look to their histories to understand their emotions toward grammar. Using

grounded theory, I code six interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their

memorable encounters with grammar instruction. I identify patterns in the interviewees’ stories

and teaching practices. Finally, I compare these patterns against the results of a nation-wide

survey of over a hundred first-year writing teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience

I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the

instruction impacts the learner’s sense of self. I trace a connection between these encounters and

teachers’ feelings of empathy for their students and passion for grammar instruction’s reform. I

argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers locate points of empathy for their

students’ experiences of grammars and promote productive conversations about grammar

instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that educators of first-year writing teachers

implement grammar-focused reflection into teacher training. Through this self reflection, student

teachers can better understand their emotions toward the topic of grammar. Beyond this

understanding, student teachers who use grammar-focused self reflection will be more

emotionally prepared to discuss grammar instruction.

viii

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction 1

Theoretical Grounding 9

Question 1 11

Question 2 13

Scholarly Contributions 14

Emotions and Grammars 15

GTA Training 17

Grammar Instruction 20

Key Terms 22

Grammar(s) 22

Identity 25

Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction 26

Summary of Chapters 27

Chapter Two: Review of Grammar Instruction 29

Grammar Instruction’s Evolution 29

Renaissance, Pre-1900s 30

1900-1940s 32

The 1950s-60s 33

The 1970s 37

The 1980s-90s 40

2000-2021 44

The Kairotic Moment 51

Conclusion and Exigence 57

Chapter Three: Methods and Methodology 60

Methodology and Epistemology 60

Data Collection 63

Question Format and Design 65

Participant Agency 70

Validity 70

ix

Recruitment Method 71

Participants 72

A Note about Response Rate 73

Privacy and Protection 74

Data Analysis 74

Coding 75

Codes and Procedures 76

Limitations 82

Positionality 83

Chapter Four: Results 85

Survey Results 87

Results of Survey Section One 87

Results of Survey Section Two 96

Response Comparisons 102

Interview Results 119

Trevor’s Story 119

Heather’s Story 121

Bethany’s Story 122

Carrie’s Story 123

Christie’s Story 124

Lisa’s Story 125

Chapter Five: Empathy and Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction 129

Empathy in First-Year Writing 130

Empathy out of Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction 131

Positive Attribute Subtracted 133

Positive Attribute Added 135

Negative Attribute Added 137

Change of Trajectory 139

Unaffected 140

Limitations of Interview Findings 141

Conclusions 143

x

Chapter Six: Passion and Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction 146

A Note about Passion 146

Passion out of Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction 147

Passion to Change Student Perceptions 148

Passion to Change Faculty and Staff Perceptions 151

Evidence of Passion in Survey Data 153

Conclusions 158

Chapter Seven: Implications for Composition Programs 160

Reflection on Epiphanic Encounters 160

Sample Lesson Plan 167

Chapter Eight: Conclusions and Future Research 170

Recommended Future Research 172

Conclusions 186

Question 1 188

Question 2 189

Question 3 189

Final Thoughts 190

Afterword 192

Works Cited 195

Appendix A 211

1

Chapter One: Introduction

In “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar,” Laura Micciche writes, “Grammar makes

people anxious, even--perhaps especially--writing teachers. Just as writing teachers dread when,

our identities discovered, strangers announce that they had better ‘watch their grammar,’ we also

recoil at the idea of teaching grammar, often considered a mind-numbing pedagogical task that

offends our rhetorical sensibilities” (716). Micciche captures the anxiety and frustration many

writing teachers feel when stereotyped as fluent grammarians or--worse yet--the “grammar

police.” Even with my enthusiasm for grammars, I feel this frustration at times, usually when I

misuse or misspell a word and someone teases, “Aren’t you an English teacher?” Even though I

am confident enough to tell a class of twenty students that I am terrible at spelling, something

about these particular jokes sting. Now on the other side of this dissertation project, I believe

these comments affect me because they question an important piece of my identity, as if my

inability to spell a word disqualifies me from being a writing teacher. So when fellow writing

teachers tell of yet another gathering where they were asked to explain a grammar rule, or

another friend who asks them to “edit” a document, I understand their frustration.

I witnessed this frustration in a memorable exchange between classmates in a graduate

course. For reading, the teacher had assigned Asao Inoue’s 2019 CCCC Chair’s address, “How

Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other or What Do We Do about White Language

Supremacy?” In this address, Inoue speaks to the issue of white language preferences in schools,

boldly calling out writing teachers for their empty lip service and perpetuation -- even if

reluctantly -- of racist teaching practices in the guise of “conventions.” Inoue delivered more

than a speech with this piece; he created an experience. He starts the speech by addressing his

fellow teachers of color. Much of the language in this first part shows empathy to teachers and

2

students of color and points to white teachers as part of the problem. When Inoue does address

the white members of his audience, he names our emotions, our defensiveness and frustration at

being talked about as “the problem” when many of us try to be part of the solution. Inoue doesn’t

compromise, though. He affirms, lest there be any misunderstanding, that all white teachers

reinforce white supremist structures simply by their presence at the head of the classroom. As I

read, I was indeed defensive and uncomfortable. As an inexperienced teacher still trying to prove

my qualifications, I was very committed to meeting the writing standards. When Inoue predicted

my response, I was ashamed and impressed. He had revealed my emotions as the true source of

my criticism and this made me respect him. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to sign up for what

felt like reckless abandonment of all my guideposts.

My mix of emotions made me anxious to work through the text with my classmates.

Specifically, I looked forward to the opportunity to discuss the issues surrounding grammar

education, one of my research interests. The first in class to respond to the text started off with

the declaration that she does not teach grammar in her first-year writing classes. It was a

perfectly valid decision, one that research and many other teachers would agree with. Afterall,

grammar was not even one of the program learning outcomes where we taught as graduate

teaching assistants. Her staccato tone caught my attention, though. I witnessed the anticipated

discussion unfurl as a debate. Between who, I wasn’t sure.

No one had disagreed with anyone, yet somehow I felt as though I, along with my

classmates, had been charged with some crime. Maybe this was because I harbored the

knowledge that I did teach rhetorical grammar, and I didn’t like the thought of my interest

having no place in a college writing class. Afterall, I love rhetorical grammar. This love rests

heavily on my history with grammar and mechanics. My education started off rocky with my

3

failing my first college essay. My failure was entirely due to lower-order concerns and a

professor bound to mechanical correctness. It’s truly dismal to think what an impact those

corrections had on my self image at the time and the identity I would later form. At the time, I

was just coming out of a full twelve years of being homeschooled and was overwhelmingly

aware of the underprepared, overprotected, jean-skirt wearing cliches most people of the 2000s

still believed true of homeschooled students. For the Freshman me, my failure proved I didn’t

belong. Ironically, my fears drove me to learn everything I could about grammars, and

eventually—after a lot of self-doubt, I discovered I had a knack for it. This knack turned into a

passion when I learned of rhetoric and began writing for instructors who rewarded

experimentation and valued craft. In a course called Advanced Grammar, I met my now

academic role model, a linguist who taught sentence diagramming well into the twenty-first

century. This trajectory led me to teaching, propelled me through graduate school, and continues

to be how I identify myself as a scholar. With this emotional history, is it really any wonder that

I become passionate when told grammar doesn’t matter?

In that moment, I would have thought my history had nothing to do with the scene

unfolding in my graduate course, but now I know it fueled my momma-bear instinct to defend

the importance of instruction in rhetorical grammars. As I primed to respond, a second student

echoed the first, adding that she doesn’t assess grammar. “I don’t care about grammar,” she laid

out, short and simple. A third student, the discussion leader that day, attempted to push the

conversation further, raising a common rebuttal to anti-grammar arguments. The discussion

leader asked what these teaching choices would mean for students who later encountered

teachers who did demand adherence to standardized grammar. “I don’t care,” answered one of

the first two speakers. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this dismissal angered me. I felt a

4

challenge in the statement, even as I doubted that she really meant all the implications of what

her claim suggested to me. Surely, behind the dismissal was a well thought-out rationale for her

choice. It was unlikely that a teacher who I had heard sing the praises of her students would

knowingly send those same students off to academic ruin. Most likely, her statement came from

feelings of frustration that grew out of a good place, perhaps protective feelings for her students’

rights to their own language. She didn’t seem too eager to entertain follow up questions, though,

so I decided to keep my opinions and let her keep hers.

After a couple failed attempts from my classmates who hoped to salvage the discussion,

everyone gave up. We sat uncomfortably in the aftermath of what had just happened until the

professor ended class a full hour early. Amazingly, mere talk of grammar had left a class of ten

plus scholars too emotional to remain in the same room together. What had happened? An

opportunity for productivity had passed with nothing to show for it, and I wondered how any of

us, anyone at all, could cooperatively find a way to extract what is useful about grammars and

pass it to our students untainted by classism and racism. If we couldn’t discuss grammar

instruction, how could we hope to reform it? How could we bring society out of traditional ideas

about grammars or evolve our approaches for teaching it?

Though one of the more extreme cases, this is not the only time I have seen emotions shut

down professional conversations about grammar instruction, and the occurrence is not exclusive

to my own interpersonal conversations. Unlike scholarship about other topics that often take an

impartial and impersonal tone, articles on grammar instruction are at times surprisingly

emotional. Martha Kolln takes a downright snarky tone in her response to Shook’s criticism of

her article on grammar. Though lengthy, it’s worth reprinting the conclusion of her response

here:

5

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised at Professor Shook's reaction to my article: people

hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read. And maybe he really doesn't

know that the terms "grammar" and "theory of grammar" have two quite different

referents. But it does surprise me that he would report Bamberg's findings in such a

distorted fashion, without so much as a quiver in his voice. And I am downright shocked

that a teacher of English would write such words as these: "My own experience in

teaching composition leads me to doubt that grammar has any connection with writing at

all." Has Professor Shook never had to deal with punctuation, with sentence fragments,

with unparallel structures? Has he never pointed out to his students the possible choices

of modifiers and the variety of forms that adverbials take? Has he never suggested an

appositive or an absolute phrase to emphasize a detail? Has he never suggested that a

passive construction or a "there" transformation can shift the emphasis in a sentence? Has

he never explained how to prevent a particle from dangling? (“Reply by Martha Kolln”

498)

From her belittling lack of surprise to her frivolous repetition of the phrase “has he never,”

Kolln’s response is measured but unapologetic.

I’m not alone in finding these emotional responses curious. Joseph Williams ponders this

oddity in his essay “The Phenomenology of Errors,” also wondering why some deviations from

formal grammar encite outrage while others go unnoticed. He writes, “I am puzzled by what

motive could underlie the unusual ferocity which an irregardless or a hopefully or a singular

media can elicit” (152). Williams doesn’t come to an answer exactly, but he does cleverly prove

to readers, through hidden typos or non-traditional grammar in the text, that deviations pass their

eyes unnoticed all the time, and in doing so, he makes a good-natured jest of unexplainable

6

outbursts over non-traditional grammar. Darren Crovitz and Michelle Devereaux have their

theory for why grammar is so often emotional:

Any way you look at it, grammar-in-use is never a neutral phenomenon. Why? Because

language itself is never neutral. Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum of abstract rules and

ideal models. Instead, language use is a practice that embodies our backgrounds,

histories, communities, and identities; every day, we use language to gain, sustain, and

negotiate power through and within the multiple societies in which we live, work, and

play. And grammar is the structure, the framework, the backbone of that language use.

(16)

Crovitz and Devereaux make a valid point. Language is deeply connected with a person’s

identity, a fact echoed by many in Rhetoric and Composition (R&C) (see Brownell; Llamas et

al.; Paris; Baker-Bell; Wright and Taylor). Considering my own intense feelings about grammars

and their connection to my personal experiences, I wondered how other writing teachers’

encounters with grammar instruction might also contribute to their emotions toward the topic of

grammar.

The Problem

First-Year Writing (FYW) teachers receive students at the start of their academic career,

the time when they are just beginning to develop a professional identity for themselves and are

sometimes still affirming for themselves their place in academia. For this reason, FYW teachers

are some of the best situated to help college students overcome negative emotions toward

grammars and doubts that past language instruction may have given them about their identities. I

find, though, that when I try to discuss with other writing teachers how we can best teach

grammars, the conversations are sometimes inhibited by our own emotions toward the topic of

7

grammar. As was the case for me during the exchange described above, identity can be the

source of these emotions. These reactions are not necessarily uncalled for. We should have

feelings about a system that has suppressed people for so long (discussed more in Chapter Two).

On the one hand, it is reassuring that teachers recognize the issues surrounding standardized

grammar. On the other hand, students still face a public that judges everything from work ethics

to morality (Cameron; Dunn and Lindblom; Bleske-Rechek et al.) based on compliance with

prescriptive grammar rules. Well-meaning members of society continue to wag the proverbial

red pen, insisting that each new generation must learn the rules they were afflicted with. The

news offers plenty of examples of this attitude. In a 2012 article in Harvard Business Review,

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, declared, “if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between ‘to’ and ‘too,’

their applications go into the bin.” In 2014, a grammar stickler called out Massachusetts Bay

Transit Authority on Twitter to point out that their delay announcement misused “due to”

(Annear). Learning resources also reinforce the belief that educated people follow traditional

English grammar rules. Stanford’s website for the Humes Center for Writing and Speaking

currently (in 2021) includes a list of the top 20 “errors” in undergraduate writing, accompanied

with the warning “Grammar and usage carry high stakes in writing and speaking…” These are

just a few examples of the continued attention given to mechanical “correctness.” This is why it

doesn’t surprise me that I still encounter students who say they are “bad at writing” just to later

find out that they built this belief on someone’s assessment of their ability to adhere to formal

(aka White) English grammar.

Instruction in grammar(s) has the power to make students doubt their rights and abilities,

as my first encounter did, or bolster students’ love of writing, as it eventually did for me. The

good news is that because of scholars like Geneva Smitherman, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Jan

8

Swearingen, and Victor Villanueva, strides have been made to change traditional, oppressive

presentations of grammars. Currently, in 2021, language rights are a widely recognized social

justice issue. Rights to one’s language is now a concept that is widely recognized inside and

outside of academia. A quick Google search of the term linguistic racism delivers multiple

publications from this year, including articles in BBC Worklife (“The Pervasive Problem of

Linguistic Racism”) and Michigan State University’s faculty and student news source

MSUToday (“Ask the Expert”). Wikipedia now has entries for linguistic racism, last edited in

May 2021, and linguistic discrimination, last edited in August 2021, and just last year, April

Baker-Bell published her book Linguistic Justice. It is good that these issues are being discussed

in multiple spheres, but it is not enough to agree that people have rights to their own language.

We need to be able to talk about these beliefs with people who do not see how grammar

instruction can share a space with antiracist, anti-classist practices. Teachers have provided some

outlines of their innovative approaches to teaching grammars rhetorically and contextually in

college writing classes (Dawkins; Lindblom and Dunn; Myhill et al.), but I find in my

conversations with FYW teachers that these practices are not widely known among them, and

they often do not know what rhetorical grammar is or how to assess grammars without

reinforcing linguistic supremacy. Instead, they avoid the topic or address it through other terms

such as style or conventions. The research exists. The desire exists. But the solutions have not yet

been thoroughly disseminated. This is why despite all that has been written on grammar

instruction, I bring the topic around again. Because if grammars are too emotional a topic for

teachers to discuss within academia, how will traditional ideas about grammars change outside of

academia? For this reason, it is critical that we understand the source and effects of writing

teachers’ emotions toward teaching grammars.

9

Theoretical Grounding

In this dissertation, I draw from multiple disciplines: rhetoric, composition, and

linguistics. To comprehend all the possible understandings of grammars that teachers might hold,

I had to design my study so it would recognize these disciplines’ different definitions of

grammar. As Patrick Hartwell mapped out in “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of

Grammar,” there are at least five different definitions of grammar, with three being characteristic

of rhetoric, composition, and linguistics, respectively. The rhetorical definition of grammar

Hartwell calls stylistic grammar, the “active manipulation of language with conscious attention

to surface form” (125). In other words, rhetorical grammar teaches writers to choose among

language options based on context. A composition-oriented definition, or what Hartwell calls

school grammar, is mainly the rules of standard English, what is known as prescriptive grammar.

Finally, linguists hold a descriptive view of grammar, describing and studying naturally

occurring patterns. Hartwell calls this the scientific grammar (109-110). Of course, members of

any discipline might use any combination of these definitions, but the discipline often determines

one’s priority and this can influence which definition takes precedence in one’s work. With this

study, my objective is not to make claims about which definition is correct. Understanding these

different perspectives was important for my research because I needed to recognize the

differences in teachers’ understandings of grammars and locate any relationships between these

understandings and types of experiences.

Project Overview

In this dissertation, I explore how FYW teachers’ emotional histories with grammar

instruction impact their current teaching of and reactions to the topic of grammar. I use data

10

collected from a nation-wide survey of FYW teachers and follow up interviews with six

respondents to answer the following research questions:

1. How might emotional resonances from past experiences as learners of grammar inform

FYW teachers’ teaching of grammar?

2. In what ways do FYW teachers consult their past encounters with grammar instruction

when attempting to shape productive and uplifting writing encounters for their students?

3. How do resonating emotions from past experiences affect FYW teachers’ motivation for

discussing grammar instruction?

To address the problem I have identified (i.e. emotional reactions inhibiting conversations and

reform of grammar instruction), I focus on practices for teaching grammar and reactions to the

topic of grammar as two points of impact. The nature of the problem made reactions a natural

choice. I chose to also observe impact on instructional practices because research has shown that

teachers’ personal experiences shape their beliefs (Holt-Reynolds) and that their beliefs then

influence their teaching practices (Behar-Horenstein, Pajares, and George). Therefore, I selected

the questions above based on the following premise: Emotional resonances from past encounters

with grammar instruction are important if they are found to influence teachers’ instructional

practices and/or reactions to discussions of grammars. If emotional resonances influence

teachers’ instructional practices, then efforts to disseminate new knowledge about grammars and

instruction in rhetorical grammar would need to address teachers’ emotional pasts if they hope to

change teachers’ practices. Similarly, if emotional resonances are found to impact teachers’

reactions to discussions of grammar instruction, then teacher educators would need to explore

ways of preparing student teachers emotionally before holding discussions about grammars and

grammar instruction.

11

To answer the above questions, I collected a combination of qualitative and quantitative

data. Although quantitative data is not the only measure of significance, it does help indicate

how broadly findings can be generalized. Because the group I wished to study (FYW teachers in

the US) is large and diverse, it was important that I be able to assess how generalizable my

findings are. For this reason, I used a survey of multiple choice and short answer questions,

which I distributed on several academic listservs. I also conducted interviews so I could collect

more in-depth descriptions of teachers’ experiences and practices, in case certain findings were

not revealed in the survey responses. Rather than class observations or another qualitative

method, I chose interviews because it was important to me that participants take part in selecting

details to share and that they contribute to the analysis of these details as they relate to their

current emotions and practices. The combination of survey and interview data produced the

following answers to the three research questions.

Question 1

Survey questions inquired about teachers’ practices, including how often they schedule

grammar instruction, what terms they use to refer to sentence-level concerns, if/how they assess

grammar1, and which uses of grammar they encourage in their classes. The survey also included

questions that asked respondents to name and describe their emotions from a memorable

encounter with grammar instruction. By comparing the information collected from these

questions, I was able to search for correlations between types of emotional experiences and

certain understandings of the topic grammar as reflected in teachers’ practices. Respondents

named their specific emotions as well as qualified their emotions as somewhat or very negative

or positive, neither negative nor positive, or both negative and positive. This combination of

1 I have left grammar singular when discussing survey data because that is how the term was presented to

participants in the survey.

12

information gave me multiple ways of categorizing the data for different levels of analysis:

analysis of specific emotions and analysis of types of emotions according to the participants’

evaluation of the emotions. This data, though not representative of all teachers, provided enough

scope to answer my first research question. I determined from the survey data that teachers with

negative or positive emotional experiences hold negative feelings about teaching grammar more

often than positive ones. Regardless of emotional experience, the majority of teachers did not

schedule class time to teach grammar, did not consider grammar when assigning grades much if

at all, and qualified their current emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW as negative.

The interview data provided greater understanding of several teachers’ experiences,

which took the answer to Question One further. Using grounded theory, I identified two trends in

a particular group of FYW teachers whose narrated experiences matched the characteristics of

what I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction, or encounters with grammar

instruction that affected the learner’s sense of identity. Data indicate that these teachers tend to

experience heightened levels of empathy for students and passion for the reform of grammar

instruction. After coding the transcripts of six interviews with FYW teachers, I found that four of

the six teachers indicated, unprompted, that their memorable encounter with grammar instruction

impacted their sense of self at the time. Evidence of impact to identity were reports of the

incident 1) causing feelings of pride (because the instruction added a positive attribute to the

student’s identity) or shame (because the instruction either subtracted a positive attribute or

added a negative attribute to the student’s identity), 2) changing the student’s beliefs about

language or literacy, or 3) initiating a change to the student’s trajectory, such as a change in

career. I compared these interviews against those that did not show evidence of the experience

impacting the learner’s sense of identity. In my comparisons, I considered the intimacy and

13

intensity of the emotions the teachers named in their survey responses, length of their survey

responses, and the content of their interviews. The teachers whose interviews suggested the

experience impacted the participants’ identities expressed intense emotions when thinking back

on their experiences and also when thinking about teaching grammar in FYW. These teachers

wrote lengthy descriptions of their emotions, and noted in their interviews their concern for

minority or non-traditional students. Therefore, in response to Question One, I found that

teachers with empathy and passion because of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction

tend to treat grammar as less important than higher order concerns and strongly support the

legitimacy of multiple grammars. Furthermore, their teaching practices reflect these positions by

encouraging students to question conventions and promoting the value of non-traditional

Englishes.

Question 2

Seventy-two percent (78 out of 109) of survey respondents indicated that their experience

has impacted, either a little or a lot, their approaches to teaching grammar (or decision to exclude

it) in FYW. Almost ninety percent (17 out of 19) of respondents who reported having “very

negative” emotions at the time of their experience (ATE) said the experience has impacted their

approaches a little or a lot. This impact is the highest of all the qualified emotions ATE. The rate

of impact for teachers who had “somewhat negative,” “very positive,” “somewhat positive,”

‘both positive and negative,” or “neither negative nor positive” emotions ATE was lower than

those with “very negative” emotions ATE. Additionally, three interview participants stated that

their experience has impacted their teaching. These data indicate that FYW teachers sometimes

consult their past experiences to guide their teaching (or not teaching) grammar. The high

percentage of teachers impacted by negative experiences makes sense, since epiphanic

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encounters appeared especially influential, and identity change can be a painful experience.

Additionally, several of the interview participants spoke of their desires to provide their students

experiences either similar to their own positive ones or different from their own negative ones.

This data indicates that nearly eighty percent of FYW teachers and nearly all FYW teachers with

negative experiences consult their past experiences with grammar instruction when attempting to

shape productive and uplifting writing encounters for their students. Their specific practices are

described in Chapter Four.

Question 3

Survey respondents whose responses included evidence of the experience impacting their

identity at the time and who reported their experience having impacted their current teaching of

grammar “a lot” agreed to a follow up interview more often than respondents with any other

combination of responses. Of the seventeen respondents who reported experiences with some

level of impact to their identity ATE and high impact on their teaching, all but one agreed to an

interview. Though not a perfect measure of motivation, these results suggest that teachers who

have experienced epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and who reflect on these

experiences tend to be more motivated to discuss grammar instruction than teachers who lack

one of these traits.

Scholarly Contributions

With the current study, I write for two audiences. First, I write for FYW teachers in hopes

of informing them of how their emotional histories as learners of grammar can aid them in their

teaching and service to the discipline. For the same reason, I also write for educators of FYW

teachers, specifically those who train graduate teaching assistants. These educators have direct

access to the largest pool of future college writing teachers in a classroom setting, where

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communal listening and sharing can take place. The findings from this study contribute to

several scholarly conversations, which I discuss below.

Emotions and Grammars

Picking up the work Daly and Miller began in the 90s, R&C scholars of the last two

decades have been writing on the topic of emotions with greater frequency and greater

appreciation. Charles Anderson and Marian MacCurdy's 2000 edited collection offers essays on

how to use activities that incorporate emotion into the writing classroom. Dale Jacobs and Laura

Micciche's 2003 edited volume A Way to Move collects more than ten essays that consider both

the negative and positive functions of emotions in professional spheres such as writing

classrooms and English departments. In her singley authored book Doing Emotion, published in

2007, Micciche says she is "bored and disappointed by approaches to emotion that cast it as an

always suspect, usually fallacious feature of persuasive discourse" and argues that "... rethinking

emotion beyond the emotional appeal as traditionally understood leads to exciting, innovative

pedagogical methods as well as to invigorated studies of emotion as a rhetoric of bodies and

beliefs in motion" (xiii). Micciche argues that emotions have been given such a bad reputation

that people have lost sight of the important role they play in meaning making. Rethinking the

traditional understanding of emotions, Micciche says emotions are mistakenly thought to be

internal when they are actually outwardly performative, embodied, and social. This means

emotions are not simply a way of influencing others; they are a way of relating to others. People

do not just have emotions; they do emotions, often together (1-2). Furthermore, she makes the

point that emotions should not be filtered out of argumentation, as if logic and empirical data are

the only appropriate grounds to build an argument on. Emotions are, she recognizes, what get

people invested in issues to the point of argumentation, so is it ever really absent (3)? She goes

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on to present exercises in dramatization, which she suggests can help students understand

emotions as rhetorically performative and social (47-71). The groundwork laid by these scholars

helped prepare me to recognize the unanticipated benefits of teachers’ emotional encounters with

grammar instruction.

April Baker-Bell is a rising R&C scholar in the area of linguistic justice. Her previously

mentioned 2020 book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

shows how far literacy education still has to go to eliminate racist structures. Her work with

Detroit students shows that language standardization inflicts emotional and developmental

damage to Black-language speakers’ identity formation. In this book, she instructs actions

teachers can take to respond to what she calls “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism.” The study I offer

here also considers how language standardization in schools can have short and long-term impact

on learners’ sense of identity. While Baker-Bell composes a sensitive and persuasive

representation of Black students’ experiences and emotions, I take her research a step further by

studying how emotional and developmental impact from grammar instruction resonate into the

teaching of students who later become educators.

I build upon the aforementioned research by turning focus to writing teachers’ emotional

resonances from their experiences learning grammar and suggesting another answer to the

question Williams posed in “The Phenomenology of Errors”: Why is the topic of grammar

emotionally charged? While Williams’ essay explores anger toward standardized English

grammar deviations, my research considers a variety of emotions toward grammars and grammar

instruction. Williams suggests that people feel anger toward grammar “errors” because it gives

them satisfaction to point out others’ “mistakes,” even if they themselves slip into non-traditional

forms. I argue that to understand teachers’ emotions toward grammars and grammar instruction,

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we have to look to the past as well as the present. In addition to self-satisfaction, some teachers

react passionately to the topic of grammar because past experiences have made them sensitive to

language issues.

GTA Training

Among those who have contributed to recent research of GTA training, Jessica Restaino

does important work by drawing attention to the range of emotions felt by individuals who are

both new graduate students and new teachers. Her 2012 ethnographic study follows four

graduate student teachers through their first semester of teaching. By applying Arendt’s concept

of labor, she analyzes interviews, observations, surveys, and written communication with the

subjects to reveal the fear, shame, desperation, and confusion that is often a part of the GTA’s

“survival.” Restaino’s research responds, in part, to the disconnect she identifies between theory

and GTA practices, or “the theory/practice divide,” (30) as she calls it. Student teachers often

end their training with a list of practices without knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings for

those practices. Restaino was right when she recognized the importance of emotions to GTAs’

performance. From my study findings, I suggest that emotional experiences can help student

teachers contextualize the theory behind grammar instructional practices. The lesson I develop

out of the findings from this study offers an example of how it might look to balance the

practical with the theoretical. In this lesson, student teachers use self reflection and group

discussion to emotionally prepare for developing activities and practices they can implement into

their classes and learning the theory behind these practices.

Dylan Dryer is yet another researcher who has improved understanding of graduate

student teacher training. For his 2012 study, he had ten graduate teaching assistants voice their

impressions of a set of undergraduate papers to see how their various backgrounds might

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influence their evaluations. Dryer’s suspicion that student teachers’ genre backgrounds (e.g.

literature, creative writing) would correlate with certain responses did not prove true. Instead, he

found that the student teachers tended to project their own writing anxieties onto the students,

assuming that the authors of the essays struggle with the same tendencies as themselves. Dryer

notes one critical exception in that the student teachers did not consider whether the authors of

the essays intentionally broke the conventions of academic writing. This oversight occurred even

though many of the student teachers did question academic conventions. To study this

phenomenon, Dryer considers the involvement of identity formation. He points out that graduate

students are, in many ways, working to shape their graduate student and teacher identities.

Graduate students’ doubts about academic conventions play into this shaping as they must decide

if they will abide by the conventions to conform to the traditional teacher models they usually

observe. This “dissonance,” (421) says Dryer, must be addressed in teaching practicums if

graduate student teachers are to demonstrate to their own students how to “negotiate reflectively

… a more productive relationship with dominant academic writing practices” (422). I agree that

many graduate student teachers privately question academic conventions and that they can

struggle to negotiate an authentic identity for themselves when they feel obligated to teach

practices they question. I add to Dryer’s argument that grammar conventions make up a sizable

portion of those practices student teachers question. The critical reflection Dryer says should

happen in teaching practicums should include opportunities for future writing teachers to engage

specifically with their tensions over grammar standardization and instruction. By understanding

the personal experiences that may contribute to their reservations about grammar conventions,

GTAs can better articulate the connection between the theories they learn and the experiential

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knowledge they sense. Understanding this connection helps them build a stronger, more

contextualized foundation for their teaching practices.

Although many have studied the use of reflection in teacher development (Farrell;

Mcdonough; Shandomo; Ottesen; Juklova), these observations have primarily focused on how

reflection helps teachers scrutinize their personal ideologies and assess their classroom practices.

I argue that in addition to these critical inquiries, self reflection can serve as emotional

development. Reflection on transformative encounters with grammar instruction can make

writing teachers sensitive to their students’ experiences and passionate about reforming

understandings of grammars and grammar instruction. The knowledge gained from this study

can guide the development of workshops to help FYW teachers participate in open conversation

about the issues of grammar instruction and access the positive emotions that can come out of

reflecting on their past experiences learning grammar. In Chapter Seven, I provide a sample

lesson plan for leading GTAs in a grammar-focused reflection. Some General GTA training

models exist (see Davis and Kring; Fedukovich and Hall), but colleges and departments often

have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the content of these courses. The lesson I offer in

Chapter Seven helps students achieve two of the ten teaching competencies Molly Hatcher and

Joanna Gilmore outline in their 2021 book Preparing for College and University Teaching: teach

with an attention to diversity and assess their own teaching performance.

Lastly, although not about GTAs specifically, Elaine Richardson’s chapter in Language

Diversity in the Classroom reveals several related points about teacher training. In this chapter,

she reports the findings from a survey of 983 high school and college language arts teachers,

recruited from the CCCC and NCTE membership lists. The book is somewhat outdated, having

been published in 2003, but still relevant is the data that proved writing teachers’ language

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training impacts their attitudes about multilingual/multidialectal education. The survey data

Richardson presents showed that more teachers who had taken at least one course in English

dialects expressed openness to language diversity in classes than those who did not take a course

in dialects (62). Surprisingly, a third of the teachers surveyed had not taken a single college

course in language. This statistic may have changed since this survey took place, but based on

the programs I have reviewed over the course of applying to graduate school and most recently

faculty positions, courses in dialects appear almost exclusively under the linguistic department.

Historically, this organization makes sense since sentence-level language study is typically

associated with linguistics, but this arrangement could unintentionally convey a message that

dialects are only legitimate as language “in the wild'' and are inappropriate for the classroom.

Assigning precious teaching practicum time to grammars by way of dialects tells student

teachers that dialects (plural) and grammars (plural) belong in FYW. From the current study, I

determine that reflection on past experiences learning grammar is a useful form of training, and I

make suggestions for how it can be used to emotionally prepare GTAs to engage in the topic of

grammars.

Grammar Instruction

In addition to emotions and GTA training, this work contributes to conversations about

grammar instruction. Many have challenged the effectiveness of traditional grammar instruction,

either based on research or anecdotal evidence (Harris R.; Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer;

Dean), and years of scholarship have delivered and contested the results from tests of alternative

forms of grammar instruction (Combs; Daiker et al.; Davis; Dawkins; Weaver; Bateman and

Zidonis). Some of this scholarship even considers emotions in the context of composition and

correction, considering student and teacher emotions (Shaughnessy; Caswell; Martinez et al.; A.

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Watson). As the literature in Chapter Two of this dissertation shows, grammar definitions have

been critiqued, approaches have been tested, and issues of equality have been raised. My study

turns the conversations in a new direction, acknowledging that like students, teachers harbor

emotions from past encounters with grammar instruction and their emotions are critical to

grammar education’s reform.

Related to grammar studies, this work adds to the ongoing conversations on linguistic

justice and antiracist teaching practices. My findings provide evidence that supports what

scholars like Geneva Smitherman, Asao Inoue, Sina Saeedi, Elaine Richardson, and April Baker-

Bell have been arguing: that language arts and the critiques given by writing teachers impact

students’ self identity. (For a more complete overview of current literature on language and race,

see Chapter Two). Such scholars acknowledge history’s importance to their cause. Historical

context plays a critical role in most of their arguments. For example, in “Grading Writing is a

Racist Practice,” Inoue traces the origins of grading and its connection to eugenics to show how

the practice sustains white language supremacy. Victor Villanueva even wrote an autobiography,

Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, sharing his emotional experiences as a

student of color. Scholars on the topic of language and race do not ignore the past nor pretend to

extract emotion from their work. In fact, much of the writing in this area gets its power from the

bold way the authors convey their emotions. I don’t suggest that I do something innovative when

I suggest teachers’ histories and emotions hold importance. What I do hope I offer is perspective

on how writing teachers can make their emotional histories work for them. I want to help FYW

teachers recognize how their learning experiences converge and diverge from the student

populations they teach and, through reflection and conversation, take away emotional wisdom

from both comparisons.

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Key Terms

Grammar(s)

When I use the term grammar, I mean a socially constructed system, consisting of

structural and usage conventions shared between two or more interlocutors. This definition is

informed by Winston Weathers’ definition of a grammar of style: “the ‘set of conventions

governing the construction of a whole composition; the criteria by which a writer selects the

stylistic materials, method of organization and development, compositional pattern and structure

he is to use in preparing any particular composition’” (220). I do not use Weathers’ phrase

grammar of style, for reasons I will explain, but I do share his preference for pluralizing

grammar. I add the plural ‘s’ whenever the referent might include multiple varieties of grammar.

Another important difference between my definition and that of Weathers is my avoidance of

words like “composition” and “writer” in order to include non-alphabetic grammars. Although

the current study concerns human-designed, alphabetic grammars, I recognize other systems as

grammars, including visual design, gestures, and spoken inflections, including those used by

plants and animals. Another important part of my definition is that it allows for constant change

and invention, each iteration equally legitimate. A departure from one grammar’s conventions

can become its own grammar, if that departure communicates between interlocutors.

My definition of grammar lies on the inclusive end of the spectrum. Similar to how

Darren Crovitz and Michelle Devereaux use the term in Grammar to Get Things Done, I view

the term grammar as the overarching subject that includes the study of usage and mechanics (1-

4). More specifically, I place syntax, semantics, conventions, punctuation, and spelling all under

the heading grammar. I prefer to use the overarching term grammar as opposed to the

subheadings because I believe the multiple aspects of writing do not have clean divisions.

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Discussions of conventions can easily blend into talk of punctuation and spelling, and some

punctuation cannot be explained without talk of syntax and semantics. It is for this reason that I

resist dissecting writing into different concept areas. Although I might venture briefly into a

single writing concept during a lecture, I try to discuss language as it naturally functions, and

these divisions are not natural. In use, written language does not normally present punctuation

apart from syntax, nor diction from conventions.

It is perhaps easy to see how one would place the aforementioned concepts on a sublevel

under the broader heading of grammar. It is less clear how style differs from grammar and why I

would not adopt this arguably more favorable term2 in place of grammar, or at least combine

them as Weathers did. I had a couple intentions with keeping to the term grammar. The first

reason is because I do not see the reactions to this alternate term being as intense as the

emotional ones in response to utterances of the term grammar. I find this oddity both mysterious

and promising. Emotions can be a resource, so a term that raises particularly intense emotions is

to me an opportunity. This dissertation attempts to understand emotions surrounding the topic of

grammar, and so I use the term. The second reason I use the term is because R&C teachers and

scholars have an obligation to be the voices of reason on the topic. Butler wrote in 2008, “in its

neglect of style as a topic of serious scholarly inquiry (as well as grammar and literacy, to

varying degrees), the discipline of composition and rhetoric has ceded the discussion to others

outside the field--generally to self-described public intellectuals…” (62). Butler was specifically

concerned about style when he wrote this warning, but I suggest the same is true of grammar; the

term grammar will not escape the public intellectuals any time soon. At least for now, writing

teachers must continue meeting strangers who promise to “watch their grammar” around them,

2 In Chapter 2, I explain why I believe textbooks have adopted the term style in place of grammar.

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and we must all put up with internet trolls who point out that blessed “it’s” that should be “its.” I

share English teachers’ frustration with this minimization of our service, but I fear that moving

on to a new term will not change the world. It only leaves the world with confused students

informed by unqualified judges. This is why I continue to use the terms grammar and grammars

when I discuss my research. The term invites emotional reactions, keeping everyone invested in

the topic, at least to a degree, and giving me the opportunity to use this investment as motivation

to learn what lies beyond the commas.

While I am committed to the continued use of the term grammar, I do often pair it with

the qualifier rhetorical. I am most careful to use this qualifier when discussing instructional

practices with other teachers. Like Martha Kolln, I use it to indicate a distinct difference from

formal grammar instruction and its focus on “error” correction. Kolln uses George Hillock Jr.’s

words to define rhetorical grammar as the “conscious ability ‘to select effective structures for a

given rhetorical context’” (“Rhetorical Grammar” 29). Laura Micciche also believes it is critical

to distinguish between different types of grammar instruction when discussing the topic: “These

differences [between types of grammar instruction] evaporate, reducing the issue of grammar

instruction to a rather simple rejection of a banal practice, when we fail to specify just what kind

of grammar we're rejecting” (“Making a Case” 717). In other words, for those of us who hope to

revive and reform grammar instruction, we have to qualify our argument to persuade those who

are justifiably skittish of anything resembling formal grammar instruction. She argues that

rhetorical grammar instruction “emphasizes grammar as a tool for articulating and expressing

relationships among ideas” (720). This is yet another reason I believe rhetorical grammar is so

beneficial in composition classes. It is a way into critical conversations about how language and

culture interact and react. Rhetorical grammar, says Micciche, is a step toward “emancipatory

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teaching” (717). Again, I agree with this logic. When grammar is taught rhetorically, grammars

are possible in composition classes. Though I advocate for rhetorical grammar, I understand that

not everyone does. For that reason, I use the phrases “topic of grammar” and “grammar

instruction” throughout this dissertation to keep attention on the study participants and their

understandings of grammar. When I do make personal appeals for the teaching of grammars, I

specify “rhetorical grammar instruction.”

Identity

For the purpose of this study, I rely on Carmen Llamas and James Watt’s definition of

“identity” in Language and Identities: “Identity is the social positioning of self and other” (19).

According to psychology, identities have both stable and adaptive parts. The stable part, called

the natural self, is present from birth and remains constant throughout a person’s life. The

environmental self, on the other hand, changes depending on the actors and circumstances

involved at any particular time. People conceptualize their natural and environmental selves

through two reflective schemas: self image and self concept. The self image is formed out of

measurable traits such as intelligence or physical dimensions. Self concepts, on the other hand,

are abstract traits such as compassion or cheerfulness. Altogether, the natural self’s images and

concepts plus the environmental self’s images and concepts compose the self identity. The

individual’s evaluation of this self identity, through images and concepts, determines an

individual’s self-esteem (Bailey). Because self-esteem deals with self worth, changes to it can be

particularly emotional, making it key to answering why grammar instruction is such an

emotional topic for some writing teachers. Throughout this dissertation while discussing identity

and sense of self, I will refer to that part of the self identity which reacts to the environment.

Grammar instruction can impact both a person’s self image and their self concept. For example,

if grammar instruction makes students believe they are intelligent, it affects the students’ self

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image and may positively impact their self-esteem. At the same time, grammar instruction that

leads students to believe their heritage language, and therefore their heritage, is defective

involves an abstract quality of the students’ self concept and can negatively impact their self-

esteem.

Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction

Epiphany derives from the Greek word epipháneia meaning manifestation or

appearance; originally, it referred to divine revelations that occurred in the presence of a deity.

As early as 361 A.D., literature shows the term used to refer to an annual festival held on

January 6 in celebration of Christ’s birth and baptism and, in some cases, the Magi’s first

appearance before the Christ child (“Epiphany”). James Joyce is credited for bringing use of

the term into the literary sphere. Over the course of his writing, he wrote more than seventy

epiphanies, of which forty still survive. Many of these individual epiphanies he collected in his

novel Stephen Hero (Scholes and Walzl 152). In this story, Joyce, in the voice of his alter ego

Stephen, introduces the theory of the epiphany. Harry Levin was first to discover the

importance of epiphany to the document (Scholes 66). In Stephen Hero, Stephen reflects on

certain events, calling them epiphanies and asserting that men of letters have a responsibility to

record these “most delicate and evanescent moments” (qtd. in Scholes 68). Joyce, through

Stephen, describes the experience of an epiphany as the moment when “the soul of the

commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant” (qtd. In Scholes

69). Although Joyce’s application of the term retained some of its religious qualities, he

reformed it so that it no longer had to refer solely to manifestations of a deity. Joyce’s

expanded use of epiphany acknowledges the ability of everyday objects or gestures to insight

religious-like transformations. These experiences may not directly involve the sighting of a

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deity, but are religious nonetheless because the change initiated by the event radiates over the

whole person, casting fresh light on the affected’s belief system.

Through this study, I have found that FYW teachers’ most memorable encounters with

grammar instruction are often cases of such transformation. Many of the teachers in this study

recounted experiences of grammar instruction that changed their self image. In some instances,

the instruction strengthened an individual’s perceived possession of positive traits. In other

instances, it caused the individual to doubt his or her possession of positive traits or imposed

negative traits onto the individual. Yet another type of experience shared by the teachers in this

study was instructional moments that changed the individual’s worldview and, in some cases,

the person’s life trajectory. Applying Joyce’s use of epiphany, I have named these experiences

involving transformation to the individual’s identity epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction. Epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction are defined as experiences of

grammar instruction that involve changes to one or more of the following:

● Self-esteem -- the instructional experience builds belief or doubt in a positive trait such as

intelligence or power.

● Trajectory -- the instructional experience changes the person’s direction in life such as

their occupation.

● Worldview -- the instructional experience changes the person’s view on how language

operates, or ought to operate, in the world and as a result causes the person to reconsider

their values or representation in the world.

Summary of Chapters

I begin Chapter Two with a review of the history of grammar education in America, from

the 19th century through the 21st century. I end by identifying the gap that this research attempts

28

to fill and a note about the current kairotic moment for this study. Then, in Chapter three, I

outline my methods and methodology, explaining my rationale for conducting the study using

mixed methods and grounded theory. In Chapter Four, I present the data from both the

interviews and survey. The interview data is arranged as narratives which detail the interviewees’

emotional encounters with grammar instruction and their current practices for teaching grammar.

Finally, in Chapters Five and Six, I discuss my analysis of the study data and suggest several

conclusions. In Chapter Five, I consider evidence that indicates epiphanic encounters with

grammar instruction facilitate empathy in FYW teachers. In Chapter Six, I analyze the data as

evidence that epiphanic encounters also lead FYW teachers to feel passionate about the

continued discussion and reformation of grammar instruction. I offer in Chapter Seven

application for the study findings, including a lesson plan that GTA educators can modify for

their training classes. This lesson has GTAs reflect on their past experiences in order to tap into

their epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and prime them to approach the topic of

grammar with empathy and passion. I conclude in Chapter Eight with a review of what was

learned from the current study and suggestions for future research.

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Chapter Two: Review of Grammar Instruction

The impact of my personal history with grammar instruction made me wonder how other

FYW teachers’ emotional experiences as learners of grammar might impact their feelings toward

and responses to grammar instruction. I wondered if similar experiences could be behind the

reactions I sometimes received from writing teachers who resisted discussions of grammar(s) and

grammar instruction. Our experiences are the result of a trickle down effect; ideas and emotions

trickle through the history of grammar instruction and continue to affect how people experience

grammars still. Therefore, to understand teachers’ current feelings about the topic of grammar, I

had to first trace its emotional past. The remainder of this chapter reviews grammar instruction’s

evolution, including the important roles emotions and identity played in the pedagogical shifts

and, ultimately, the formation of the grammar instruction we now know. At the end of this

chapter, I have provided a timeline of the events that played the greatest role in shaping grammar

instruction in the U.S.

Grammar Instruction’s Evolution

The history of grammar instruction in the U.S. includes several monumental turns that

occurred because of changing ideas and transformative events. What follows is a history of these

turns, starting with the 19th century, progressing through the many significant turns of the 20th

century, and ending with 2021 when I’m writing this dissertation. Rhetoric historian Robert

Connors provided the field a great service with his documentation of Composition’s history,

particularly the evolution of composition textbooks. In compiling the history of grammar

education, I depended on Connors’ work, along with James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality:

Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900--1985 and Andrea Lunsford’s “Alexander Bain

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and the Teaching of Composition in North America.” I’ve divided my review of grammar

instruction’s history into six eras based on thematic changes that occurred around the same

periods: pre-1900s, 1900-1940s, the 1950s-60s, the 1970s, the 1980s-90s, and the 2000s.

Renaissance, Pre-1900s

The history of grammar instruction in the U.S. begins with the dawning of the

renaissance period, c. 1820-1860. The American renaissance saw tremendous growth in literature

and poetry, which contributed to class distinctions between the developing East and the still-wild

West. With these class distinctions, came language distinctions. Regional dialects quickly took

on the connotations of their classes as the dialect of the East became associated with intellectual

elites of the cities, and the dialect of the West became known as the language of the rough

frontiersmen (“Mechanical Correctness” 62).

Several key events around this same time dramatically increased enrollment in American

schools. The first of these events was advancements in writing technology. During the American

Industrial Revolution, pens, pencils, and ink all improved, and paper production streamlined to

make writing more affordable. At the same time that writing tools were becoming more practical,

the postal service also grew, making written communication more popular than ever. As writing

technology became more accessible and necessary, the demand for literacy education grew.

Schools began enrolling large numbers of students, making the old ways of demonstrating

communication skills impractical. The previous rhetorical tradition of oral presentation and

debate was not possible when school enrollment began reaching numbers in the thousands. By

necessity, the new way to demonstrate communication skills was essay writing, and the new

criteria for proficiency was adherence to prescribed rules (Bordelon, Wright, and Halloran 214-

216).

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Elitist literature had already begun to set the precedence for what would become the

language of self-improvement when in 1864, Englishman Henry Alford wrote A Plea for the

Queen's English. Although the American public vehemently rejected Alford's British ideal, the

book reinforced the idea that America did, in fact, have an ideal dialect. Many believed that this

ideal was under threat not by the New World dialect as a whole but by the supposedly barbaric

dialect used by the frontiersmen (“Mechanical Correctness” 64). Connors calls the resulting

impact of pleas such as Alford’s the "first great period of American linguistic insecurity" (62).

As early as 1865, college textbooks began to reflect these new concerns for standardized

correctness.

One scholar during this time who charged against these changes was Scottish philosopher

Alexander Bain. Far ahead of his time, Bain modeled writing across the curriculum before it was

a recognized concept (Lunsford 225). His knowledge of psychology, logic, and linguistics

informed his pedagogy and set his teaching of composition apart from that of most other

educators of his time. Even in these early days of grammar instruction, Bain preached the pitfalls

of rote memorization and methodical exercises. Bain’s version of First-Year Composition taught

critical thinking not through writing but through rhetorical analysis of texts. By assigning

writing, Bain argued, teachers would be forced to resort to rules of method and form in order to

assess students’ work (Aley 214-215). The 1886 edition of Bain’s textbook English Composition

and Rhetoric (first printed in 1866) would grow to be the most popular textbook in North

American universities during the latter half of the 19th century (Lunsford 219).

The future that Bain warned against in Scotland had already arrived in America. In U.S.

schools, the attention that had previously been given to rhetorical theory evolved into lessons in

prescriptive grammar. By the 1870s, college texts had begun to implement exercises in

32

standardized grammar, cementing the idea that language had right and wrong forms

(“Mechanical Correctness” 65-66). Finally, in 1874, Harvard set a new precedent by adding a

writing section to their entrance exam (64-65). That same year, Seth T. Hurd introduced the first

grammar manual, A Grammatical Corrector (63), which he created for the general public, and

Edwin A. Abbott developed How to Write Clearly: Rules and Exercises, the prototype for what

would later become the composition handbook (67). Even before reading these texts, their titles

alone told readers that educated writing meant following predetermined rules. Born from this

concern for “correctness,” in 1877 Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg developed sentence

diagramming, the first mode of visualizing syntactic relationships as a way of teaching linguistic

precision (Reed and Kellogg). The title of their textbook on this method reflects the priority of

the times. Its full title, Higher Lessons in English: A Work on English Grammar and

Composition in which the Science of the Language is Made Tributary to the Art of Expression,

was likely one of the first times language had been equated to science. From this perspective, it

only made sense that language would have precise formulas.

1900-1940s

Abbott’s prototype eventually led to the publication of the Handbook of Composition: A

Compendium of Rules in 1907. This book, by Edwin C. Woolley, officially initiated the

“handbook era.” According to Connor’s count, this era saw the publication of at least fifteen

different handbooks in the span of twenty years. In the hype of these new handbooks, which

taught lower-order concerns such as spelling and punctuation, traditional rhetorical theory nearly

disappeared from composition texts (“Mechanical Correctness” 67-68). In place of rhetorical

training, drill books and workbooks took on wide-scale use. These books, with their focus on

“error” identification, blotted out any remaining rhetorical theory in college composition courses.

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It did not take long, however, before educators, linguists, and rhetoricians surged against

mechanical classroom methods. They did not have to go far to find evidence for their concerns.

As early as the 1900s, studies had been proving grammar drills ineffective. The concerned voices

grew stronger through the 40s and 50s until, in 1944, rhetoric made a comeback, this time

sheltered within communication courses. Then, in 1949, college writing teachers organized the

Conference on College Composition and Communication to share and discuss the field’s

expanding topics (69-70).

The 1950s-60s

Upon entering the 60s, compositionists had already begun questioning traditional

grammar instruction’s effectiveness. Some educators adopted the term functional grammar, since

by this point suspicions cloaked the term traditional grammar. Roland Harris, a student at the

time, noticed that despite the change in name, grammar instruction had changed very little, still

depending on memorization and categorization apart from context (Harris 26). Observing the

absence of studies testing the long-term impact of grammar instruction, Harris conducted a two-

year-long dissertation project documenting the impact of explicit grammar instruction on high

school students. In this study, published in 1962, Harris evaluated the efficacy of formal

grammar practices. After acknowledging the slipperiness of the term, Harris defines formal

grammar as the ability to breakdown sentences into phrases and clauses; recognize units as

subject, predicate, direct/indirect object, and simple compliment; and differentiate between

specific parts of speech such as transitive and intransitive verbs; personal, demonstrative,

interrogative, and relative pronouns (20-21). In other words, Harris associated formal grammar

with the memorization of terminology. Harris’s research was an academic shot heard around the

world; his research revealed that students who were taught formal grammar produced writing

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with more “errors” than students who were not taught formal grammar. The year following

Harris' dissertation, Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer published a

review of all the literature on the instruction of grammar produced up to that point and

concluded, "Uncommon however is carefully conducted research which studies the effect of

formal grammar on actual composition over an extended period of time" (37). Short-term studies

could offer only a limited perspective on the issue since formal grammar instruction could

potentially take time to take effect in students' writing. This observation by Braddock et al.,

therefore, identified a critical gap in the grammar debate. It is surprising, then, that in the same

article, these authors made the following claim about formal grammar:

In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of

students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the

teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some

instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement

of writing. (37-38)

Despite the absence of extended observations, the persuasive voices of Harris and Braddock et

al. took effect. Because no one could show evidence of immediate writing improvement,

opposition grew against grammar instruction.

As “error correction” fell from popularity, composition teachers turned to structural

linguists to find a new method of teaching writing (“The Erasure of the Sentence” 98).

According to James Berlin’s account, structural linguistics was thought to be the new and

improved theory of language that would elevate writing courses by defining for them a unique

subject matter (111). In 1954, CCCC held a panel to discuss linguistic implications for freshman

composition, and by 1958, two new composition textbooks had adopted structural linguistics as

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their basis, one co-authored by Harry Warfel (112). In his essay “Structural Linguistics and

Composition,” Warfel describes English as having an “algebraic theory of functions, variables,

and constraints” (cited in Berlin 113). This view of English made it possible to boil down the

teaching of composition to observable patterns. Despite the hopes that structural linguistics

would renovate the teaching of composition, it was experiencing its own unrest as a discipline. A

series of articles spanning from May of 1959 to December of 1960 documented compositionists’

concerns over linguistics’ application. In these articles, William Bowden and Francis Cain

debated sentence diagramming as a teaching tool, with Bowden defending its use and Cain

protesting that it was too focused on grammatical terms, a feature of the unfashionable

mechanical classroom. Along with Cain was a group of scholars who took issue with linguistics’

focus on taxonomizing language. This practice, they argued, did nothing to help students

generate novel sentences. Among the most vocal of these revolutionaries was Francis

Christensen, who also happened to have served as recorder at the earlier CCCC panel on

structural linguistics. He revised the structural linguistic approach and called it generative

grammar. He presented this revision in his 1963 essay “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence”

(GRS). Christensen’s generative grammar taught students sentence manipulation by having them

build increasingly complex sentences. Students would begin with a short, base sentence and play

at adding what Christensen called “free modifiers,” clauses that could be freely moved about a

sentence in order to modify it. In addition to being a new approach to teaching grammar,

generative grammar was monumental in another way. Christensen’s instructions for how to teach

grammar were some of the earliest efforts to reinstate grammar’s association with rhetoric. A

couple early texts such as John Walker’s A Rhetorical Grammar (1732) and David Cruttenten’s

A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language (1816) spoke of rhetorical grammar, but these

36

texts still taught grammar as a mode of standardization and focused on precision more than

context. The original rhetorical canon had included close sentence work (categorized under

style), but, as noted, American schools had replaced lessons in rhetoric with exercises in

prescriptive grammar. After its departure in the 19th century, the first evidence of rhetoric

rejoining the teaching of composition appeared in a 1952 article written by several teachers who

argued for the importance of rhetoric’s invention to the composition process (Berlin 115), but

educators had yet to join rhetoric with grammar instruction. Except for the exceptions named, the

topic of grammar had been largely severed from rhetoric for roughly a century when Christensen

combined the two terms in his instructions for teaching generative grammar. Although he never

specifically uses the term rhetorical grammar, he clearly had such a concept in mind when

writing “Notes Toward a New Rhetoric” (published the same year as GRS). As the title suggests,

this article argues that composition classes require a new kind of rhetoric. What is not

immediately apparent from its title is that Christensen believed a new rhetoric was the answer to

how to teach syntax. In this article, he speaks of “a rhetorical theory of the sentence” (11) and

“rhetorical and grammatical character of the modifiers” (14).

Christensen’s method received much attention and was tested numerous times. First,

Charles Bond and R.D. Walshe conducted separate experiments using generative grammar. Both

determined that the method improved students’ writing and that students responded positively to

the method. These initial tests of the method were, however, anecdotal. Lester Faigley’s 1978

experiment is famously the first scientific test of the method. Faigley reported that students who

used Christensen’s method produced more mature sentences than those who did not (“The

Erasure” 98-100). In 1957, while generative grammar was still being tested, the famous linguist

Noam Chomsky put his own take on the method and renamed it transformational-generative

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grammar, also the basis of what would be called simply sentence-combining (“The Erasure”

103). As its alternate name suggests, Chomsky advocated for mature syntax to be taught through

exercises in combining sentences.

While generative grammar was still in its testing phase, a second approach to teaching

grammar was introduced. This approach built on the revived excitement over rhetoric, which had

begun in the 40s and 50s, and returned to the tradition of imitation. Edward Corbett was

instrumental in imitation’s resurgence. His essay “The Uses of Classical Rhetoric” (1963) and

his book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1965) helped progress the initiative to bring

back imitation. Others who helped promote imitation include Winston Weathers and Otis

Winchester, who wrote Copy and Compose in 1969 (“The Erasure” 100-101).

While new approaches to teaching the topic of grammar evolved out of linguistics and

composition, there came onto the scene a concept taken from ancient rhetoric: style. During the

60s, stylistics became the new theory of linguistics and literary criticism. In 1967, Penn State

University Press established the journal Style and Graham Hough published his book Style and

Stylistics in 1969. This curiosity for style continued into the 70s (e.g. Widdowson) and on into

the 80s (e.g. Belsey; Leech and Mick; Carter). These early revivals of stylistics would, however,

primarily remain within literary criticism and linguistics until the 2000s.

The 1970s

Encouraged by the famous quote by Braddock et al., scholars throughout the 70s and 80s

published follow-up studies that seemed to confirm that grammar instruction was ineffective

(Hartwell; Elley; Hillocks; Bamberg). In the midst of traditional grammar’s unraveling, R&C

experienced another landmark shift. CCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to their Own Language”

represents the field’s first organized commitment to approach issues of linguistic justice. This

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topic would receive greater attention in the 90s once linguists and rhetoricians like William

Labov, Joey Dillard, and Geneva Smitherman laid the theoretical groundwork needed to spur

pedagogical research (DoBell 163). With these powerful advocates, stories like the King vs. Ann

Arbor court case (1977) and the Oakland Resolution on Ebonics (1996) forced the public to

acknowledge multiculturalism in schools and, though reluctant, recognize validity in dialect

varieties (159-160).

Another change in R&C that proved important to grammar instruction was a new interest

in emotions. Though still early in its research, students’ emotions became a viable topic with the

invention of the Daly-Miller Scale of Writing Apprehension in 1975 (“The Empirical

Development of an Instrument to Measure Writing Apprehension”). This interest, like the

concern for linguistic justice, would gain greater momentum in later years. According to Jill

Belli, Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, the increased attention to

emotions in education was induced by positive psychology which came about near the end of the

twentieth century (para. 5).

In the late 1970s, many scholars devoted their time to interrogating the practices that had

come to light the previous decade. Most of the research conducted to test sentence-combining

confirmed earlier findings. James Ney's 1976 study was, however, an outlier. From his classroom

studies, Ney claimed that sentence-combining was ineffective and even harmful when used in

college composition classes. Because his findings contrasted those of all previous research,

Donald Daiker, Andrew Kerek, and Max Morenberg investigated the study. They found that

Ney's study design was flawed both in its methods and its reporting. The first major issue was

that the classes in Ney's study spent much less time practicing sentence-combining than the

classes in other studies. Students, claimed Daiker et al., cannot be expected to benefit from so

39

little practice (36-37). The second issue with Ney's study was that he did not report enough

details about his subjects and research procedures (37). After deeming Ney's study inadequate,

Daiker et al. presented the findings of their own follow-up study. This more thorough study,

conducted at Miami University, found that a control group of freshman college students without

sentence-combining instruction did not improve in their “syntactic maturity,” while the group

with sentence-combining instruction increased 8.75 words per clause to 9.64 words per clause.

More words and sentence variety does not necessarily equal more rhetorically effective writing,

but Daiker et al. consider this evidence of success because the students’ word count more closely

resembled that of professional writers. This, concluded Daiker et al. was sufficient evidence to

discredit Ney's data (39-40). As for imitation, its capabilities were tested by Rosemary Hake and

Joseph Williams’s 1977 experiment. As their contribution to the research on imitation, they

compared the writing of students who practiced imitation against those who practiced sentence-

combining. Hake and Williams discovered that the students who had been taught using imitation

benefited even more than those taught through sentence-combining exercises (“The Erasure of

the Sentence” 102).

Then, in 1977, perhaps encouraged by the new focus on students’ rights and emotions,

Mina Shaughnessy came to students’ defense in yet another way. Her book, Errors and

Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, laid out the logic behind non-traditional

grammar commonly used by college students. Shaughnessy wrote this defense specifically for a

generation of college students known as “open admission students,” a group of students who

entered college under a new admissions policy at the City University of New York. This new

policy, passed in 1970, granted each of the city’s high school graduates free and open admissions

to any one of eighteen colleges in the city. Suddenly, NYC colleges found themselves

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responsible for nearly 100,000 more students than previous years, and many of these students

were, according to college standards, illiterate. Understandably, overwhelmed teachers held little

hope for these students (Errors and Expectations 1-3). Some students would, however, prove the

skeptics wrong. They would fight through four-plus years of college and, in doing so, would give

writing teachers something to think about. The conversations and writings that Shaughnessy

collected from this unique class of students served as the basis of her book. For the first time, a

credible scholar carefully analyzed students’ non-traditional writing and boldly declared that the

reason for their “errors” was not because the students lacked logic but because the students tried

to apply logic to an illogical system, namely standardized grammar. Despite this revelation, even

Shaughnessy would not deny the need for grammar instruction and provides strategies to help

students standardize their grammar.

The 1980s-90s

It seems all the work up to this point in grammar instruction’s history had brought a

greater understanding of students’ rights, emotions, and abilities, but the field was left with just

as many questions as before. As conclusive as the early scholarship on the teaching of traditional

grammar seemed, the 80s and 90s brought a wave of scholars who were reluctant to dismiss all

grammar. They began scrutinizing the seemingly conclusive studies and discovered that the issue

was much more complicated than the Braddock et al. quote made it out to seem. One of the more

powerful voices among these scholars was Martha Kolln. In her 1981 essay "Closing the Books

on Alchemy," she critiques the leading anti-grammar research, saying about Braddock et al.’s

statement, “That famous statement has probably had a more harmful effect on our students these

past seventeen years than all the time spent memorizing rules and diagramming sentences ever

had” (147). Ed Vavra, who calls himself a "veteran of the grammar debates" ("Grammar is Back,

41

but When Will We Start Cooking?" 86), also took issue with the validity of certain anti-grammar

studies. The studies, wrote Vavra in a 1996 article called “On Not Teaching Grammar,” use

problematic definitions for "teaching grammar" and "improved writing." As an example, he

refers to a study conducted by Mellon and O'Hare, who measured writing improvement based on

clause length rather than accuracy ("On Not Teaching Grammar'' 32). Vavra questioned whether

clause length really constituted improved writing.

Patrick Hartwell, hoping to settle the grammar debate, defined multiple grammars in his

1985 article “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” In this article, Hartwell

identifies five grammars. For these definitions, he begins with the three types of grammar

defined by Nelson Francis in “Revolution in Grammar.” Nelson describes Grammar 1 as “the set

of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger

meanings,” Grammar 2 as “the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the

description, analysis, and formulization of formal language patterns,” and Grammar 3 as

“linguistic etiquette.” Hartwell, however, splits Grammar 2 into “scientific grammar” and

“school grammar” and adds a fifth grammar he calls “stylistic grammar” (110). This last

grammar, says Hartwell, is that which is taught by those like Lanham, Strunk, and White. With

these definitions, Hartwell hoped to put an end to the great grammar debate. One can hear his

frustration in his concluding words:

At no point in the English curriculum is the question of power more blatantly posed than

in the issue of formal grammar instruction. It is time that we, as teachers, formulate

theories of language and literacy and let those theories guide our teaching and it is time

that we, as researchers, move on to more interesting areas of inquiry. (127)

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One can only imagine his discouragement when despite his attempt at a compromise, the debate

continued.

This second look at old anti-grammar studies must have recalled for some the old

obsessions with standardized correction, so it was perhaps only natural that research in this

period would find intrigue in “errors” as Shaughnessy did. Specifically, a group of scholars drew

attention to the ways teachers respond in writing to students’ typos or non-traditional grammars.

Joseph Williams was among those who contributed the most to this research. In his article “The

Phenomenology of Errors,” Williams brought new complexity to the study of deviations with his

invention of a categorization matrix. This matrix included four categories of “errors”: errors that

when violated we respond and when not violated we still respond; errors that when violated we

respond but when not violated we do not respond; errors that we respond to regardless of

whether it is committed or avoided, and errors that we do not respond to regardless of whether it

is committed or avoided. Williams found that teachers were not consistent in the errors they

responded to. “Errors” that distracted one teacher could go completely unnoticed by another

(Williams 160-165). This research was important to grammar research because of what it meant

for formal grammar rules. If teachers do not uniformly address deviations from the so-called

standards, those standards become difficult to defend.

Shifting to the late 90s, composition scholars finally started to see the value of

Christensen’s attempt to more thoroughly combine the topic of grammar with rhetoric. Scholars

began exploring what, besides imitation, rhetoric could offer grammar education. Martha Kolln

was front and center in the movement for what would officially be termed rhetorical grammar

(see Table 2.1, below, for a comparison of traditional and rhetorical grammar). In 1991, she co-

authored Rhetorical Grammar and in 1996, she published “Rhetorical Grammar: A Modification

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Lesson.” In 2004, Kolln was joined by Laura Micciche, who also advocated for rhetorical

grammar in her essay "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar." In this article, she writes,

"rhetorical grammar instruction can demonstrate to students that language does purposeful,

consequential work in the world" (719). Micciche taught that the harmful effects of grammar

instruction, as Braddock et al. describe, could be avoided if only we stopped isolating the topic

from writing. In her article, she even went as far as to offer two well-defined practices for

presenting the topic of grammar together with composition, as they naturally occur. First,

Micciche describes how she guides her students in rhetorical thinking by having them look to

model texts and consider the "art of selection” (723). She has students study texts that have

personally impacted their lives and trace the connection between the fine mechanics of writing

and the impact made by those texts. Second, Micciche acknowledges the benefits of using

contextualized writing prompts to teach rhetorical grammar. Micciche is not alone in this

recommendation. Patricia Dunn and Kenneth Lindblom also recommended having students

develop grammar knowledge by having them write for real situations. In their contribution to

The English Journal’s special issue on “revitalizing grammar,” they explain that instead of

focusing on rules, when students write for real audiences, they learn grammar by considering

effects.

Table 2.1 Traditional vs. Rhetorical Grammar*

Type of

Grammar

Object of study Seeks to Determines

grammaticality

based on

Form’s

Standards

based on

44

Traditional/

School/

Formal/

Prescriptive

non-traditional

forms and usage

identify non-

traditional forms

and usage and

categorize parts of

speech

rules based on

Latin language

prescribed rules;

many rules were

originally based

on Latin

constructions

Rhetorical appropriateness

and effectiveness

understand how to

shape language to

persuade a

specific audience

impact genre

conventions,

audience

expectations,

and purpose

*The information in this table is based on literature by Roland Harris, Patrick Hartwell, Martha

Kolln, and Laura Micciche.

2000-2021

The interest in written feedback that began in the 90s continued into the 2000s, as the

field began investigating the role of written feedback for ESL students. In 2006, Cristine

McMartin-Miller conducted a case study of three writing instructors and nineteen FYW students

in a course specifically designed for international students. Her study revealed, as Joseph

Williams had observed, that instructors varied in how comprehensively they marked “errors.”

McMartin-Miller also found that the students valued and applied feedback to whatever degree it

was given. James Hartshorn et al. reported evidence of similar success with written feedback in

2010. These findings are, admittedly, in contrast to findings by Truscott (1996, 1999, 2004,

2009) and Lee (2007, 2008), whose research found that many students do not pay much attention

to teachers’ written feedback or else do not apply it (see literature review in Chen). Neomy

Storch and Gillian Wigglesworth offer a possible explanation for these contradictory findings.

They found with their 2010 study that multiple factors create a complicated network of

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influencers that determine how effective written feedback is for a student. These factors include

the type of “errors” as well as the student’s goals and beliefs. Despite its mixed success, many

writing teachers continued to use written feedback to teach grammar(s) contextually. By teaching

students grammars through their own writing, they are not only made more relevant but also

more rhetorical. When working together with a student on a piece of their own writing, teachers

can engage students in conversations about conventions and appropriateness, all while framing

the lessons as rhetorical choices, as opposed to formal rules. This practice draws away from the

failed traditions of the mechanical classroom and aligns with process theory, where students

write multiple drafts, ideally applying teacher feedback to each revision.

Along with the growing interest in feedback, the 2000s saw the occasional retesting of

traditional grammar methods (e.g. Graham and Perin’s 2003 study). These studies continued to

affirm what Harris had found to be true. Educators, however, continued to put forward

persuasive reasons why students needed knowledge of formal grammar. In 2006, The English

Journal published an article called “Teacher to Teacher: What is your Most Compelling Reason

for Teaching Grammar?,” in which high school and college English teachers explained their

reasons for teaching grammar. Kolln and Nancy Patterson were among those to share their

reasons. Their responses emphasized the “control” and “flexibility” students gain by learning

grammar, implicitly referencing grammar’s rhetorical elements (Benjamin et al. 19). Other

responses argued that students need grammar to possess the metalanguage to discuss their

writing (18).

Because many believed there was much to gain from the knowledge of grammar(s),

scholars in the field continued exploring alternative approaches to teaching it. In 2003, an entire

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issue of The English Journal was dedicated to discussing "revitalizing grammar." Many

contributors wrote in favor of teaching the topic rhetorically.

While some individual scholars continued in the direction of rhetorical grammar, R&C

began taking an interest in stylistics. The composition handbooks that were once “grammar

workbooks” began boasting a new focus on style. Such texts include Virginia Tufte's Artful

Sentences: Syntax as Style published in 2006; Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing from

2012; and Paul Butler's The Writer’s Style: A Rhetorical Field Guide, which came out in

2018. In "The Stylistic (Re)Turn in Rhetoric and Composition," Paul Butler suggests one reason

for the sudden preference for the term style. Style, according to Butler, "offers a way for

composition to embrace the cacophony of difference that defines our field; stylistic pedagogy,

the difference that defines our students" ("The Stylistic (Re)Turn" 2). Butler believes style offers

flexibility that has not been associated with the topic of grammar.

Smitherman continues her work on the subject of language and race and demonstrates the

contributions that can be made when one applies knowledge from the fields of both linguistics

and rhetoric. Smitherman’s background in linguistics helps her defend the speech of the Black

community as a distinct language. As she explains in multiple articles (see “Language and

African Americans: Movin On up a Lil Higher” and “‘A New Way of Talkin’: Language, Social

Change, and Political Theory”) the precise patterns in the discourse makes it a legitimate

language. This is an important point of agreement because, as Smitherman asserts, a dialect can

be seen as a distorted variety of an existing language. To receive equal rights as white

mainstream English, Black English must be recognized as a language. As recently as 2017

Smitherman was contributing to the Black language cause with the article “Raciolinguistics,

‘Miseducation,’ and Language Arts Teaching in the 21st Century.” With this article, she

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promotes Critical Language Awareness pedagogy (CLA), which she defines as an approach to

teaching language that “seeks to develop in students a critical consciousness about language,

power, and society” and “heighten their awareness of the stakes involved in language attitude

and policies of correctness and strives to impart knowledge about their own language, its social

and linguistic rules, its history and cultural connection” (10). Among those who also support this

pedagogy, she lists Samy Alim, April Baker-Bell, Shenika Hankerson, David Kirkland, Stacy

Perryman-Clark, and Vershawn Ashanti Young--all active 21st century scholars on the topics of

language and race.

Like Smitherman, Alim’s work on linguistic justice is powerful because it is

interdisciplinary. He comes at the education problem from the perspective of a sociolinguist.

This crossover is not common, as Alim notes, because the tendency is for linguists to view

educators as too involved and emotional, and educators consider linguists too high in their ivory

tower. It is through this combination of disciplines that Alim is able to argue for the same CLA

pedagogy that Smitherman promoted. Alim explains that CLA is one way educators can respond

usefully to the language and race conflicts. CLA teaches students about the sociolinguistic

circumstances surrounding their language. Students are encouraged to interrogate how those

conditions came to be and how they can be changed. It attempts to “make the invisible visible”

by bringing to light the interconnections between power, discrimination, and language (28). I

consider grammar instruction an extension of this pedagogy because the elements of written

grammars (e.g. syntax and punctuation) are literally visible and consequently a concrete way into

these discussions of language, power, and race.

In addition to the teacher-scholars named above, Karen Paley provided a valuable

snapshot of the kind of emotional and developmental harm white language supremacy can inflict

48

on students. At the 2001 Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Paley

presented the lecture “‘African Americans Have This Slang’: Grammar Dialect, and Racism.” In

this presentation she recounts how a Black student, Tanya, was forced to retake a teaching

practicum because she used Black English vernacular. In a writing seminar, Tanya wrote about

her experience student teaching at a school where she was the only Black teacher. The teacher,

Debby, who assigned this essay noticed that Tanya started off passionately at the beginning of

her first draft but then seemed to pull back from personal, emotional writing and instead shifted

to the style of an impersonal argumentative essay. When Debby and Tanya met in a one-on-one

conference to workshop her draft, Paley noticed that only after Debby revealed empathy for

Tanya’s isolating situation did Tanya share the circumstances surrounding her repeat of the

practicum, an experience I think Paley accurately describes as “humiliating” for Tanya (6). An

advisor told Tanya a week before her practicum ended that she needed to retake the class because

of her verbal communication. In other words, Tanya spoke Black English language and the

advisor identified this as poor grammar. This experience understandably made Tanya doubt her

abilities, making her quiet in subsequent classes and leading her to believe she needed help from

Debby on her grammar. During the remainder of the writing seminar, at Tanya’s request, Debby

indicated “corrections” to help Tanya standardize her grammar, but she told Tanya that she

would only discuss grammar during their conferences if Tanya had questions. Debby’s response

to Tanya’s concern for her grammar demonstrated the teacher’s willingness to give the help

requested but also prioritize content. According to Paley, this approach helped Tanya build self

confidence but also left Tanya unsatisfied with the hands-off grammar instruction she received

from Debby. Tanya is an example of students who realize it does not matter if their current

writing teacher does not prioritize standardized grammar, because they know society will judge

49

them based on their language and limit their social mobility. This is why it is so important that

writing teachers address grammar(s). If they ignore the topic of grammar, students like Tanya

leave the course still thinking they need to abide by white mainstream English rules and may

continue to carry negative views of themselves. To help students understand that they are not the

problem, that the system is flawed, writing teachers need to invite students into the critical

conversation and show them a new ideology where their language is valuable.

Although this case was about a future primary or secondary (unclear from the

presentation) school teacher, it demonstrates the benefits student teachers can reap from

reflection on their emotional histories with grammar. Tanya’s reflection, which she later shared

with her classmates in the writing seminar, inspired her to use her story to teach her classmates

how isolating it can be as a Black student in a predominantly white school. Furthermore, and

maybe more importantly, her reflection--along with Debby’s empathy and encouragement--gave

Tanya the confidence to share her valuable story. It is interesting that of all the possible

memories that could be inspired by an essay about student teaching, the assignment drew Tanya

back to that moment when her language was used against her. It was likely a fairly recent event

for her, so that might explain why it was on Tanya’s mind, but surely there were many

experiences while student teaching that Tanya might have dwelled on. I think it’s telling that

Tanya was haunted and inspired by an emotional encounter with grammar instruction. The

current study investigates this phenomenon further. I find that Tanya is far from alone in having

a moment of grammar instruction that informs her teaching, and that writing teachers in post-

secondary education also benefit from reflecting on and sharing their experiences of grammar

instruction.

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Also in 2001, Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson brought attention back to CCCC’s

original resolution regarding students’ language rights. They provide empirical data in support of

teaching Black language, offering a picture of what a new composition course might look like. In

this study, student participants took a course in Black language. At the end of the course, raters

assigned scores to the set of essays the students wrote in response to a prompt that asked them to

respond to a passage by Boreman that speaks on Black rhetorics. The graders were instructed not

to consider formal grammar while grading. The study showed a positive correlation where the

more Black language style and discourse a student used in the essay, the higher the score that

essay received. They argue that students were able to engage more critically overall in their

writing because they were able to relate to the prompt and writing style. Although the authors do

not address possible biases that might have influenced graders and this weakens their overall

argument, their work provided evidence that student writing is improved by education that

supports their home dialects.

Within scholarship on grammar and race, code switching became a topic of debate in the

2000s. Code switching was presented as a solution to the linguistic rights debate. Composition

and education scholars, however, have put forward powerful critiques of this perspective.

Vershawn Ashanti Young spoke out against code switching because it teaches students that

white mainstream English is for professional occasions and Black language is only for at home,

reinforcing the idea that white language is superior. Young believes, though, that code switching

as it is usually used is not how it was meant to be used. To return to its originally intended use,

Young urges teachers to use the term code meshing, a clearer description of what code switching

was intended to be. Code meshing is the blending of dialects simultaneously, not switching

dialects everytime one changes environment (114). Young makes it clear, though, that the

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education reform he desires doesn’t mean eliminating grammar instruction. He clarifies at the

end of his 2010 essay “Should Writers Use They Own Language?” that some instruction in

punctuation and standard English is needed, but teaching code meshing means helping people

use what they already know more rhetorically (116-117). Alice Lee, a past elementary school

teacher well-versed in language learning theories, picked up Young’s protest against code

switching. In 2017 she wrote “Why ‘Correcting’ African American Language Speakers is

Counterproductive.” In this article, she expresses concerns that code switching trains students not

to speak AAV in school. Frequent, contextual use, she says, is necessary if a child is to adopt

(and, I would add, retain) a new language (31).

The Kairotic Moment

In 2021, as I write this dissertation, issues of social justice are just as apparent, if not

more, in education than it was in past years. With the cruel discrimination international students

received on college campuses across America during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and

the tension between whitely institutions and frustrated Black citizens, college writing teachers

who may have previously excluded topics of racism from their classes now strive to understand

their topics and students in this newly admitted reality. R&C has, I am proud to say, responded

without hesitation to discuss what directions the field ought to grow in reaction to current events.

Nearly every workshop announcement, conference invitation, and call for proposals as of late

has had racism at the center of its theme.

It is especially important that writing teachers educate themselves on issues of linguistic

racism because so many students explore and build their identity through their writing. This

means that when a teacher comments on a student’s piece of writing, they comment on the

student’s identity. Kisha Porcher experienced this effect as a student when she was forced to

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drop her Black language in school. When she was later assigned to teach a college course on

grammar and usage for students in the education program, she was reminded of moments when

she was told (as a student and a teacher) that she had to leave her cultural language at the

classroom door, that she spoke “ghetto” and that was bad, that to be a good teacher she had to

code switch. Porcher describes how these experiences silenced her as a student and regretfully

led her to pass on the same traumas to her students. She finds it important that teachers realize

that teaching Black students does not mean fixing the students; it means the teachers

“unpacking” themselves (269). The unpacking I recommend is what I here call grammar-focused

reflection. As Porcher noticed about high school preservice teachers, I found that FYW teachers

who reflect on their transformative experiences with grammar and how those compare to their

students’ experiences tend to empathize with multilingual and multidialectal students and design

their practices with these students in mind. Porcher’s application of the phrase “archeology of the

self” is a great way of thinking about self reflection, and the exercises she shares help preservice

K-12 teachers interrogate their own understanding of and biases toward Black English. The

current study proposes that in addition to understanding and biases, FYW teachers’ past learning

experiences should also be excavated in preparation for teaching grammars through culturally

sustaining methods.

In the end, Porcher did teach the course on grammar and usage but she did it in a way that

centered Black English. One striking way she accomplished this was by refusing to code switch.

She presented lessons using Black language and gestures and forced students to consider their

reactions to this choice. Culturally-sustaining teaching practices are important for white students

and students of color because all of them are alert to the implicit messages delivered by racist,

monolingual teachings of language. Baker-Bell witnessed this condition in the Black students

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she worked with for the study her 2021 book Linguistic Justice is based on. Baker-Bell explains

the harm that is done to Black students’ identities when they are taught to edit out their non-

traditional speech patterns. She describes her students' responses when asked to depict who they

imagine being the writers of different dialect texts. Most of these students assigned Black speech

with negative characteristics such as trouble and White speech with positive attributes such as

respect. Baker-Bell interprets this finding as evidence that Black students internalize the views of

anti-Black linguistic racism (24). Once students have internalized such views, says Baker-Bell,

they may avoid language patterns that suggest they are group members as a way of distancing

themselves from any negative perceptions associated with a group. In other words, the students

may begin to distance themselves from their communities and, by extension, their identities.

Baker-Bell articulates the danger such distancing puts student identities in. She writes, "to

eradicate Black Language is to eradicate Black people’s ways of knowing, interpreting,

surviving, being, and resisting in the world" (25). In other words, to lose one’s language is to

lose oneself. Baker-Bell has primarily focused on students’ loss of identity. My study indicates

that the emotional trauma from losing one’s identity can extend far beyond being a student and

into being a teacher. To modify language education to be more equitable, Baker-Bell

recommends teaching literature that exposes students to a variety of Englishes (“Dismantling

Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in English Language Arts Classrooms”). (For suggested readings

that model dialect writing, see Whitney).

For equitable teaching practices, Asao Inoue has been a significant contributor in the

2000s, not just for the previously mentioned CCCC address but for his mounting scholarship in

both academic journals and his personal blog, Asao B. Inoue’s Infrequent Words. His work on

antiracist teaching practices and labor-based grading contracts continually force writing teachers

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to evaluate the ways their practices might reinforce racist frameworks. He published his latest

book, Above the Well: An Antiracist Literacy Argument from a Boy of Color, this past July. I

await the arrival of my copy, but in the meantime, Inoue offers open access to the introduction

and first two chapters. In the introduction, he promises readers a breaking of their expectations.

His narrative does not, he says, follow conventions like chronology. This, declares Inoue, is a

necessary step to break down white language supremacy (3). One of the topics Inoue attends to

most with his work is writing assessment. He summarizes his stance on writing assessment in his

poignantly titled essay “Grading Writing is a Racist Practice.” In explaining this seemingly brash

statement, he asks readers to imagine grading students based on the states their grandparents

originate from. Knowing full well that this scenario will seem ridiculous to any writing teacher,

he then shows how all writing standards come from the person or persons in power, while

language varieties come from a mix of location, needs, and “language tribe” (6). He delivers the

ugly truth that grade assignment in US schools was developed as a way of weeding out classes of

people who were said to be genetically-determined to be less intelligent (7-8). Inoue reveals how

grading to any single standard is essentially as ridiculous as grading based on the origin of

students’ grandparents. Instead of traditional assessment according to a single standard, Inoue

argues that teachers use an alternative grading practice. Inoue famously authored the book

Labor-Based Grading Contracts, so it is no surprise that he supports this practice most. Labor-

based grading contracts, says Inoue, creates a classroom atmosphere where “language norms of

all students and teachers get to be circulated in the classroom” (“Grading Writing” 10).

Of course, not everyone in the 2000s joined the movement for linguistic justice. It was

just 2009 that literary theorist Stanley Fish wrote “First, you must clear your mind of [the

following...]: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the

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dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style’”

(qtd. in Young 110). Fish is vocal about his disgust for racism, but he argues that it is only by

learning to abide by standard (white) English that people can avoid prejudice. In a response to

Fish, Young addresses this argument, termed Standard Language Ideology. To Fish’s argument,

Young retorts in proud AAV, “dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable

to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES” (110). Young goes on to describe the repercussions of such

thinking. Standard Language Ideology, he explains, says minority people will never hold high

ranking leadership positions in academia unless they perfect white mainstream English, but

white men (Young says “men” but perhaps we could also include white women?) can obtain

those positions despite ignorance of standardized English rules (113). As a PhD holding Black

man who has held numerous teaching positions at different levels of education, Young knows all

too well the identity crisis that can result from assimilating and trying to become “raceless.” In

confession style, he tells in “Your Average Nigga” how a college student who matched the

masculine Black man stereotype that Young was never able to achieve submitted to Young an

essay in which he used Black discourse. The student’s act forced Young to decide if he would

encourage this style or force the student to meet the white standards Young had learned to

perform in order to be a part of academia. With the first response, he would be choosing to admit

into academia the stereotype he hated. With the second response, he would have to reject his

cultural language. Young found himself caught in the impossible choice between being

“insufficiently black or insufficiently masculine” (703). His story reflects the ways Standard

Language Ideology can complicate identity for a student of color.

Currently, in 2021, one of the biggest challenges R&C is faced with is how to respect all

the cultural backgrounds our students bring to the composition classroom. Our approach to

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grammar instruction must respond to this need. The teacher-scholars above suggest a number of

multicultural sustaining practices that can be used to teach grammars:

● Use technology like Jamboard and Padlet to accommodate multiple literacies, not just

written ones (Porcher)

● Teach code meshing, not code switching (Young)

● Use home dialects as teachers (Porcher)

● Engage students in the issues surrounding language rights, grammar, and white linguistic

supremacy, AKA Critical Language Awareness pedagogy (Smitherman; Alim)

● Use different style literature (Whitney)

The work of so many educators, linguists, and composition theorists should be enough

evidence to prove the legitimacy of Black speech as its own language and open the door for other

Englishes to receive recognition. Some of the leading communities on language education have

recognized and responded to this evidence. These communities include CCCC, which in addition

to the “Students’ Rights” resolution of 1974 added the “Statement on White Language

Supremacy” and revised their statement on “Ebonics Training and Research” this year. They also

added a statement entitled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black

Linguistic Justice” and revised their statement on “Second Language Writing and Multilingual

Writers” in 2020. NCTE has also responded to the current issues of racism with a convention

theme of “Equity, Justice, and Antiracist Teaching” this year. Based on these high profile

organizations alone, it is clear that race and language is receiving growing attention as a topic

within language arts education. Adding to this evidence, the findings of this study show FYW

teachers seem to be trending toward rhetorical teachings of sentence-level concepts, rarely if ever

planning grammar instruction into their lessons. Based on interviews with a sample of these

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teachers, these choices seem to grow in part out of consideration for multilingual/multidialectal

students. As we draw closer to the mid-twenty-first century, we shall see what shape grammar

education takes on next. As history has shown, it is not likely it will go away quietly, but

activist-scholars in R&C continue to raise uncomfortable questions every writing teacher must

answer. As Dunn and Lindblom wrote in 2003, “if we teach standardized, handbook grammar as

if it is the only ‘correct’ grammar, we are teaching in cooperation with a discriminatory power

system, one that arbitrarily advocates some language-use conventions as inherently better than

others” (42). Grammar instruction lives at the nexus of many pedagogical topics, but one of the

most important for today is how to change understandings and instruction of grammar so it

encourages diversity and equality in the composition classroom.

Conclusion and Exigence

As I hope this literature review has shown, grammar instruction’s history has been

fraught with heated debates about pedagogy and linguistic rights. The swings from one

philosophy to the next have been dramatic, from the traditional correction of the 19th century

born out of linguistic insecurities, to Braddock et al.’s damning statement against grammar, to

“Students’ Rights to their Own Language” in the 70s, and now the turn to style which seems to

be the new-and-improved grammar. As Williams observed with wonder (“The Phenomenology

of Error” 152), something about the topic of grammar makes people jerk, makes them scoff,

makes them scratch with red pens, or just makes them squirm. Something about the topic has the

power to make men like Paul Robinson declare “The semicolon has become so hateful to me that

I feel almost morally compromised when I use it” (cited in C. Watson 649). To try and better

understand these reactions and learn ways of priming teachers to direct their emotions so that

productive discussions about grammars and grammar instruction can be held, I collected data on

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over a hundred FYW teachers. This data consists of information about the teachers’ practices,

experiences, and emotions, all in relation to grammar and grammar instruction. The next chapter

details my methods for collecting and analyzing this data.

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Figure 2.1 Timeline of the History of Grammar Instruction in the U.S.

1944 1940s 1962 1963 1930 1959-60 1957 1974 1978 1949 1977 1967

1820 1847 1874 1864 1840 1885 1870 1907

2003 2004 2020 2013 2008 1985

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Chapter Three: Methods and Methodology

This dissertation explores how FYW teachers’ emotional histories with grammar

instruction impact their current teaching of and reactions to the topic of grammar. Specifically,

it responds to the following research questions:

1. How might emotional resonances from past experiences as learners of grammar inform

FYW instructors’ teaching of grammar?

2. In what ways do FYW teachers consult their past encounters with grammar instruction

when attempting to shape productive and uplifting writing encounters for their students?

3. How do resonating emotions from past experiences affect FYW teachers’ motivation for

discussing grammar instruction?

To answer these questions, I relied on mixed methods, a combination of interviews and a

nation-wide survey of FYW teachers. The study design was reviewed and exempted by

Virginia Tech’s Institutional Review Board.

Methodology and Epistemology

My rationale for using mixed methods is based on Dana Ferris’ ethical research

practices. In “Responding to Student Writing: Teachers’ Philosophies and Practices,” she

highlights the ethical need to give teachers a voice when they are being researched, and she

uses the combination of survey and interviews to honor subject agency. Surveys allow for a

larger sampling from which she can make her own calculated analysis, while interviews

provide participants’ point of view in their own words. I chose to collect data through a

combination of interviews and surveys for similar reasons.

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Although I had personally encountered emotional reactions to the topic of grammar

from FYW teachers, I did not have a scope of how common these feelings were. As my first

step, therefore, I surveyed FYW teachers across the U.S. to gain a greater understanding of

teachers’ feelings toward grammar instruction, including types and degree of emotions. The

survey made participation quick and easy, better ensuring a large and varied sample. To trace

possible correlations and answer my first research question, I also surveyed respondents’

teaching practices. This combination of feedback gave me a large sample of empirical data. I

was able to then cross-compare responses to determine what, if any, correlations exist between

type or degree of emotions ATE and teachers’ current emotions toward grammar instruction or

between emotions ATE and teachers’ instructional practices. The survey also provided easily

quantifiable results. Although not the only measure of significance, quantitative data helps

indicate how broadly findings can be generalized.

I used interviews as my second method to collect more detailed accounts from a smaller

sample of teachers. The six teachers I interviewed do not represent all teachers, but their stories

and reflections provided examples of the emotional and pedagogical impact FYW teachers’

learning experiences can have. Like Ferris, I chose to collect this information through

interviews so participants could take part in describing and interpreting their personal stories.

Because my research questions concern internal processes like beliefs and emotions, I could

not thoroughly investigate through observations or another method predominantly used for

external data collection. By having participants discuss their experiences and emotions in their

own words, I was better able to understand participants’ point of views and thought processes,

helping me answer questions about their concerns and motivations.

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In addition to Ferris, Nancy Macdonald also played a key role in helping me

conceptualize my methods and methodology. In explaining her approach to field research, she

writes "Our values will always interweave, in some form or another, with our research

approach, and our personal qualities, quirks and preconceptions will always leave their imprint

upon the interactions and results of our fieldwork" (11). She goes on to explain that "Our

beliefs and values should not be viewed as shackles -- just as they can hold us back, so too can

they inspire and motivate us" (12). I similarly believe that when aware of its influences, a

researcher’s beliefs and traits can add value to research. Macdonald suggests the ethogenic

theory as a way of working with, as opposed to against, the subjectivity of human research

where humans are both researcher and the researched. This theory opposes positivist thinking

by viewing qualitative study participants as agents rather than subjects (12-13). Macdonald

explains that "The ethogenists wanted to reverse the belief that people are merely objects

responding to the push and pull of environmental forces (Harris & Secord, 1972), and treat

them, for scientific purposes, as if they were human beings (Harre & Secord, 1972) -- that is,

self directing agents" (13). In this study, my epistemology similarly values the human elements

of research, even with the biases and inconsistencies that these elements can bring to projects. I

believe that a researcher’s leanings can motivate valuable inquiry and that inconsistency

among human agents can inspire innovative solutions. As will be revealed, my work for this

study required, unexpectedly, that I learn the makings and motifs of self identification. This

investigation has strengthened my belief that research and education happen best when the

agents accept the involvement of their identities as an asset. As a way of honoring their

valuable involvement as agents and co-creators of meaning, I refer to the teachers in this study

as participants rather than subjects.

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Data Collection

The survey of FYW teachers’ emotions toward the topic of grammar and approaches to

teaching it was created using Virginia Tech's survey system, Qualtrics. The survey consisted of

sixteen multiple choice/short answer questions. Most of the multiple choice questions in the

survey offered an "other" option that allowed participants to enter a written response if they felt

none of the other options accurately represented their case. This gave subjects agency without

requiring that all subjects take the extra time to write in responses. The survey remained open for

seven days and received 113 responses. Four incomplete responses (more than two questions

unanswered) were removed, leaving 109 responses.

After closing the survey, the responses were reviewed and six respondents were selected

to participate in follow up interviews. These six respondents were selected from the six types of

responses to the survey question that asked participants to qualify the emotions they experienced

at the time of their memorable experience learning grammar. One respondent was randomly

selected from each group except for the group that answered “neither negative nor positive”

emotions at the time of the encounter. This group was small and did not include any willing

interviewees. Instead, I randomly selected a second interviewee from the category of “very

positive” emotions, since this was the largest group.

The day before each scheduled interview, interviewees were emailed a copy of the

interview questions with instructions to review the questions before the interview, if they chose.

This was done to provide transparency and predictability, transparency to build trust with the

participants and predictability to give participants time to remember their experiences and make

informed decisions about what they wished to share. Although I built into the study protection

for participants’ identities, I recognized that the stories they shared could be emotionally

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charged, and I wanted participants to have the option to reflect privately before the interview, so

they would not be caught off guard and either forget a detail they wished to share or reveal a

sentiment they preferred to keep private. At the start of each interview, I read a script reminding

interviewees of their right to stop the interview, move on to a new question, and/or request

removal from the study at any point during the interview. Subjects were interviewed individually

so that they would recall their own memorable experiences and not be influenced by others to

recall experiences that were not naturally memorable for them.

The six individual interviews lasted roughly sixty minutes each. Due to the 2020

pandemic, in-person interviews were not possible. Interviews were instead conducted over

Zoom. Both researchers and subjects have found Zoom to be an ideal setting to conduct

interviews because of its rapport-building capability, convenience, and usability (Mandy

Archibald et al. 3-4). I found these conditions to be true for this study. The virtual nature of the

interviews allowed participants the comfort of remaining in their personal space but also the

power to control what angle of that space was shown on screen. From what could be seen (some

individuals chose to use Zoom’s pre-set background features) the participants in this study all

gave their interviews from home spaces, mainly home offices. This choice was again likely due

to COVID-19 and the nation-wide move to online for the Fall 2020 term.

The interviews were audio recorded using Audacity and transcribed using Kultura’s

machine transcription service. After proofing the transcriptions, I created a second, cleaned-up

version of the transcripts with filler words/phrases such as “you know” and “right” and restarts

removed. Identifying names or content the interviewees requested be left out were also deleted.

Although not instructed to do so, the interview participants all chose to have their

cameras on during the interviews, so I did not lose the added advantage of seeing their

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expressions and body language like would happen had the interviews taken place over telephone.

Likewise, I interviewed with my camera on. I chose this option to show trust on my part, letting

participants into a screen-sized part of my home. I hoped that through facial expressions and

gestures I could build rapport and that this would earn me more in-depth responses. On the other

hand, the camera also meant that participants could see that I am a young, white, female, and in

some cases, these traits might have raised suspicions of white privilege and inexperience. This

did not, however, seem to be an issue, perhaps because four out of six of the interviewees went

by female pronouns (the other two went by male and plural pronouns, respectively) and all were

white.

Interview participants were emailed copies of the written analyses that involved

portions of their individual interviews. Subjects were allowed two weeks to review the written

analysis and suggest revisions if they felt that the analysis misinterpreted any portion of their

interview. One participant requested that their pronouns be changed to they/them, but no one

responded with concerns about the analysis.

Question Format and Design

Although there has been much scholarship discussing best practices for teaching

grammars (see Chapter 1 for a review of this literature), what we know about grammar

instruction as it is actually taught comes mainly from individual accounts given by teachers who

describe their classroom experiences as narrative evidence of success with certain teaching

practices (for examples of personal accounts see Nunan; Sams; and Vavra). No study to my

knowledge has surveyed a large sample of writing teachers to discover the current state of

grammar instruction in FYW. This is important information in order to assess the current state of

grammar education and understand how research has impacted practice. Then, we can better

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move forward with knowledge of where research needs to go next. For this reason, Section One

of the survey inquired about teaching and assessment practices. The questions in Section One of

the survey asked that respondents report the following information about their teaching of

grammar:

● Q1) How often do you schedule class time for grammar instruction in FYW?

● Q2a) In place of grammar, which of the following subjects do you teach in FYW in order

to draw students’ attention to sentence-level writing choices?

● Q2b) What modes of instruction do you use to teach grammar in FYW?

● Q3) In what contexts do your FYW students receive feedback on grammar?

● Q4) How do you have your students explicitly use knowledge of grammar in FYW?

● Q5) When do you use the term grammar with your FYW students?

● Q6) How do you assess grammar in student papers?

The survey questions were carefully written so that they would elicit information

regarding the key points of instructional practices, including amount of in-class attention, modes

and context of instruction, and assessment. Questions in this section, specifically Questions 2a, 4,

and 5, were designed to understand respondents’ definitions of grammar, including which

subtopics they believe are contained by the term grammar and the applications of grammar

knowledge. By discovering what the respondents believe is distinct from grammar, Question 2b

sheds light on respondents’ definitions of the term grammar and explores which, if any, related

terms teachers use when teaching sentence-level writing choices.

Yet another role played by the first section of the survey was to prepare respondents to

form connections between their instructional choices and their own memorable learning

moments. Following this priming, the second section of the survey asked respondents to describe

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a memorable experience they had while learning grammar. This section included the following

questions:

● Q7) Think back to a time when you had a memorable experience learning grammar.

Where did this experience take place?

● Q8) In the memorable experience you described in Question 7, who provided the

grammar instruction?

● Q9) What emotions did you feel at the time when you had this experience?

● Q10) Overall, how would you describe the emotions you named in Question 9?

● Q11) What emotions do you feel now as you recall this experience?

● Q12) Overall, how would you describe the emotions you named in Question 11?

● Q13) What emotions do you feel when you think about currently teaching grammar in

FYW?

● Q14) Overall, how would you describe the emotions you named in Question 13?

● Q15) In your opinion, to what extent has the memorable experience you have recalled in

this survey impacted your approaches to teaching grammar now (or your decision to

exclude it) in FYW?

In order to decipher which, if any, features correlate with particular practices or reactions to

grammar instruction, the second part of the survey collected details about the respondents’

memorable learning experiences: location of experience, relationship to the person who provided

the instruction in the experience, and emotions felt at the time of the experience (ATE).

Questions 7-10 inquire about these details. Questions 11 and 12 request information about the

respondents’ current feelings about the memorable experience, in order to assess how teachers’

emotions from memorable learning experiences changed over time, if at all. Questions 13 and 14

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ask respondents to describe their feelings about teaching grammar in FYW. This question was

included to gain a sense for how invested the teachers were in the topic of grammar and whether

they respond intensely to it. The term “memorable” was used in the survey questions so as not to

qualify the incident but instead allow the participants to express their feelings toward the

experience. A term such as “impactful” or “meaningful,” by contrast, might have led participants

to recount only experiences that they found productive in some way. Finally, Question 15 gave

respondents the opportunity to reflect for themselves on how much their memorable experience

has impacted their teaching of grammar in FYW. The final question of the survey asked

respondents to indicate if they were willing to participate in a follow up interview.

While developing survey and interview questions, I consulted John Flanagan’s Critical

Incident Technique (CIT) for acquiring detailed responses from participants about specific

incidents with grammar instruction. CIT is primarily an interview technique that invites

participants to recall specific moments when they encountered a problem. The value of studying

critical incidents, as explained by Elenore Long, is that they "can serve as a resource for

subsequent joint inquiry among people who otherwise have few occasions to take other people's

lived experiences into account. This is because critical incidents are primed to elicit and to

circulate people's experiential insights -- that is, their situated knowledge" (A Responsive

Rhetorical Art 78). Critical incidents, therefore, are specific moments that represent a type of

problem commonly shared. The unpacking of such incidents is thought to unveil experiential

knowledge that can help others. In order to glean an individual's learned experience, the

researcher must position the person in the context of that incident. CIT attempts to do this by

having participants recount detailed descriptions of specific incidents. To elicit such accounts,

the interviewer phrases questions rhetorically to help place participants in the specific time of

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that incident (Flower, Community Literacy and Rhetoric of Public Engagement, 238). For

example, I wrote Question 7 of the survey as a request for participants to recall "a time when..."

The mention of time encourages participants to describe a specific situation rather than answer in

abstract statements. Similarly, I wrote the opening interview question so that it asks specifically

“what was the environment and who was present” during the time of their memorable experience

learning grammar. As with the mention of time, requesting details about the experience helps

place the subject in the specific conditions of the memory. Epiphanic encounters, discussed in

my analysis in Chapter Five, are a specific type of critical incident that changes or expands the

experiencer’s self concept.

Interview questions used similar phrasing as the survey to remind participants of their

survey responses. Even with the rhetorical phrases mentioned above, I found that follow-up

questions were necessary to have interviewees relay details about their experiences. It is

possible that being academics who conduct their own research studies, the participants were

hyper-focused on offering only useful information and thought that specifics would be too

individualized and unhelpful to my research. After this issue occurred in the first two

interviews, the statement "The more specifics you can give, the better” was added to the initial

question for subsequent interviews. This addition better conveyed the information being sought

in their responses, while still leaving the question general enough so as not to lead participants

toward certain answers.

The interviews were semi-structured, with scripted questions but adjustable follow up

questions. Participants were asked to elaborate on the memorable experience they recalled in the

survey. Several interview questions asked subjects to reflect on their emotions toward grammar.

Several questions also provided subjects the opportunity to explain the reasons for their

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approaches to teaching grammar and consider how their experiences and resulting emotions

might contribute to their choices. See Appendix A for the scripted interview questions.

Participant Agency

Because I was interested in learning teachers’ thoughts about grammar instruction and

the impact their experiences have on their teaching and responses to the subject, participants

were asked to share how they feel their memorable experience impacts their teaching. This

practice of asking participants to reflect along with the researcher is in line with the ethogenic

approach. Ethogenists believe that although events influence people, people are also actors

who choose their responses to events. Furthermore, ethogenists believe that if people choose

their actions, they can also speak about those actions and rationale (Macdonald 14). I give

participants agency by allowing them the opportunity to reflect and share their analysis of their

cases, but I also draw additional connections that the participants did not originally form

themselves. Because the stories I collected were at times sensitive and I inserted my own

interpretations of them, I provided interview participants further agency by sending them each

copies of my written analysis of their data for them to review for misinterpretations. They were

given two weeks to review and request revisions.

Validity

Although researching emotions, especially those of distant memories, can be difficult

because historical accuracy cannot be reliably determined, I identify with Jennifer Sano-

Franchini’s perspective that first-hand accounts are reliable for learning what narrators

remember about events and the emotional attachments they formed to these moments (“It’s

Like Writing Yourself into a Codependent Relationship” 102). Despite the volatility of

emotions and memories, the proposed study is made possible by the fact that my research

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questions do not require that participants recall their past emotions or memories accurately. I

am interested in what emotions teachers currently recall, so whatever their answers, even if

time has altered them, they are accurate simply because the teachers themselves report them.

For the purpose of this study, therefore, whatever the participants remember feeling or report

currently feeling is considered accurate.

Recruitment Method

Subjects were recruited from WPA listserv, 4CEnglishEdSIG, The Two-Year College

Association listserv, and NextGen. These listservs have hundreds of subscribers including

composition teachers and graduate teaching assistants at two-year and four-year colleges from

across the U.S. The use of these listservs allowed indiscriminate recruitment of teachers

representing different ages, genders, experience levels, sexual orientations, and ethnicities. This

recruitment method was chosen so as to collect a representative pool of responses. A future study

might control one or more of these factors to investigate how a specific factor interacts with

emotional histories, but this goes beyond the scope of the current study. The recruitment email

requested that only FYW teachers respond. I chose to focus on this group because teachers of

FYW have unique access to non-English majors who are more likely to carry emotional histories

of grammar instruction than English majors who are often naturally gifted with linguistic

intelligence.

Participants for the interviews were selected from the survey respondents. The last

question of the survey asked respondents to indicate their voluntariness to take part in an

interview and to provide their email address if willing. Respondents who indicated willingness

to participate in an interview were divided into categories according to their response to the

survey question that asked respondents to qualify the emotions they experienced during the

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time of their memorable encounter with grammar instruction. Participants selected from six

options: very negative, somewhat negative, neither negative nor positive, somewhat positive,

very positive, and both negative and positive. After willing respondents were categorized, one

interviewee was randomly selected to represent each of the six emotions ATE. However, the

number of representatives in the category of “neither negative nor positive” emotions at the

time of the encounter was limited, and none of the volunteers in this category followed through

with the interview. To fill the sixth interview slot, I randomly selected a second interviewee

from the category of “very positive” emotions, since this was the largest group and therefore

warranted multiple representatives. In the end, interviews were conducted with one

representative from the “somewhat negative group,” one representative from the “very

negative” group, one representative from the “somewhat positive” group, one representative

from the “both negative and positive” group, and two representatives from the “very positive”

group. The number of interviews was limited due to time constraints, but because I was

interested in understanding subjects' individual experiences, a larger sample of interviews was

not necessary to gain what I hoped to learn.

Participants

The six interview participants consisted of 1 male and 5 females. All were roughly

between the ages of 26 and 40. Two of the interviewees were graduate students and teaching

assistants. One participant had graduated the previous year. The teachers taught at public and

private colleges from across the country, including Massachusetts, Kentucky, Virginia, Texas

and Ohio. In addition to teaching FYW, one interviewee directs a university Writing Center

and one is a WPA. Participants were not asked about their religious or ethnic backgrounds nor

their sexual orientation or other information that might identify them as members of minority

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groups. However, several of them noted characteristics that placed them in certain

oppressed/minority groups or identified them as non-traditional students. These cases include

one participant who identified as Jewish and another who reported having grown up in a small

farming community where few residents continue their education beyond high school. These

features are discussed more in Chapter Five.

A Note about Response Rate

I acknowledge that as a member of academia, I have access to certain resources that

facilitated my research. Specifically, I had access to academic listservs to obtain a large sample

of survey responses. Members of these listservs were especially responsive because many of

them are actively conducting research and completing dissertations. They, therefore,

understand the importance of their participation in research studies and were responsive to my

recruitment. It is possible that subjects were more willing to respond due to the fact that this

research is to satisfy a doctoral degree. Many of the listserv members would have completed

dissertation research or be in the midst of completing dissertation research and would therefore

relate to my need for participants and be more willing to respond.

An additional reason for the positive response rate may be attributed to the effects of

COVID-19. In her 2019 article, Mandy Archibald praises the many advantages of online

interviewing but with reservation, admitting that one disadvantage is that technology often

evolves too quickly for researchers to remain up-to-date on the continually changing systems (2).

Beyond just the researchers, participants’ familiarity with virtual conferencing systems is

perhaps an even greater concern, since participants might be reluctant to involve themselves in a

study if it requires that they interact with unfamiliar technology. In light of the 2020 pandemic

and widespread shift to virtual education, this hurdle was not as great a concern. Many teachers

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had already learned how to operate Zoom. It is possible, then, that this change contributed to

people's willingness to participate in this study’s Zoom interviews.

Privacy and Protection

To protect participants’ privacy, they were given a link that allowed them to respond to

the survey anonymously. Identifying information was only requested of survey respondents

who agreed to an interview. This information was limited to the person’s name and email. In

subsequent writings from this data, the names of interview participants were replaced with

pseudonyms. Furthermore, all other identifying information such as university or instructor

names were removed from the interview transcripts.

Data Analysis

When analyzing the data collected from the surveys, I was most interested in identifying

any correlations between the subjects’ experiences and their current grammar instructional

practices/responses. My analysis, therefore, went beyond counting responses. Using Microsoft

Excel, I reviewed the data and color-coded features within the data that appeared frequently,

were emotionally charged, noted concern for minority students, or described an aspect of their

memorable experience. Significant features were those that indicated extremes (e.g. "very

negative" selections) or appeared to be a pattern among many responses (e.g. "frustrated" as a

commonly listed emotion that respondents attached to their memorable experiences).

After color-coding the data, I compared features by studying responses one question at a

time and assessing the number of responses that matched a certain criteria. Most of these criterias

were developed based on responses to other survey questions. For example, I selected the survey

question "How often do you schedule class time to teach grammar in FYW?" For each possible

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response, I then counted how many of those responses also reported having "very positive"

emotions at the time of the memorable experience (ATE).

To analyze the qualitative data I collected from the interviews, I depended on Grounded

Theory Methods. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss first created the Grounded Theory Method

(GTM) in 1967 in response to what they observed to be a deficit in sociology. The field, claimed

Glaser and Strauss, had taken to the armchair, testing but not inventing theories (Urquhart, Ch. 2,

p. 2). In 1990, Strauss, joined by Juliet Corbin, published Basics of Qualitative Research. Glaser

felt that this text contradicted the GTM’s foundational principles. The book taught grounded

theorists that only one coding paradigm could be used to build theory. Glaser felt these

guidelines limited a researcher’s creativity and inhibited theory building too much. As a result of

this dispute, the GTM founders split ways and promoted different strands of the method.

GTM, specifically the strand promoted by Glaser, is ideal for this study because it

considers possible relationships beyond a simple causal one (Urquhart, Ch. 1, p. 6). It is possible,

for example, that concept A is an example of concept B, a subcategory of concept B, or an

influencer of concept B. Unlike experimental inquiry, I did not enter this study wanting to test

causality. I remained open to the likely possibility that the phenomenon I discovered would

indicate more complicated relationships. Therefore, I chose a method of analysis that would help

me view the data from multiple angles, even ones I had not anticipated.

Coding

Among grounded theory methods, one of the most commonly practiced is coding. Cathy

Urquhart defines coding as “the process of attaching concepts to data, for the purposes of

analysing that data” (Ch. 1, p. 3). In this dissertation, I use Urquhart’s term concept to refer to

the individual topics contained within the data and coded. With this form of coding, sometimes

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referred to as inductive coding, the codes and categories emerge out of the data. This is the form

of coding used in this study.

While praising coding’s uses, Michael Williams and Tami Moser write, “Coding

promotes thematic integration and organizational strength, enabling researchers to be reflective

and reflexive in joining the data in nuanced and intimate ways and employing the outcomes from

the coding process to create meaning” (54). Because I am investigating the relationship between

two things (i.e. emotional experiences and teachers’ practices/reactions to grammar) across

multiple cases, I selected a method of analysis that allowed me to home in on not just the data

but the spaces between the data, the data joints Williams and Moser identify as a key part of

coding.

I chose to code thematically since the interviewee’s idiosyncrasies meant they used

different language to convey similar ideas. The variations made in vivo coding impossible, since

I would have ended up with too many closely related codes to trace meaningful relationships

among them. For the same reason, I found it necessary to code manually. Manual coding helped

me identify similar concepts even when interviewees may have used different terms to express

them.

Codes and Procedures

I began my analysis by reading the transcripts of my first two interviews. As I read, I

highlighted sentences that expressed concepts related to my research questions. Based on the

content of these highlighted passages, I created the following open codes with which to sort the

passages:

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● Impact--passages that mention thoughts, practices, or beliefs directly caused or

definitively not caused by the teachers’ experiences. May include words like

impact or effect.

● Teaching Practices--passages that describe actions, activities, resources, and

accommodations used in the teacher’s FYW classes.

● Reasons for teaching practices--passages that express beliefs or desired results in

regards to grammar instruction. These passages sometimes include “I

think/want/feel” and appear where the teachers discuss their instructional

practices.

● Details about experiences--passages where teachers describe the events and

surroundings of the experience they reported in the survey.

● Emotions--words or phrases following I feel/felt or that include a word commonly

used to express a reactionary feeling.

● Background Info on Teacher--passages that provide information about the

teacher’s family, home life, character traits, culture, and education.

● Signs of Reflection--passages that include words like reflect, think back, or other

indicators of thinking on their past experience.

● Understanding of Grammar--passages where the teacher states what they think

grammar is/is like or what constitutes as grammar.

● Mention of Minority/Non-Traditional/Diversity--passages that show the teacher’s

consideration of minority or non-traditional students, including multilingual and

first-generation students.

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Coded passages consisted of single words, sentences, or several consecutive sentences. Here are

some examples of passages coded according to these specifications:

“In my graduate work, working and reading Matt Sounez’ work with grammar and international

students and learning that if it’s not explicit then grammar instruction is not going to improve, I

found that other research as telling me also that if the grammar instruction isn’t connected to

students’ writing there’s a lot less transfer. So that has perhaps also pushed me to do more of the

teaching into their writing.” (Reasons for teaching practices)

“I think that that practicum course and the emphasis I’ve had in some classes on trans-lingual

pedagogy has had a stronger impact than that experience.” (Impact)

“I actually remember being surprised.” (Emotions)

“The incident was six years ago. So it was Fall 2014. I guess that was my first semester in my

MA program.” (Details about experience)

“I think that decision is partly my understanding of how everyone tends to think of English

teachers being the robot, grammatical police or whatever. And so I’m kind of like, ‘Well I’m not

like that’ and I want to show them we can do other things.” (Reasons for teaching practices)

“The discourse around grammar with faculty both in the writing program and out makes me

angry, because it’s always ‘These kids can’t write,’ and ‘How dare they use they when they mean

he.’” (Emotions)

“It's English, math. Like the little puzzles and formulas of language.” (Understanding of

Grammar)

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“There might be students who would benefit from it [direct grammar instruction], but I don't

think it's the role of the writing instructor.” (Reasons for Practices)

“There’s a lot of talk when it comes to embracing other languages, other language varieties,

pushing against grammar instruction. But in practice I don’t see that happening.” (Mention of

Minority/Non-Traditional/Diversity)

“When I reflect back on it [the experience] I can see how much of an impact it has had on my

life” (Sign of Reflection)

“When I was younger, I was not a rule breaker by any means. I was very straight and narrow

and as schoolwork came I would do everything exactly like I was told and you told me

something it was black and white. (Background Info on Teacher)

“I teach into their writing” (Teaching Practices)

Upon noticing the popularity of these concepts in the first two interviews, I proceeded to

read the remaining interview transcripts for these concepts. I discovered that these concepts

appeared in nearly all the interviews. In the second phase of coding, selective coding, I

categorized the open codes as identity, since I was beginning to see a pattern in the way

identification played a significant role in all the teachers’ stories. Upon closer inspection, I

discovered that the statements coded identity described strikingly different but related

experiences of identification. Through the circular process of open and selective coding, I ended

up with a list of concepts that characterized the different experiences of identification displayed

in the teachers’ stories. Figure 3.1, below, organizes this list according to the relationships I

developed out of the final stage of coding, theoretical coding. The codes in this chart describe

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features of emotional experiences of grammar instruction, primarily focusing on the role of

identification. As observed, the category “negative attribute substracted” does not appear in the

visual. This category may be possible but did not appear in the interviews conducted for this

study and was therefore left out of the visual.

Figure 3.1 Codes

For example, using the coding scheme shown in Figure 3.1, the following passages would be

assigned these codes:

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“That’s a lot of why I went into education and then into academia.” [In reference to the

disjointed way she experienced English instruction and sees students experience it] (Ideology

Changed)

“I had enough of a sense of my identity as a writer outside of that class that it didn’t mess me up

or wreck me with those comments.” (Not Identifying)

“I think another part of that too, as I mentioned, having been identified as a gifted or an

accelerated student,, there was additional pressure from my classmates that I do better or the best

on all assignments. So when things get passed back … you just get handed your paper with your

score on it or another student would be passing them out they’d be like ‘Oh you got a C on this

grammar assignment.’” (Positive Attribute Subtracted)

For this part of the coding process, passages were analyzed within the context of the full

interview containing the passage. Necessary context often had to be collected from different

points in the interviews, so I referenced all available details to code the experiences. In other

words, I coded the teachers’ experiences based on a combination of key passages that could be

coded and a holistic reading of the interview.

In later rounds of coding, I also circled back to the passages I had coded as “emotions.”

Having noticed that the teachers frequently showed sensitivity and appreciation for issues of

discrimination and the experiences of minority or non-traditional students, I created for these

passages the subsidiary code “empathy.” I applied this code to any passages in which the

teachers indicated making pedagogical choices to make the learning experience more equitable

and uplifting for diverse students. An example of one such passage comes from Christie’s

interview:

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My students are always amazed when I tell them that they can use Spanish in their essays

and they’re like “I can? Are you sure?” and I’m like, “Yes! Especially if you’re sharing

dialog. Is your mom talking to you in English?” and they’re like, “No” and I’m like,

“Okay, Then give us your mom’s dialogue in Spanish and give us context clues for what

that means.”

Because Christie mentions allowances for students whose cultural language is Spanish, this

passage codes as “empathy.”

Limitations

Though informative, the results of this study are restricted by certain limitations. The

greatest of these limitations is the small sample size. As a whole, the survey received adequate

response, but because I made teaching first-year writing the only requirement for participation

instead of targeting specific emotions, the samples for “neither positive nor negative” emotions

ATE and “both positive and negative” ATE were small. Some exciting trends appeared in these

small samples, so it will be important for future research to determine whether correlations are

found when the sample size is increased.

The positive/negative framework of the study also presents certain limitations. The

terms positive and negative set up a false either/or scenario, so even though the survey offered

additional options with “both” and “neither” options and the qualifiers “very” and “somewhat,”

participants may have been influenced by the framework’s binary nature. It is possible, for

example, that some participants did not perceive their experience as positive or negative. They

may understand it in terms that are not clearly positive or negative, such as “formative” or

“routine.” In such cases, the respondent would have no choice but to select “neither negative

nor positive.” Since this answer might be perceived as a sort of non-answer because it does not

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actually qualify the emotions as requested, these participants might be persuaded to select one

of the other options. As a result, the number of negative/positive responses could have been

skewed.

Another limitation of this study is the lack of demographic information. The survey and

interview questions did not request information regarding race, class, religion, etc. Educational

experiences may follow certain demographic lines. A question I would like to explore with

future research is whether this determinism primes certain demographics to yield more

empathy and passion from their grammar experiences when they become writing teachers. An

additional result of not targeting any traits other than being a FYW teacher is that the study had

no safeguards against over or under representing certain groups. I have no way of knowing, for

example, if more respondents were closer to the beginning of their career than the end. This

could impact the results since these teachers would be reporting based on less experience.

Positionality

As previously explained, I recognize participants’ involvement in shaping the study’s

direction and meaning. I also acknowledge that as the researcher of this study, I influence

outcomes with the questions I ask, the reactions I give, the data I select, and the interpretations

I make. I acknowledge and appreciate my personal interest in the research as a past student

who experienced grammar instruction emotionally and a writing teacher who passionately

advocates for holistic teaching of composition and critical thinking alongside rhetorical

grammars and styles. I believe in the empowerment of grammars and the ways it can promote

exploration of the self. I hold this belief because my emotional encounters with traditional

English grammar taught me two conditions. First they taught me the self-loathing that can

result when one feels compelled to relinquish agency over her words because she feels

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inadequate to own them herself. Being told my grammar was wrong was for me more than a

comment on my knowledge; to me it was an assertion that some qualified people can write but

I was not one of these people. Self-consciously, I relinquished my creative liberties, too fearful

to put anything down on paper and ready to subject myself to any and all edits my professors

suggested. In a jarring fusion, this lesson combined with a series of writing experiences that

taught me how exploring expression allowed me to explore myself. In a serendipitous moment,

I read Edward Forster’s revelatory quote, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say,”

and I understood the importance of linguistic freedom. How could I ever know myself if I

limited my expression to the formulas I was given. How could I know what I think unless I

could craft what I wanted to say? My experiences and the beliefs formed from these

experiences unequivatively inform this project, its design, and my interpretations. Rather than

try to escape this influence, I embrace it as my initial inspiration and continued motivation.

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Chapter Four: Results

This study produced both qualitative and quantitative data, from which the following

results were gathered in response to the three questions that drove this research:

1. How might emotional resonances from past experiences as learners of grammar inform

FYW instructors’ teaching of grammar?

The statistical comparisons of survey responses did not give evidence that emotions ATE

or when recalling an experience determines how often FYW teachers schedule grammar

instruction or how they grade grammar. However, I identify cases of what I call epiphanic

encounters with grammar instruction (i.e. when instruction impacts the learner’s sense of

identity) in the experiences of four interviewed teachers, and their experiences seem to have

persuaded them to develop teaching practices that show sensitivity to multilingual/multidialectal

students.

Of the seven teachers who had “neither negative nor positive” emotions ATE, seventy-

one percent (5) now feel “somewhat negative” about teaching grammar, and none of them feel

positive to either degree or “both positive and negative” about it. The sample is small, but these

results may indicate that teachers who lack transformative experiences with grammar instruction

are influenced by some other source of information that mainly portrays grammar instruction

negatively, such as studies that report poor results from the use of traditional instructional

methods.

2. In what ways do FYW teachers consult their past encounters with grammar instruction

when attempting to shape productive and uplifting writing encounters for their students?

Overall, seventy-two percent (78 out of 109) of the teachers surveyed said their

experience has impacted their teaching of grammar. By comparing emotions ATE and impact of

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experience, it was determined that teachers who experienced “very negative” emotions ATE had

their teaching impacted by their experience a higher percentage (eighty-nine percent or 17 out of

a total of 19) of the time than any other emotion ATE. The interviews provided more information

about what ways their teaching was impacted. These are noted in this chapter after each retelling

of the experiences.

3. How do resonating emotions from past experiences affect FYW teachers’ motivation for

discussing grammar instruction?

Of the twenty-four teachers who reported having had “somewhat negative” emotions

ATE, 38% (9) now feel “neither negative nor positive” about teaching grammar in FYW,

possibly indicating that teachers who have had only somewhat negative experiences are limitedly

invested in the topic. The sample size is too small to tell for certain. It is possible that these

teachers think on and discuss grammar instruction without needing to emotionally connect with

the issues.

Three of the four interviewed teachers who had epiphanic encounters wrote notably long

responses (between 26 and 81 words each) to the survey question asking their feelings about

teaching grammar in FYW. Additionally, the responses of all four teachers with epiphanic

encounters included highly physical and intense language to describe their feelings. For example,

the teacher I have named Bethany wrote that she feels “pained” when she thinks about teaching

grammar, and Heather wrote she feels “exhausted.” Combined with the fact that all four teachers

noted in their interviews that they take active roles in reforming ideas about grammar(s), the

nature of their survey responses indicate that they are passionate about discussing grammar

instruction.

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These results are presented in greater detail in the remainder of this chapter and then

analyzed in Chapters Five and Six. In what follows in this chapter, I present the data collected

from the study survey, giving the distribution of participants' selections for each survey question

and the statistical comparisons of multiple questions. The second set of results come from the six

interviews. In the interviews, I asked participants to describe in more detail the memorable

experiences they reported on for the survey portion of the study. Using these details, I composed

retellings of the experiences in the second part of the chapter. Each narrative is followed by a

summary of the teachers’ current roles in education and teaching practices.

Survey Results

Separately, responses to the two sections of the study’s survey shed light on the

respondents’ experiences as learners and their understanding of grammar and grammar

instruction. However, to investigate relationships between experiences and current practices and

responses, it was necessary to compare the two sections’ data. The first part of this chapter

presents the survey results, beginning with statistical breakdowns of responses to each question,

followed by a comparative analysis of responses to pairs of questions.

Results of Survey Section One

The first question of the survey asked participants “How often do you schedule class time

for grammar instruction in FYW?” Respondents selected from the following options:

● not at all

● once as a refresher at the beginning of the course

● about once a month

● about once a week

● most class days

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● all class days

The most popular response, at fifty-one percent (56 out of 109), was “not at all.” “About once a

month” was selected second most often but at a much lower twenty-eight percent (30).

Following in frequency were “about once a week” at ten percent (11), “once, as a refresher at the

beginning of the course” at seven percent (8), and “most class days” at four percent (4). None of

the teachers reported scheduling grammar instruction all class days. Graph 4.1, below, visualizes

this distribution.

The respondents who answered “not at all” were then asked “In place of grammar, which

of the following subjects do you teach in FYW in order to draw students’ attention to sentence-

level writing choices?” Teachers could mark more than one answer. Seventy-one percent (40) of

the fifty-six teachers who indicated that they do not schedule class time to teach grammar

reported that they instead teach sentence-level writing choices through rhetoric, among other

topics. This response does not mean that the teachers who schedule grammar instruction do not

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teach rhetoric, but that almost half of the survey respondents consider rhetoric distinct from

grammar. What this distinction is, is not clear from the survey. The same is true of style; fifty-

five percent (31) of the fifty-six teachers who do not schedule class time for teaching grammar

instead teach style. The subject marked least often by teachers was punctuation, which was

selected by twenty percent (11) of the fifty-six teachers who do not schedule class time for

teaching grammar. The remaining options were selected at roughly the same percentage: usage at

thirty-nine percent (22), syntax at twenty-nine percent (16), mechanics at twenty-three percent

(13), sentence structure at thirty-six percent (20), and “other” at twenty-three percent (13). Graph

4.2, below, shows this breakdown.

The fifty-three participants who reported scheduling class time to teach grammar were

not asked about their teaching of alternative subjects. Instead, they were asked "What modes of

instruction do you use to teach grammar in FYW?" Respondents could select multiple answers.

Eighty-three percent (44) of the fifty-three participants to be shown this question reported using

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"contextualized feedback on student writing" to teach grammar. This mode of instruction is the

most widely used among the participants, by a margin of thirteen participants. The next most

common responses were “sentence revision work on the board” at fifty-eight percent (31) and

“hands-on activities” at fifty-seven percent (30). Forty-five percent (24) of the fifty-three

teachers who schedule class time for grammar instruction implement group work, forty-two

percent (22) use handouts, forty-two percent (22) make use of model texts, thirty-eight percent

(20) lecture, and thirty-four percent (18) use textbooks/online resources. Only fifteen percent (8)

use drills or worksheets. See Graph 4.3, below, for a full description of this distribution.

The next question asked respondents “In what contexts do your FYW students receive

feedback on grammar?” This question, and all following questions, were presented to all

respondents, both those who do schedule class time for teaching grammar and those who do not.

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Again, respondents could select multiple answers. The options consisted of the following

responses:

● office hours/conferences

● instructor written feedback

● peer workshops

● instructor-led workshops

● university writing center

● they do not receive feedback on grammar

● oral feedback in class

● audio/video recordings as oral feedback

● other

The most popular answers were “instructor written feedback” at eighty percent (87 ou of 109)

respondents, “office hours/conferences” at sixty-one percent (67), and “university writing center”

at fifty-eight percent (63). See Graph 4.4 for all responses to this question.

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Next, the survey asked respondents “How do you have your students explicitly use

knowledge of grammar in FYW?” Teachers could select more than one answer. The option most

frequently selected was “to revise writing to be more clear” at seventy-eight percent (85 out of

109). The option selected second most often was “to create rhetorical effects in their writing” at

sixty-four percent (70). These responses were followed in popularity by “to analyze texts for

their rhetorical effects” at fifty percent (55), “to vary sentences” at fifty percent (54), “to provide

terms with which to discuss writing” at thirty-two percent (35), “to identify errors” at thirty-one

percent (34), and “other” at eleven percent (12). See Table 4.1, below.

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Table 4.1 Number of Teachers Who Teach Applications for Grammar

Grammar Application Number of Teachers Who

Have Students Use

Application

Percentage of Teachers Out Of

Total 109 Who Have Students

Use Application3

To Identify Errors 34 31%

To Analyze Texts for

Their Rhetorical Effects

55 50%

To Provide Terms with

Which to Discuss Writing

35 32%

To Create Rhetorical

Effects in Their Writing

70 64%

To Revise Writing to be

More Clear

85 78%

To Vary Sentences 54 50%

Other 12 11%

The survey then asked respondents “When do you use the term grammar with your FYW

students?” Participants could select multiple answers. Options consisted of the following

responses:

● never - I avoid using this term

● when teaching conventions

● when teaching syntax

● when teaching punctuation

● in my rubric

● in my feedback on drafts

● in my feedback on final projects

3 Total equals greater than 100% because respondents could select more than one option.

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● never - this term does not come up in my lessons

● when students initiate use of the term

● when teaching rhetoric

● when teaching style

● other

The most commonly selected option was “when students initiate use of the term,” which fifty-

five percent (60 out of 109) respondents selected. Forty-three percent (47) of respondents

selected “when teaching conventions,” thirty-two percent (35) selected “in my feedback on

drafts,” twenty-eight percent (31) selected “when teaching punctuation,” twenty-six percent (28)

selected “in my rubric,” twenty-five percent (27) selected “when teaching syntax, twenty-three

percent (25) selected “when teaching rhetoric,” twenty-two percent (24) selected “in my

feedback on final projects,” and thirteen percent (14) selected “other.” Only fifteen percent (16)

of participants reported never using the term grammar, either because they avoid it (8) or

because it does not come up in their lessons (8). See Table 4.2, below, for this breakdown.

Table 4.2 Number of Teachers to Use Term Grammar

Occasions When Teacher

Use the Term Grammar

Number of Teachers Percentage of Teachers out of

Total 1094

When students initiate use

of the term

60 55%

When teaching

conventions

47 43%

In my feedback on drafts 35 32%

When teaching 31 28%

4 Percentages add up to more than 100% because respondents could select more than one option.

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punctuation

In my rubric 28 26%

When teaching syntax 27 25%

When teaching rhetoric 25 23%

In my feedback on final

projects

24 22%

Other 14 13%

Never-this term does not

come up in my lessons

8 7%

Never-I avoid using this

term

8 7%

The next survey question asked “How do you assess grammar in student papers?”

Respondents chose from the following options:

● I comment on grammar but it does not factor into the grade

● I comment on grammar and it factors slightly into the grade

● I do not comment on grammar and it does not factor into the grade

● I comment on grammar and it factors heavily into the grade

● other

The majority of participants answered that they comment on grammar and it factors slightly into

the grade. Forty-two percent (46 out of 109) respondents selected this answer. Respondents

answered in nearly equal proportion “I comment on grammar but it does not factor into the

grade” at twenty-one percent (23) and “other” at twenty-two percent (24). “I do not comment on

grammar and it does not factor into the grade” was selected by fifteen percent (16) of

respondents. None of the respondents reported factoring grammar heavily into grades. Graph 4.5,

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below, visualizes just how significant the difference is in the number of teachers who comment

on grammar and factor it slightly into the grade, in comparison to the other grading options.

Results of Survey Section Two

The second section of the survey inquired about respondents’ memorable experiences

learning grammar, beginning with the question “Where did this experience take place?” Several

participants selected more than one answer to this question, resulting in a total of 131 responses.

For nearly all the participants, their memorable experiences learning grammar occurred in

school, with thirty-nine percent (51 out of 131 responses) being “primary school,” two percent

(3) “middle school,” fifteen percent (20) “high school,” and thirty-two percent (42) “college.”

Three percent (4) of respondents answered “other.” Write-ins for “other” were graduate school

(2), French class (1), and “never” (1). Table 4.3, below, provides a breakdown of these numbers.

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The second question of this portion of the survey asked “Who provided the grammar

instruction?” For eighty-seven percent (95 out of 109) participants, a teacher gave the instruction

during the memorable experience. Only five percent (5) of participants reported a family member

as the one to have given the grammar instruction and one participant each selected “a friend” and

“a peer (not a friend).” Six percent (7) answered “other.” The write-ins for “other” included a

book (2), self (2), a student (1), “never [had a memorable experience]” (1), and one response that

referenced the respondent’s mother as well as catholic school. No one selected “elder (not a

family member)” or “boss/supervisor.” Graph 4.6, below, visualizes this high rate of experiences

that occurred in primary school and college.

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Graph 4.3 Relation of Instructor from Experience

Relation of Instructor from

Experience

Number of Teachers Percentage of Teachers out of

Total 109

Teacher 95 87%

Other 7 6%

Family member 5 5%

Friend 1 1%

Peer (not a friend) 1 1%

Elder (not related to you) 0 0%

Boss/supervisor 0 0%

The next two questions worked as a pair, the first asking respondents to describe their

emotions at the time of their experience (here on out referred to as ATE) and the second

requesting that respondents qualify those emotions. Of the 109 responses to the survey, thirty-

four percent (37) answered that they had “very positive” emotions at the time of the memorable

experience with grammar instruction, fifteen percent (16) had “somewhat positive,” 17 percent

(19) had “very negative,” twenty-two percent (24) had “somewhat negative,” five percent (6) had

“both negative and positive,” and six percent (7) had “neither negative nor positive.”

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A second pair of questions asked participants to describe and qualify their current

emotions when recalling their memorable experiences. Nine percent (10 out of 109) participants

reported currently having “very negative” emotions, twenty-four percent (26) have “somewhat

negative” emotions, eighteen percent (20) have “neither positive nor negative” emotions,

seventeen percent (18) have “somewhat positive” emotions, twenty-six percent (28) have “very

positive” emotions, and six percent (7) have “both negative and positive” emotions.

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The last pair of questions asked participants to describe and qualify their current

emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW. Seventeen percent (19 out of 109) respondents

answered that their feelings are “very negative,” twenty-five percent (27) selected “somewhat

negative,” twenty-two percent (24) selected “neither negative nor positive,” fifteen percent (16)

selected “somewhat positive,” thirteen percent (14) selected “very positive,” and eight percent

(9) selected “both negative and positive.”

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Last, respondents answered “In your opinion, to what extent has the memorable

experience you have recalled in this survey impacted your approaches to teaching grammar now

(or your decision to exclude it) in FYW?” Overall, thirty-seven percent (40 out of 109)

respondents selected “a little,” thirty-five percent (38) selected “a lot,” twenty-two percent (24)

selected “not at all,”and seven percent (7) selected “not sure.” The majority of respondents (72

percent) believe that their experience impacts their teaching of grammar in FYW to some degree

(either a little or a lot). Furthermore, more than half (sixty-one percent) of the fifty-six

respondents who do not schedule grammar instruction indicated that their experience impacts

their teaching to some degree: thirty-six percent (20) of these fifty-six respondents selected “a

little,” twenty-five percent (14) selected “a lot,” and nine percent (5) selected “not sure.” Thirty

percent (17) of the fifty-six teachers who do not schedule class time for teaching grammar

indicated an impact level of "not at all."

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Response Comparisons

In order to answer how emotional experiences learning grammar impact teachers’

teaching of and responses to grammars and grammar instruction, my analysis had to compare

responses across survey questions. For an initial analysis, I studied the respondents as groups

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based on the type of emotions they reported experiencing at the time of their memorable

experience. I was then able to study each group’s responses to the questions about their teaching

of grammar to discover if any correlations exist.

In total, thirty-four percent (37 out of 109) respondents reported having “very positive”

emotions ATE. Fifteen percent (16) had “somewhat positive” emotions, seventeen percent (19)

had “very negative” emotions, twenty-two percent (24) had “somewhat negative” emotions, six

percent (7) had “neither negative nor positive” emotions, and six percent (6) had “both negative

and positive” emotions. It is possible that the highest response rate was “very positive”

emotional experiences because the questionnaire surveyed writing teachers. It reasons that those

who teach writing are typically individuals who are gifted in language arts and more often

experienced enjoyment and encouragement in relation to language arts generally and, by

extension, traditional grammar. Although this disproportion makes some of the data difficult to

draw conclusions from, much can be learned about the majority, positive-emotion respondents,

and some promising points for further analysis can be drawn from the less broadly represented

emotion groups. The remainder of this chapter presents the empirical data that offers insight into

my investigation. These insights are then explored more in-depth alongside qualitative data in

Chapters 5 and 6. The survey resulted in a number of additional findings that fell beyond the

scope of this project. Those are presented in the final chapter and briefly discussed as

opportunities for future research.

No correlation was found between type of emotional experience and how much class

time teachers devote to teaching grammar, as shown in Table 4.6 below. For all six categories of

emotions ATE, the majority of teachers indicated scheduling class time for grammar instruction

“not at all” (selected most in each category) or “once per month” (selected second most often in

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each category). This data indicates that regardless of emotional histories related to learning

grammar, most writing teachers do not schedule direct grammar instruction in FYW. It is

important to note that this report does not necessarily mean that these teachers do not address the

topic of grammar in class. It is possible that they incorporate grammar instruction impromptu,

when students ask questions or class discussions offer opportunities to connect grammar

instruction with a broader issue such as literacy or rhetoric.

Table 4.6 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Frequency of Scheduled Grammar

Instruction

Frequency of Scheduled Grammar Instruction

Emotion

ATE

Not at

All

Once Once

per

Month

Once

per

Week

Most

Days

All Days Total Number of

Teachers with

Emotion ATE

Very Neg. 47% (9) 0% 32% (6) 16% (3) 5% (1) 0% 19

Somewhat

Neg.

42% (10) 13% (3) 33% (8) 8% (2) 4% (1) 0% 24

Very Pos. 51% (19) 8% (3) 22% (8) 14% (5) 5% (2) 0% 37

Somewhat

Pos.

50% (8) 13% (2) 31% (5) 6% (1) 0% 0% 16

Neither 71% (5) 0% 29% (2) 0% 0% 0% 7

Both 83% (5) 0% 17% (1) 0% 0% 0% 6

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What is worth noting about the responses shown in the table above is that the highest

number of respondents to answer “not at all” came from teachers who had experienced “very

positive” emotions ATE. Of the fifty-six respondents to answer “not at all,” thirty-four percent

(19) of them had very positive experiences. One possible explanation for this distribution is that

teachers who experienced grammar instruction very positively might feel unjustly privileged.

Many of these respondents indicated concerns for minority students or fears that their feedback

on grammar(s) might be read by students as indication that they do not belong in academia or are

somehow deficient. These feelings were noted by some teachers in response to the question

about their current feelings toward teaching grammar in FYW. These findings suggest teachers

with positive experiences seem to have as much if not more empathy than teachers with other

emotions ATE for students’ anxiety about formal grammar.

It is important to note, however, a second possible explanation for the above numbers.

Slightly more “very positive” respondents than any other emotional experience might have

reported that they do not schedule class time for grammar instruction simply because overall,

more survey respondents reported positive experiences. More participants with positive

experiences means a greater likelihood that some of those respondents will also report not

scheduling class time to teach grammar. Because so many fewer participants reported

experiencing “both negative and positive” ATE, for example, there is less chance that many

respondents in that category will report not scheduling class time for teaching grammar. To

check for this possible cause, it was necessary to determine the percentage of respondents from

each group (based on emotions ATE) that answered “not at all” to the question inquiring about

the time scheduled for grammar instruction. This calculation shows that roughly half of the

respondents with very positive emotions ATE reported not scheduling any class time for

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grammar instruction. The same proved true of respondents who experienced very negative,

somewhat negative, and somewhat positive experiences. Interestingly, though, nearly all of the

respondents in the “neither positive nor negative” and “both positive and negative” groups

reported not scheduling class time for grammar instruction. See Table 4.10, below. These groups

consisted of a very small number of respondents, though, so a follow up study would need to

sample a larger number of participants in these categories in order to know whether a correlation

truly exists between these early emotions and teachers’ current choice to avoid scheduling class

time for grammar instruction in FYW.

Table 4.7 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Scheduling Grammar Instruction “Not at

All”

Emotion (ATE) Number of Teachers in

Emotion Group to

Report “Not at All”

Percentage of Teachers

in Emotion Group to

Report “Not at All”

Total Number of

Teachers in Emotion

(ATE) Group

Very Neg. 9 47% 19

Somewhat Neg. 10 42% 24

Very Pos. 19 51% 37

Somewhat Pos. 8 50% 16

Neither 5 71% 7

Both 5 83% 6

In addition to teaching practices, I also wondered if any correlations might exist between

location of experience and emotions ATE. The first pattern you might notice in Table 4.8, below,

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is that positive experiences were more common when the experience took place in primary or

high school than if they took place in middle school or college. This is a worthwhile finding and

is discussed more in the final chapter with suggestions for future research. Another pattern,

though, is relevant to the current project. This pattern appears for the few respondents whose

experiences took place outside of school. Although these respondents only amount to eleven

respondents total, these eleven show surprising consistency. All five respondents whose

experiences took place at home or at a relative’s residence indicated that their emotions ATE

were negative. Out of the six respondents whose experience took place at work or a friend’s

residence, five of them indicated that their emotions ATE were positive, with only one indicating

the emotions as both negative and positive. See Table 4.8 below. One possible explanation for

this pattern might be that these respondents had an expectation that home and family is a safe

space where their cultural and familial identities are nurtured. If the members of this safe space

unexpectedly scolded the respondents’ language, it may have felt as though their primary

community saw their identity unfit or divergent from that of the family’s, making the experience

more likely a negative one. In contrast, it is possible that because the workplace and friends’

homes are considered more social spaces, the respondents viewed instruction from friends and

coworkers as feedback on their presentation of the self rather than a critique of the actual self.

This explanation becomes more meaningful in the next chapter where I discuss the language-

identity relationship as it relates to this dissertation.

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Table 4.8 Comparison of Negative (to Either Degree) or Positive (to Either Degree)

Emotions ATE with Location of Experience

Emotion ATE

Location Very/Somewhat

Negative

Very/Somewhat

Positive

Total Number of Teachers

with Experience in Location

Primary 35% (18) 55% (28) 51

Middle 67% (2) 33% (1) 3

High school 40% (8) 50% (10) 20

College 48% (20) 43% (18) 42

Friend’s 0% 100% (1) 1

Relative’s 100% (2) 0% 2

Home 100% (3) 0% 3

Work place 0% 80% (4) 5

Other 25% (1) 25% (1) 4

The majority of respondents who do not schedule grammar instruction indicated that they

instead teach rhetoric, and slightly more than half instead teach style. This finding is evidence

that teachers who do not schedule class time to teach grammar do address related topics but do

so in the context of rhetoric and writing. This practice is consistent with what scholarship now

recommends (see Chapter One). It is apparent, therefore, that FYW teachers have been

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influenced by changing views on grammar instruction. It is not clear whether this influence has

come from teacher training, familiarity with current literature, or someplace else. It is also

possible that the type of institution or program outcomes influence the teachers’ decisions. There

was no significant correlation between this choice and the type of emotional experience. See

Graphs 4.12 and 4.13 below.

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Among those teachers who do schedule class time for grammar instruction, only fifteen

percent (8 out of 53) use drills and worksheets in their instruction. This low frequency suggests

that teachers are aware of the research that shows such approaches are ineffective for teaching

standardized grammar. It is not clear from this data whether that awareness comes from

scholarship, training, or experience. Those who reported using drills and worksheets described

their emotions at the time of their memorable experience as “somewhat negative,” “very

negative,” or “very positive.” No one with “somewhat positive,” “both negative and positive,” or

“neither negative nor positive” experiences reported using drills and worksheets. The small

number of participants in this group makes this finding unreliable and no significant correlation

can be drawn between the decision to use drills and worksheets and the teacher’s type of

emotional experience.

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Among the nineteen teachers who experienced "very negative" emotions at the time of

their experience, seventy-nine percent (15) of them reported their emotions about the experience

remaining negative currently, with six retaining "very negative" emotions and nine reporting a

slight decrease to "somewhat negative." Two participants reported a change from very negative

to "neither negative nor positive," and two reported a change to "both negative and positive."

Only one of the participants who originally experienced “very negative” emotions at the time of

their experience reported their current emotions being positive to either degree. This finding

supports that writing teachers whose experience learning grammar caused them “very negative”

emotions rarely change to having positive ones toward the experience later in life. See Table 4.7

and Graph 4.15, below.

Table 4.9 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Current Emotions

Very Neg.

ATE

Somewhat

Neg. ATE

Very Pos.

ATE

Somewhat

Pos. ATE

Neither

ATE

Both

ATE

Very Neg. (now) 32% (6) 4% (1) 3% (1) 13% (2) 0% 0%

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Somewhat Neg.

(now) 42% (8) 54% (13) 3% (1) 0% 29% (2) 33% (2)

Very Pos. (now) 0% 13% (3) 57% (21) 25% (4) 0% 0%

Somewhat Pos.

(now)

5% (1) 0% 27% (10) 38% (6) 14% (1) 0%

Neither (now) 11%(2 ) 25% (6) 8% (3) 25% (4) 57% (4) 17% (1)

Both (now) 11% (2) 4% (1) 1 (3%) 0% 0% 50% (3)

Total Number of

Teachers with

Emotion ATE

19 24 37 16 7 6

An unexpected complication to the finding noted above is that while respondents who

reported very negative emotions at the time of their memorable experience did not report that

these feelings turned positive, some of them did report currently having positive emotions toward

teaching grammar (see Table 4.8 below). These findings may seem contradictory until reading

the write-in answers to the question that asked teachers what emotions they experience when

they think about teaching grammar in FYW. In response to this question, several teachers

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mention being concerned about their students’ experiences, or feeling “optimistic.” One

explanation, therefore, for why some teachers with very negative past experiences as learners of

grammar do not change their feelings about their experiences but do go on to feel positive

emotions about teaching the topic is that in the latter situation they have more agency with which

to create for their students more positive experiences with grammar(s) than the ones they

encountered as students. This is, admittedly, a small percentage. Only sixteen percent (3) of the

nineteen respondents with very negative emotional experiences reported now having “very

positive” feelings toward teaching grammar. The fact, however, that such a dramatic difference

from very negative experiences to very positive feelings about teaching are even possible is a

worthwhile finding.

Comparing the rest of the emotions ATE to respondents’ current feelings about teaching

grammar reveals even more curiosities. Thirty-two percent (17) of the fifty-three teachers who

experienced somewhat or very positive emotions ATE now hold somewhat or very positive

feelings about teaching grammar in FYW. Forty-two percent (22) of the fifty-three teachers who

had somewhat or very positive emotions at the time of their memorable experience reported now

having somewhat or very negative emotions toward teaching grammar. Seventeen percent (9) of

these teachers who changed from positive to negative, swung the full spectrum from very

positive emotions toward their memorable experience to very negative emotions toward teaching

grammar. Many of the teachers who changed feelings so dramatically described their current

feelings about teaching grammar as "conflicted" or "concerned" or referred to power

issues/racism. Others reported intense feelings such as "pained," "exasperation," "dread," and

"trapped." On the other hand, a total of forty-three teachers had either somewhat or very negative

emotions ATE, and twenty-six percent (11) of them reported now feeling somewhat or very

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positive feelings about teaching grammar. Therefore, the change from positive emotional

experiences to negative feelings about teaching grammar occurred more frequently than the

change from negative emotional experiences to positive feelings toward teaching grammar.

Additionally, the highest number of respondents with very negative emotions toward teaching

grammar and the highest number of respondents with very positive emotions toward teaching

grammar both come from the group of respondents who experienced very positive emotions

ATE. These higher numbers are likely due to the overall higher number of respondents with very

positive experiences. It is also possible that these respondents had a tendency to answer in

extremes, creating a greater chance of developing a pattern. This data is nonetheless valuable

since it indicates that positive feelings when learning grammar does not predict whether a teacher

will hold very positive or very negative feelings toward teaching the topic. Similarly, the other

emotional experiences did not correlate with a single predictable emotion toward teaching

grammar, as seen in Table 4.8, below.

Table 4.10 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Emotions Toward Teaching Grammar

Very

Neg.

(ATE)

Somewhat

Neg.

(ATE)

Very

Pos.

(ATE)

Somewhat

Pos.

(ATE)

Neither (ATE) Both

(ATE)

Very Neg.

(Toward

Teaching)

21% (4) 8% (2) 24% (9) 13% (2) 14% (1) 17% (1)

Somewhat

Neg. (Toward

Teaching)

21% (4) 25% (6) 16% (6) 31% (5) 71% (5) 17% (1)

Very Pos.

(Toward

Teaching)

16% (3) 4% (1) 22% (8) 6% (1) 0% 17% (1)

Somewhat

Pos. (Toward

11% (2) 21% (5) 11% (4) 25% (4) 0% 17% (1)

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Teaching)

Neither

(Toward

Teaching)

16% (3) 38% (9) 19% (7) 25% (4) 14% (1) 0%

Both (Toward

Teaching)

16% (3) 4% (1) 8% (3) 0% 0% 33% (2)

Total Number

of Teachers

with Emotion

ATE

19 24 37 16 7 6

Although no correlation was found between emotional experience learning grammar and

current feelings toward teaching grammar, it is still possible that the type of emotional

experience determines how much that experience goes on to impact the teacher’s understanding

of grammars and grammar instruction. Overall, seventy-two percent (78) of 109 respondents

reported that their emotional experience with grammar instruction has affected their approaches

to teaching the topic. Breaking down this number, eighty-nine percent (17) of the nineteen

respondents who reported their memorable experiences caused very negative emotions ATE

reported that their current understanding of grammar instruction has been impacted by this

experience: five "a little" and twelve "a lot" (see Table 4.9 below). Among the thirty-seven

participants who reported having "very positive" emotions in response to their memorable

experience, sixty-eight percent (25) said their teaching of grammar has been impacted by the

experience (see Table 4.10 below). Therefore, twenty-one percent more of the respondents with

very negative emotional experiences have had their teaching of grammar impacted by their

experience than those whose experience brought them very positive emotions ATE. This data

suggests that very negative experiences with grammar instruction impact English teachers'

teaching of grammar more often than very positive experiences do.

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Table 4.11 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Degree of Experience’s Impact

Emotions ATE

Impact Very Neg. Somewhat

Neg.

Very Pos. Somewhat

Pos.

Neither Both

Not at All 5% (1) 17% (4) 27% (10) 38% (6) 29% (2) 17% (1)

A Little 26% (5) 33% (8) 35% (13) 50% (8) 43% (3) 50% (3)

A Lot 63% (12) 42% (10) 32% (12) 13% (2) 14% (1) 17% (1)

Not Sure 5% (1) 8% (2) 5% (2) 0% 14% (1) 17% (1)

Total Number

of Teachers

with Emotion

ATE

19 24 37 16 7 6

Table 4.12 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Impact of Experience

Number of

Teachers

impacted (to

Either Degree)

Percent of teachers

who reported

impact (to Either

Degree)

Total Number

of Teachers

with Emotion

ATE

Very Neg. ATE 17 89% 19

Somewhat Neg.

ATE

18 75% 24

Very Pos. ATE 25 68% 37

Somewhat Pos.

ATE

10 63% 16

Neither ATE 4 57% 7

Both ATE 4 67% 6

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*Numbers in the pie graph above represent the number of teachers.

While discussing the data collected about degree of impact, it is also worth noting that of

the seven respondents who answered that they were not sure how much their memorable

experience impacts their understanding of grammar instruction, five were among those who

reported that they do not schedule grammar instruction as a part of class time. This finding,

though limited by the small sample size, warrants attention since it proved consistent for almost

the whole sample. It would be interesting to learn why these respondents felt unsure about the

degree of impact their experiences had on their teaching. One possibility is that these teachers

might not have received formal grammar instruction, making their memorable experiences

limited and causing them to overlook the topic in their own courses. Another possible

explanation is that these respondents might not give their experiences much thought. If this is the

case, it is possible that reflection on past experiences increases the likelihood that FYW teachers

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will plan grammar instruction into their lessons. This finding could be valuable if their

incorporation of grammar instruction also affords for the controversies and complexities of the

topic.

Interview Results

Because the interviews were reflective with the teachers’ narrations often backtracking or

sidenoting, I have chosen to retell their stories in my own words, with respect to the tone and

content of their original tellings and their final approval of the retellings. Particularly meaningful

statements are quoted directly. Pseudonyms have been used for all interview participants.

Trevor’s Story

Trevor attended middle school in a small farming community in the Midwest. His

grandmother had been a teacher, his mother had been a teacher, and now he was an “accelerated”

student. He was the kind of kid who wrote for fun. His friends and teachers all knew him as the

gifted student, the smart student. This had been his identity, but then he began to struggle in

English class. The arbitrary rules of traditional English grammar just wouldn’t stick for him, and

his teachers began making remarks like “You are so good at math. Why is this so hard for you?”

His classmates, not intending harm, would playfully tease his low grades, asking him “What’s

wrong with you?” In his interview, Trevor shared a recent observation he made while revisiting

some of his early writings: “I found a lot of those things that I had been writing in first and

second grade. Which for a first or second grader they were kind of cute things, but that wasn't

something that continued.” Trevor says he internalized his teachers’ comments. It’s likely this

event was memorable for him because he felt that his identity was in question during this

experience. His friends and teachers were, after all, questioning his intelligence and devotion to

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school. He must have wondered if he was the smart kid after all. As a result, he quit the thing he

thought he was bad at; he quit writing.

At the time of his interview in 2020, Trevor was a graduate student studying rhetoric and

composition and teaching First Year Writing. Although he says that his early experience with

traditional grammar created very negative emotions for him at the time, he now feels somewhat

positive feelings when he remembers it. So what happened? In his interview, Trevor recounted

how his grandmother led a “grammar bootcamp” for him. He says while his parents were away

for a period, he stayed with his grandmother. Each day she would sit him at the kitchen table

with worksheets. Trevor smiled as he shared how his grandmother still asks him about his

grammar. His feelings about that time changed, he says, because when he thinks back to that

event, he recognizes the care his grandmother took in helping him and the bond he formed with

her over that experience.

When asked what emotions he feels when thinking about currently teaching grammar in

FYW, he answered:

I feel excited to empower students and honor their unique voices and syntax while giving

them tools to navigate alternative contexts where the rules of grammar may be more

rigid. I feel a little anxiety about how to convey these differences between contexts

because I want students to have access to their voice and to use it to communicate while

understanding that outside of my classroom, grammar is often used as a gatekeeping tool

to oppress and marginalize those same voices.

Despite his own negative encounter, Trevor recognizes that knowledge is power and sees

potential for his students to experience grammar positively. He also recognizes the importance of

including students in discussions about literacy and linguistic oppression. Although Trevor’s

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experience did not involve linguistic racism, it did give Trevor a similar experience where his

language was used against him as evidence that something was “wrong” with him. Now, he says

whenever he comments on students’ grammar, especially if they are international or speak a non-

traditional dialect, he makes sure to focus his comments on the how and why rather than giving

the impression that the students’ language is simply wrong. In this way, he hopes to teach

students the intentionality behind grammar rules and “value their voices and dialects.”

Heather’s Story

Heather’s memorable experience took place in a 300-level linguistics course, The

Structure of the English Language. A native of New York, Heather’s parents both spoke with

Brooklyn accents. Ain’t frequently appeared in her father’s vocabulary, even though her mother

scolded him for using the non-traditional form, telling him “You shouldn’t say that.” Heather had

been placed in honors programs at a very early age. She came from a White, middle class family,

and her father held a Master’s degree. Every indication was that she would thrive in the school

environment. This was not her experience. School was a source of tension for her and her

cousins, she says. Her family didn’t align with the institutional ideals. They were leftist and anti-

establishment. Still, she managed to graduate high school at sixteen and went on to major in

Creative Writing. It was during this time that she encountered, for the first time, a teacher who

specifically taught formal grammar, the “puzzles and formulas of language” as Heather

described it. Although Heather found the content interesting, she found forms of non-traditional

English noticeably absent from the course content. The focus was solely on “academic, White,

mainstream English.” Heather also felt a disconnect between the different aspects of writing. It

was never made clear to her how literature, linguistics, and composition intersect. Nonetheless,

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Heather credits this class for showing her that there is more to English studies than reading

literature.

Heather says she chose to study teaching because she felt her professors didn’t teach and

she only wanted to teach if she knew what that should look like. The professor of the linguistics

class from Heather’s experience went on to recommend her to tutor at the university Writing

Center. Today, she directs her university’s Writing Center and does work on anti-racist

composition and race rhetoric. Despite the diversity at her school, which is “99% non-White,”

she finds it a full-time job pushing back on traditional views of grammar. She says instructors

frequently ask her if the Writing Center can help their students with grammar. She actively fights

the idea that writing is about formal grammar and teaches her tutors ways of approaching

grammar rhetorically. She says she and her coworker “are building on a foundation of assets-

based, student-center, non-traditional English, explicitly anti-racist approaches.” Even though

she carries on with these efforts, the continual need for them causes her emotions that she

considers “very negative.” In the survey, she described her feelings as “Irritated. Exhausted

about how often I have to tell instructors that they’re not linguists or grammar teachers and that

their whitely notions of correctness are racist.” When teaching first-year composition, she does

not prioritize grammar. She teaches students about the history of literacy education and

encourages them to question conventions.

Bethany’s Story

Bethany’s memorable experience took place in Middle school. Her English teacher

implemented a daily exercise she called DOE, daily oral edits. Each day, before taking their

seats, every student picked up the worksheet set out for the day. They would collaborate to find

the right answers, testing their speed and skills. Like Heather, Bethany also saw grammar

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exercises as word puzzles. She experienced instant gratification from solving them, even more so

under the time constraint. The work was not graded, and students were never penalized for

incorrect answers. There was always another opportunity to get it right next time. It would,

afterall, always be there again the next day, dependable and predictable as always.

In grad school, Bethany learned that grammar drills were not effective for most students.

She says she only has happy memories about her experience, and her feelings remain very

positive thinking back to it. As a WPA, though, she now feels “disquieted, frustrated, pained,”

emotions she qualifies as “very negative.” On the first day of class, Bethany talks to students

about their expectations for the class and explains that the goal of the class will not be to produce

perfect prose. Instead of editing skills, she focuses her lessons around the idea of reader-centered

prose and talks to students about making choices based on their readers’ needs.

Carrie’s Story

Carrie’s experience occurred later in life. They5 were in the first semester of their MA,

simultaneously taking a practicum in teaching college composition and a literature class. In their

practicum, they were learning about a trans-lingual approach to teaching and scrutinizing their

definition of “errors.” In their literature class, they had just received comments on one of their

first graduate school essays. They described the aura of the class as everyone read the feedback.

The tone, they said, was a unanimous “Whoa, that’s really, that’s it?” The students had expected

the feedback to address content and higher-order concerns, but the comments exclusively

concerned mechanics. According to Carrie, a lot of graduate students had their confidence

shaken by this experience. Carrie, however, experienced only somewhat negative emotions

during this event. They explained, “I saw myself as a competent writer who was doing the work

5 Plural pronouns have been used for Carrie, in accordance with their request.

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in grad school. So I had enough of a sense of my identity as a writer outside of that class that

it didn't mess me up or wreck me with those comments.”

Carrie is currently a PhD candidate. Their emotions from that experience remain

somewhat negative and they feel “distaste” at the thought of teaching grammar in FYW. Instead,

they say their focus is on teaching students the rhetoric behind conventions. On the first day of

class, they ask students to write down any particularly positive or negative experiences they have

had with writing. Carrie says part of the reason she avoids teaching grammar is because she

realizes many students have had negative experiences with writing and they do not want to add

to those.

Christie’s Story

It was the 90s and it was Catholic school, where classmates were rarely new and the

teachers seemed very old. So when a young, curly haired English teacher with innovative ideas

and a hockey trainer for a husband entered the school, it left an impression on Christie. Christie’s

memorable experience occurred over the course of third grade. During her interview, Christie

explained that her memorable experience involved a death. The death of the word “alot.” Christie

along with her classmates laid the overused and often misspelled word to rest in a tiny coffin and

sent it off with kind words and a prayer. Thanks to this new and exciting teacher, third grade was

full of creative activities such as this. Workbook exercises were supplemented with creative

prompts like “Tell the story of Thanksgiving from the perspective of the turkey” and wild ideas

like journaling backwards. In these writing assignments, the teacher did not focus on formal

grammar. Instead, she complimented the kids’ efforts. Despite the creative approach to writing,

third grade also consisted of a lot of workbooks, says Christie. She didn’t mind these, though. In

her interview, Christie described her home life as a child as “rough.” She found relief from this

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environment in the rules and routines of school, specifically in English class. It was while

solving grammar problems that she had the power to correct what was “wrong.”

Christie now teaches at a public university where roughly 60% of the student population

is made up of first generation college students, and the majority of students identify as Latinx.

Because many of her students speak multiple languages, she encourages them to incorporate

other languages in their writing, especially when writing dialogue. She doubts that her early

grammar instruction transferred to her writing much and says that even though she felt somewhat

positive during the experience, she would not teach her FYW students in the same way her third

grade teacher did. Instead, she encourages her students to challenge writing conventions and only

addresses grammar issues in individual conferences. She says her students are often concerned

about their grammar, so she works with them individually in order to help them gain confidence

in their writing. Even then, she focuses on patterns. In class, she addresses lower order concerns

occasionally but as “conventions.” She does not teach conventions as hard and fast rules. She

encourages students to challenge conventions. A reading that helps her do this is VerShawn

Ashanti Young’s essay “Should Writers Use They Own English?” which is written in AAV.

Lisa’s Story

Lisa grew up with a mother who taught high school English with the traditional stance on

grammar: follow grammar rules because they are the rules. Lisa had always felt that something

didn’t make sense about this perspective. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she majored in

English Education, attending a small liberal arts college where classes could be as small as ten

students and teachers often taught multiple subjects. This was the case when in her Junior year

Lisa took Language Structure and Usage, a 300-level linguistics course. She started the course

confident in her grasp of “the rules,” but once she found herself deep in the material, she

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discovered with fascination that she had only been exposed to a small part of language. It was in

this class that she first learned grammar as it is defined by linguists, where every language and

dialect is governed by its own grammar, different but equally legitimate systems of rules that

native speakers naturally learn. This revelation stayed with Lisa, inspiring a Senior research

paper on African American English in the classroom and eventually leading to her dissertation

topic.

Reflecting on her experience, Lisa shared, “I don't know what my life would have been

like if I didn't take that class [hesitantly], but I imagine I wouldn't be studying the things that I do

now. I may not even be teaching ... I definitely wouldn't be teaching the way that I do.” She is

now a professor of R&C and carries a mix of negative and positive emotions about teaching

grammar in FYW. Although her feelings may be conflicted, she says she feels “passion and

excitement about teaching students the difference between prescriptive and descriptive

grammar.” One of the activities she uses in class is an exercise where students try to change

sentences by using a pattern from a non-traditional English such as Appalachian English. This

exercise, says Lisa, generates conversations about how difficult it is to follow patterns that are

not innate to you and what this means when everyone has to learn one standard English.

Conclusions

In the end, no correlation was found between type of emotional experience and how much class

time teachers devote to teaching grammar. Similarly, no correlation was found between type of

emotional experience and a single predictable emotion toward teaching grammar. The empirical

data did, however, result in several interesting conclusions:

● The majority of teachers, regardless of the emotions felt at the time of their memorable

experience, do not schedule class time for grammar instruction: forty-seven percent of

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respondents with very negative emotions, forty-two percent of those with somewhat

negative, fifty-one percent with very positive, fifty percent with somewhat positive,

seventy-one percent with neither negative nor positive, and eighty-three percent with both

negative and positive.

● Most of the teachers’ memorable grammar instruction took place in primary school, high

school, or college. Thirty-nine percent (51 out of 131) took place in “primary school,”

fifteen percent (20) in “high school,” and thirty-two percent (42) in “college.”

● All five of the teachers who had memorable experiences at home or a relative’s residence

had negative emotions ATE, and five out of six of the teachers whose experiences took

place at work or a friend’s residence experienced positive emotions ATE.

● Of the fifty-six teachers who indicated that they do not schedule class time in FYW to

teach grammar, seventy-one percent (40) reported that they instead teach sentence-level

writing choices through rhetoric and fifty-five percent (31) through style.

● Only fifteen percent (8 out of 53) of respondents who schedule class time for grammar

use drills or worksheets to teach grammar in FYW.

● The change from positive emotional experiences to negative feelings about teaching

grammar occurred more often than a change from negative emotional experiences to

positive feelings toward teaching grammar. Twenty-four percent (9 out of 37) of

respondents who had “very positive” emotions ATE now hold “very negative” emotions

toward teaching grammar in FYW, while sixteen percent (3) of the nineteen respondents

with “very negative” emotions ATE now have “very positive” feelings toward teaching

grammar.

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● Very negative experiences with grammar instruction impact respondents' teaching of

grammar more often than very positive experiences do. Eighty-nine percent (17) of the

nineteen respondents who reported their memorable experiences caused very negative

emotions ATE reported that their current teaching of grammar has been impacted by this

experience, while sixty-eight percent (25 out of 37) of those whose experiences caused

“very positive” emotions have been impacted.

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Chapter Five: Empathy and Epiphanic Encounters with

Grammar Instruction

People often use grammars, alongside other dialectal features, to place themselves or

others in line with or apart from other groups. This language-identity relationship motivated the

CCCC Executive Committee consisting of Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Richard

Lloyd-Jones, Melvin Butler, and others to write a resolution for “Students’ Rights to Their own

Language.” April Baker-Bell and Asao Inoue represent just two scholars actively building

awareness for how important linguistic freedom is to identity formation.

This chapter analyzes the six FYW teachers’ experiences described in Chapter Four.

From these teachers’ stories, I found that grammar instruction interacted with their self identities

at the time of the experience and later impacted the way they engage with grammar instruction as

teachers. Depending on the interaction, elements of the person’s self identity were weakened due

to self doubt or expanded through exposure to new beliefs and ambitions. The degree and type of

interaction seem to play a significant role in determining the impact those experiences have on

the teachers’ current understanding of grammar instruction, specifically as it affects marginalized

students.

Some of these teachers’ experiences were positive, others negative, but what is consistent

in all the teachers’ stories is a persistent feeling that their instruction was in some way flawed,

evident in their critiques of the instruction, as they recall it. This sense seems to later contribute

to the teachers’ realization that traditional grammar instruction takes away a degree of agency

that ought to belong to the individual. At some point, the teachers who experienced their

identities changed by grammar instruction, negatively or positively, came to fault the method

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with which they were taught traditional grammar for the way it discriminately assigned traits and

abilities to writers. It is evident from the interviews that in addition to program training and

abundant literature on the topic of grammar instruction, emotional experiences with grammar

instruction required that the interviewees, students at the time, evaluate their understanding of

writing, the topic of grammar, and themselves. In cases where these evaluations changed the way

the individuals visualized or valued themselves at the time, the teachers usually voiced concern

in their interviews about multilingual/multidialectal students. Some of the issues raised by these

teachers are language rights, students’ unequal education, the unfair advantage native speakers

have when classwork is graded for standardized English grammar, and the misconception that

one correct English exists. Some of the teachers attributed this empathy to their experiences.

Before turning to the teachers’ stories, the role of empathy in FYW will be explored.

Empathy in First-Year Writing

Writing classrooms are often environments where teachers who identify with the

“academic type” mentor students who may feel that their identities do not fit the typical

academic mold. In her article about literacy narrative tropes, Rosanne Carlo reminds educators

that for some, the academic success story involves loss: “Often, academics are hesitant to discuss

the emotional costs of education, of what it means to ‘invent the university’ for those who come

from working and lower-middle-class backgrounds. For some of our students, education creates

distance from family and creates emotions of displacement, of loss.” First generation students,

students of rural communities, and students of immigrant families are just a few who may feel

displaced by academia. Even those who feel secure with the college student identity may

struggle to feel community with their scholarly instructors who hold advanced degrees and have

devoted their lives to academia. Mina Shaughnessy and David Bartholomea have described

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classroom power dynamics that can make it difficult for students to relate to teachers or other

“model” writers. And yet, even though they may seem distanced from their students, many First-

Year Writing teachers deeply empathize with their students’ emotions. What was apparent in all

my interviews is that the teachers are attuned to the fears that run through their classrooms, the

traumas that their students bring with them from twelve years of standardized correction, and the

despair their students can feel trying to uphold their cultural, familial, and social identities while

developing an academic identity. I propose that grammar is an emotional topic for many because

it so often accompanies moments that disrupt a person’s identity and that writing teachers who

have had epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction grow elevated sensitivity for the ways

traditional grammar instruction can isolate or even devastate certain student identities. My

findings indicate that experiences of grammar instruction that cause intense emotions (either very

negative or very positive) are typically epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. The

teachers with these experiences display empathy for students who bring negative memories of

grammar instruction to FYW.

Empathy out of Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction

The six interviews studied here reveal that FYW teachers’ memorable experiences

learning grammar often involve epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. The interviewed

teachers who reported having such experiences showed several distinct trends. All four teachers

who experienced epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction reported having at the time of

the experience felt elevated emotions. Three of these teachers reported emotions at the extreme

ends of the spectrum: one qualified their emotions as “very negative” and two as “very positive.”

The fourth teacher reported feeling “both negative and positive” emotions ATE. It is unknown to

what degree these negative and positive emotions are, but the mixed emotions show a level of

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complexity, likely indicating a deeper sensitivity than average. Although the survey had

participants name their specific emotions, having them also report their emotions with a

positive/negative framework helped me avoid confusing semantics and let the teachers state the

quality of their emotions. I was interested in the “quality” of their emotions because I needed a

way to generalize the wide variety of emotions participants named. Otherwise, the variety would

be too great to draw any generalizable conclusions. Even more important than the observations

about intensity of emotion is that teachers with epiphanic encounters indicated, either directly or

indirectly, that their heightened emotions at the time of the encounter aids their current

sensitivity to the way traditional grammar instruction can marginalize certain students. The

following analysis studies four types of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction:

● those from the subtraction of a positive attribute, when instruction causes the

individual to doubt their intelligence or some other commonly valued trait;

● those from the addition of a positive attribute, when instruction increases the

individual’s confidence in their intelligence or other commonly valued trait;

● those from the addition of a negative attribute, when instruction suggests to the

individual that they are lazy or other unbecoming trait; and

● those from a change to trajectory, when instruction causes the individual to

change their views of literacy, causing them to change lifestyle or career.

The final two stories represent cases where there were no changes to identity. In analyzing each

case, I describe the manner that the grammar instruction interacted with the teacher’s (a student

at the time) self identity. I then present the ways in which these emotions facilitate the teacher’s

current ability to empathize with students who doubt their place in academia, even in cases

where the teacher may have experienced only success in academia.

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Positive Attribute Subtracted

Trevor’s case demonstrates the impact that can result from an instructional experience

that subtracts a positive attribute from a student’s self identity. He had grown accustomed to

academic success early in life but suddenly found formal grammar did not come easily to him.

Although he may not have heard his mother and grandmother state as much, Trevor likely knew

the value these matriarchs of the family placed on education, since they had both dedicated their

lives to teaching. It is, therefore, understandable if Trevor mistakenly thought his family

measured a person’s worth based on his academic success and why he felt so much pressure to

identify with this trait. When offered the opportunity to add any comments to his interview,

Trevor said that he wanted to emphasize the “pressure” he felt due to his desire to please his

family. It seems that Trevor’s experience directly caused him to question a trait that had up until

that point defined him and connected him to multiple family generations.

Another important part of Trevor’s story is that he learned to consider himself a minority

in higher education. Although a caucasian male, Trevor grew up in a rural community in the

Midwest, where many high school teachers expect their students to take farming-related or

manufacturing jobs rather than attend college. Trevor estimated that about half of his high school

class never left town, and many of those students who did leave town for college returned once

they graduated. Trevor is, therefore, a minority in his hometown because he pursued a graduate

degree. Though he did not explicitly state as much, his origins likely help him relate with

students who worry that they do not belong in academia.

The combination of Trevor’s shaming experience with grammar instruction and the low

expectations his teachers generally held for his and his classmates’ futures seem to contribute to

his current empathy for non-traditional students. In his interview, he expressed concern for

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international students and students from Appalachian or inner city regions. He directly connects

this sensitivity to his negative experience with traditional grammar:

That negative experience of being told that I was getting something wrong or that feeling

that I was in some way deficient for not being able to understand why something was

wrong is a big part of the reason why I do try to couch everything in context and to

explain not just that this is an error in this kind of rhetorical situation but "Here is why,

here's what the genre expectation is, here's what your reader would be interpreting from

this kind of construction."... so that there's less likely an opportunity for a writer to see

that as a reflection on themselves and more as an opportunity for the revision process to

take over. Part of that is always framing it as a learning opportunity too, something that

can be improved, something that is adjustable, fixable, learnable, trying to pull away

from those potential negative reactions or feelings towards getting something wrong,

especially for international students who are struggling or non-traditional students who

are in college who already often feel displaced or have those emotions towards writing or

higher ed. in general that they feel like they don't belong and that getting negative

comments on grammar is just another indication that this isn't something that they're

ready for or isn't something that they can do because they don't have that level of training

that has led to other students getting it right the first time around.

This passage shows Trevor’s awareness for how his epiphanic encounter with grammar

instruction progressed to his current concerns for marginalized students and his instructional

choices.

An additional element of Trevor’s story worth discussing is his grandmother’s

intervention. When asked why he thought his emotions about his experience are now somewhat

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positive when they were originally very negative, Trevor answered that the change was because

now when he thinks about that event, he recognizes the care his grandmother took in helping him

and the bond he formed with her over that experience. Even in his interview, Trevor smiled when

he shared how his grandmother still asks him about his grammar. Possibly, this dramatic change

in emotions may be explained by the family ties already noted. If Trevor felt very negative

emotions at the time of his experience partly because the instruction caused him to doubt his

intelligence--an attribute that connected him to his family--it makes sense that these emotions

could be changed by one of those family members reasserting her bond with him.

Positive Attribute Added

Bethany’s experience is an example of an instructional experience that modified a

student’s identity by building onto an existing one. The classwork Bethany described built her

confidence as a proficient puzzle-solver and pride as an expert editor. An important piece of

Bethany’s memory was that the DOE (daily oral exercises) given to her by her English teacher

were never graded. She noted this detail two different times as she recalled the experience. One

of these times she explained, “I also don't have any strong recollection that this was ‘You got it

wrong’ and that was a problem. It was very much like ‘Okay, let's do it and everyone get it. If

you didn't get it right. Now here's your chance to correct your errors and then move on.’"

According to Bethany’s recollection, the activity was less about correction and more about the

teacher showing confidence in the students. When asked why she thought this was a positive

experience for her, she said part of her positive feelings were due to the way the teacher

presented the activity as “‘Edit these sentences as a way of demonstrating expertise. You can do

this, you know this, you know how to fix this, you know the professional tools to indicate

[errors].’" These “professional tools” were editing marks, which according to Bethany made the

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students feel like “we were being professional or somehow expert in a field.” The repeated “you

know” and “you can” in Bethany’s description reflects her recollection of feeling as though the

teacher believed in her expertise. In this way, the instruction helped create in Bethany an identity

as a skillful editor. Furthermore, she shared during the interview that she always enjoyed

puzzles, so solving grammar problems was satisfying for her. Unlike Trevor, Bethany’s

experience of grammar instruction affirmed her belief that she was skilled at solving linguistic

equations.

Bethany’s experience did not challenge her identity. It did, however, interact with her

sense of self by building in her further confidence in her beliefs about her skills and value and as

a result creating a positive self image. This interaction resulted in very positive feelings for

Bethany both at the time and now when recalling the experience. Despite this experience being

an affirming one, it still resulted in Bethany having an acute awareness for the many ways her

students have negatively experienced grammar instruction. During her interview, she malented

the frequency at which she hears teachers complain about students’ grammar. She voiced her

concern that such teachers are not supporting students’ rights to their own language. While

reflecting on her own positive experience of grammar instruction, she confessed that she feels

sorrow over her inability to create similar experiences for her own students. She shows a holistic

perspective in the reasons she gives for not trying to imitate the instructional practices that

brought her pleasure as a student: “A lot of my students are there to get the credential and then

get the degree. They're not there for a liberal arts education and the life of the mind like I

was, so designing a class that would make me happy is not going to necessarily make the

majority of my students happy.” Bethany’s story is an example of how a person can experience

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positive epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and still have empathy for students

whose identities are not supported by traditional grammar instruction.

Negative Attribute Added

Heather’s story offers a particularly interesting case. On the surface, her experience does

not seem terribly transformative or traumatic, since it did not directly attribute any negative traits

to her identity or subtract from it any traits that she highly valued. Heather’s comments,

however, suggest that the experience interacted indirectly with her self identity by adding a

negative attribute to her heritage language. In her interview, Heather shared that her parents

spoke with Brooklyn accents and used non-traditional English in the home. Growing up in New

York, she likely heard a variety of dialects and accents in her neighborhood and school

communities on a daily basis. It only makes sense, then, that she would have mixed feelings

about a college course that excluded non-traditional grammar from discussions. It is possible that

because she herself had a standard English accent and was adept enough at performing language

standards that she was able to graduate high school at sixteen, her personal identity was not

directly threatened by a class that focused solely on academic English. The experience did,

however, trouble her at least to the point that at the time, she questioned the instruction, and even

now she responds to her past concerns in the way she teaches grammar. Heather’s mixed

emotions, which she reported as both negative and positive ATE and currently. These emotions

might be mixed and long-lasting because the experience indirectly threatened the community that

formed Heather’s identity. She could personally code switch to match the edited, traditional

English valued by the instruction of the class, but she likely still identified at some level with the

heritage dialect that was devalued by the instruction. In describing her feelings at the time of the

experience, Heather told how she was confused by the way the course isolated language from its

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usage in real life. As a student, she seemed able to treat this artificial representation of language

as an object of study but recognized that it was unnatural in the same way that a man-made

material might be created and studied in a lab. She offered her own rationale for why the

experience did not impact her more: “... that [experience] specifically didn't impact me more

because a) I don't remember a lot of it and b) because it wasn't really connected to any sort of

socio linguistic framing or rhetorical framing really. So it was just kind of in a vacuum.” This

disconnect may be why Heather was able to experience some positive emotions at the time and

while thinking back to the memory. As long as this instruction remained disconnected from

reality, it also did not threaten her personal reality. Nonetheless, the class content suggested that

the Englishes spoken in her home communities and by her parental unit were not legitimate

enough to make it into a college course on the “structure of the English language.” In this way,

the experience indirectly applied illegitimacy to her heritage and a part of her self identity.

Not surprisingly, this experience, along with her background, helps Heather relate to her

students who are almost all students of color. Her passion for linguistic justice manifests in her

work on topics of anti-racist composition and race rhetoric. She has actively used her position as

director of her school’s Writing Center to shift focus away from traditional grammar, both in the

way she promotes the Center’s work and the way she trains her tutors. In both services, she

prioritizes higher order concerns and only discusses the topic of grammar in terms of rhetoric.

Even though her experience of grammar instruction included some positive emotions, she

viewed and continues to view the experience as a flawed approach to teaching language, since it

unnaturally isolated language and reinforced the idea that English has one grammar.

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Change of Trajectory

Lisa’s memorable encounter with grammar did not seem to threaten her character or

make a statement about the legitimacy of her heritage. It did, however, challenge the ideas she

had been raised with and in this way created an epiphanic experience. Her mother’s traditional

perspective had been Lisa’s only experience of grammar until she learned the difference between

prescriptive and descriptive grammars. The idea that multiple grammars could exist changed her

life trajectory. In our interview, she explained that this experience is “not a moment that

happened in the past that I've never even thought of since then. It is something that has stuck

with me and its memory has probably evolved since then to make it even more positive because I

see how much impact it has had on who I am as a person, who I am as a teacher, and what I do as

a researcher.” Like Trevor, she showed awareness for the way this experience changed her

thinking and, as a consequence, shaped her sense of self.

Unlike Trevor whose experience challenged his identity as a high achieving student,

Lisa’s experience expanded her knowledge in a way that supported her professional endeavors.

What is especially exciting about her case is that in addition to Bethany’s case, Lisa’s story

shows us another instance where an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction produced

positive feelings. In the survey, she described her feelings at the time of this experience as very

positive. Nonetheless, like the teachers with negative experiences of epiphanic encounters with

grammar instruction, Lisa expressed concern for students who are marginalized by traditional

grammar instruction. While describing in her survey response her feelings toward teaching

grammar in FYW, she wrote “frustration at the continued punishment of writers who deploy

language use that does not align with standard (i.e., White) written English.” In response to the

survey question that asked how she has her students use grammar, she filled in the “other” option

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that she teaches her students to use grammar similarly to the way she was taught to use it in her

transformative experience: as “evidence that all languages are rule-governed.” Lisa’s story is an

example of how a student’s trajectory can be changed by a positive experience of grammar

instruction but still result in a teacher who empathizes with students’ negative experiences of

grammar instruction.

Unaffected

Out of the six interviewed teachers, Carrie and Christie were the only ones to indicate on

the survey that they feel only somewhat negative about teaching grammar. Compared to other

descriptions, their survey responses that described their emotions about teaching grammar

display less passion. In response to the survey question What emotions do you feel when thinking

about currently teaching grammar in FYW Carrie wrote “Distaste, I think. I try to teach students

to see conventions as rhetorical and negotiable. I feel like focusing on ‘grammar’6 doesn't help

me do that.” Compared to descriptors used by the other interviewed teachers which used words

like “pained” and “exhausted,” Carrie’s feelings of “distaste” seem mild. Christie’s description

of her emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW is similarly reserved. She uses most of her

response to explain that her school teaches grammar in a support course instead of FYW. The

other four teachers, who experienced epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction, all

reported feeling either very negative or both negative and positive about teaching grammar in

FYW. It might not be a coincidence that Carrie and Christie are also alike in that their

experiences did not indicate an interaction with their identities. Carrie specifically commented

that the experience was not more negative because they had a strong sense of their “identity as a

writer” so the experience did not change their self image. Although Christie did not specifically

6 Christie explained in her interview that she understands “grammar” to be prescriptive rules.

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mention how her experience made her feel about her identity, she did share that she always had

“a natural tendency and strength toward English and language arts” and she suspected that this is

in part why she never had a horrible experience with grammar or an experience that made her

passionate about grammar. She described her feelings about grammar as “neutral.” Just as her

feelings about her experience were minimal (somewhat positive at the time and neither negative

nor positive now), so seem to be her emotions toward grammar instruction in FYW, which she

described as somewhat negative. Based on these two cases, it appears possible that teachers

whose memorable experiences with grammar instruction did not involve epiphanic encounters do

not experience particularly intense emotions about grammar instruction.

Limitations of Interview Findings

What we know with confidence based on literature and the interviews conducted for this

study is that language instruction, including grammar instruction, can be formative to a person’s

sense of self. It can directly, or indirectly, convey to a person messages about their relation to

groups (i.e. insider or outsider), the value of those groups, and the consequences of relating to

those groups. The interviews conducted for this study show four cases of epiphanic encounters

with grammar instruction, all of which resulted in either very negative or both negative and

positive (potentially still very negative) emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW.

Additionally, the two interviews that did not involve epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction resulted in only somewhat negative emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW.

These findings suggest a correlation between epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and

elevated negative emotions toward grammar instruction. The teachers elaborated on their

teaching practices and feelings about grammar instruction in their interviews, displaying keen

awareness of the complications surrounding grammar instruction. From these descriptions, I

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identified connections between the teachers’ experiences learning about grammar and their

feelings of empathy. This empathy appears to lead the teachers to use culturally sensitive

teaching practices. Sometimes, I made these connections deductively. At other times, the

teachers voiced these connections themselves.

I want to take a moment to clarify the limitations of these conclusions. I do not suggest

that teachers without epiphanic encounters do not have empathy for their students or fail to

implement sensitive teaching practices. Christie encourages her students to write in languages

such as Spanish, and Carrie uses think-aloud protocol in student conferences to help students

think about readers’ needs. These are innovative and arguably sensitive practices. These

teachers, though, did not attribute the inspiration for these practices to their experiences learning

about grammar. In Christie’s case, her mother-in-law is from Mexico, and Christie teaches at a

Latinx-serving school. Both of these factors likely contribute to her accepting practices. Many

factors play into teachers’ decisions, and with these study findings, I do not wish to misrepresent

this complexity. It is, however, useful to know that epiphanic encounters are one such factor and

that it appears to cultivate sensitive practices.

It is also important to note that there may be other explanations for the pattern of empathy

observed in this study. It is possible that some teachers with epiphanic encounters simply did not

wish to converse about grammar instruction and did not volunteer to participate in an interview.

If so, this might have skewed the results.

For the reason above, we cannot conclude that teachers without formative encounters

with grammar instruction are less passionate or less informed on the topic of grammar. What is

seen from the data is that teachers who have had epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction

report, with some consistency, that their experiences have made them thoughtful in their

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approach to teaching grammar and particularly sensitive to multilingual/multidialectal students.

As noted in Chapter Two, people are increasingly concerned about linguistic justice. It is,

therefore, useful to know that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers understand

these issues and motivate them to promote change.

Conclusions

Most of the teachers interviewed for this study expressed strong emotions about grammar

instruction, intricate understandings of the topic, and dedication to educating both students and

faculty about grammar misconceptions. It is possible that the teachers’ past epiphanic encounters

with grammar instruction may account for these intense emotions. Rather than inhibit their

understanding of the topic, though, their emotions seem to prime the teachers to receive non-

traditional views of grammars and continue to drive their commitment to educate people on

linguistic justice. This finding offers valuable insight for teacher training. By reflecting on

formative experiences with grammar instruction, FYW teachers can more fully engage in the

emotions and conversations about grammars. As the survey data showed, more of the teachers

who showed evidence of an epiphanic encounter were motivated to talk about grammar in a

follow up interview than the other surveyed teachers. Furthermore, three of the four interview

participants who experienced epiphanic encounters indicated that they have reflected on their

experiences, either on their own or in preparation for the interview. The four interviewees with

epiphanic encounters also reported more intense emotions about teaching grammar in FYW than

the two who did not. Writing teachers need to feel strongly about the topic of grammar and the

issues surrounding it if they are to continue the work that has already begun and change the way

faculty and students perceive grammars. The last chapter of this dissertation provides an example

of a teacher-training exercise that is based on these findings.

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As stated in CCCC’s extended document that accompanied their statement on students’

right to their own language, “As English teachers, we are responsible for what our teaching does

to the self-image and the self-esteem of our students.” Because language and identity are so

closely related, students are better able to write reflectively when they are free to use the

grammar they feel an affinity to. While explaining the significance of certain narrative practices

displayed by the children he studied, psychologist Jean Quigley writes, “They [the narrative

practices] reveal something of how we are taught to think of ourselves as selves. What we

acquire is not a ‘true self’ or a true identity but the ability to communicate and perform a self…”

(164). From this perspective, when we teach students to take agency in choosing among

grammatical options, we prepare them to take agency of their identities. I suggest that training

FYW teachers to reflect on their past encounters with grammar instruction is a valuable avenue

to teach them about the language-identity connection and help them develop informed,

sympathetic approaches to teaching grammars rhetorically.

In explaining his research, Quigley writes, “In relation to the self, what can be

accomplished via this sort of grammatical analysis is a change in our way of seeing and hence of

conceptualizing the developing self” (161-162). Quigley and I share similar arguments at their

core. Like Quigley, I see an undeniable interaction between language and identity, where

language sometimes indicates aspects of a person’s identity and also helps shape that identity. It

is through communication within and between different communities that we learn about

ourselves. What I add to Quigley’s argument is that in order to conceptualize specifically the

teaching self, we must analyze our emotions toward the topic of grammar as well as the

moments cultivating those emotions, because emotions based on individual experiences are not

necessarily an accurate guide for teachers to decide what a multitude of students need, as was the

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case with my own emotions in the episode I described in Chapter One. Just because formal

grammar helped me find power in writing and shaped my identity, does not mean the same will

be true of all students. Perhaps the reason I am able to enjoy freedom in grammars is because I

have the privileges of a white, educated, native speaker of a traditional English dialect.

Reflecting on my experiences and how they influence my feelings of devotion toward rhetorical

grammar instruction helps me recognize how my encounters might not match those of my

students. Bethany recognized this reality in her interview: “They’re [a lot of her students] not

there for a liberal arts education and the life of the mind like I was, so designing a class that

would make me happy is not going to necessarily make the majority of my students happy.”

Instead of distancing me from my students, this reflection has helped me empathize with them. I

will still attempt to give my students experiences like my own, but I also recognize that our

differences mean, unjustly, that we differ in the relationships we are able to have with grammars.

Even if students learn that all grammars offer powerful rhetoric, until society changes, their

realities are that non-traditional grammars will be treated “inappropriate” in professional spaces.

This understanding will affect how I go on to teach rhetorical grammars. Already I have lessened

how much attention I give to mechanics when giving feedback to students, because I want

students to recognize the other elements of clear and influential writing. I have also discovered

practical activities and readings (provided in Chapter Seven) that will let students speak to

linguistic injustices and experiment with their heritage language systems and/or experience a

totally unfamiliar one. As teachers, remembering our personal learning experiences can help us

understand our emotions and push us to evaluate our practices.

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Chapter Six: Passion and Epiphanic Encounters with

Grammar Instruction

In Chapter 5, we saw that epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction can facilitate

FYW teachers’ empathy for students whose self identity may be particularly unstable in an

environment that recognizes only traditional English. In this chapter, I will show how in addition

to feeling this heightened sensitivity, these teachers demonstrated passion for reforming grammar

instruction. This sentiment was evident in the intense emotions participants listed in response to

the survey question what emotions do you feel when you think about currently teaching grammar

in FYW and in their interview comments where they referenced their frequent efforts to educate

others about current understandings of grammar and grammar instruction. This chapter will

unpack these comments in an attempt to understand how the teachers’ epiphanic encounters with

grammar instruction informs this passion.

In his CCCC address, Asao Inoue calls out teachers who fail to adopt antiracist

frameworks because the change is uncomfortable. He says about this delay, “What a lack of

compassion -- if compassion is more than feeling empathy…” I suggest that passion, a word that

connotes something unsuppressable, is what makes com-passion active. The teachers with

epiphanic encounters showed evidence of more than just empathy; they put action to their

empathy. They showed passion.

A Note about Passion

Before delving into analysis, I want to define my use of the word passion. The word can

easily be conflated with feelings of pleasure, or at least satisfaction. People often feel passionate

about activities they choose to take part in because they find the activity rewarding in some way.

This did not seem to be the case for the kind of passion displayed by the interviewed teachers.

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Instead, their passion for discussing grammar instruction seems to grow out of feelings of

obligation to re-educate people on formal grammar’s role in writing. They nearly all expressed

frustration over the frequent need to correct faculty and friends about how insignificant formal

grammar is in comparison to other writing skills. The teachers likely wish these conversations

were unnecessary, but they find the misconceptions so critical that they take up the task with

verv. Therefore, when I refer to these teachers as passionate, I refer to their devotion to this re-

education but not necessarily feelings of enjoyment.

Passion out of Epiphanic Encounters with Grammar Instruction

Interviewed teachers who had epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction tended to

use the survey to write long, detailed, and passionate descriptions of their feelings toward

teaching grammar in FYW. The survey respondents whose responses contained signs of

epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction also showed this trend when they reported that

the experience impacted their teaching “a lot.” In the six interviews conducted for this study, I

invited participants to elaborate on the feelings they expressed in their survey responses. This

time gave the teachers the opportunity to explain their emotional responses to grammar

instruction, their beliefs about grammar instruction, and the possible connections between these

emotions/beliefs and their practices. In this chapter, I discuss two types of passion seen in the

interviews: passion to change student perceptions and passion to change faculty/staff

perceptions. I then analyze trends found in the survey data which indicate a possible correlation

between epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and FYW teachers’ enthusiasm for

discussing grammar instruction.

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Passion to Change Student Perceptions

In both her survey response and her interview, Bethany expressed strong feelings about

teaching grammar in FYW. In the survey, she described her emotions as “disquieted,”

“frustrated,” and “pained.” The word “pained” is unexpectedly physical and seems, for this

reason, strategic for Bethany. With this word, she reminds us that emotions often involve

physiological stimulation. We literally feel emotions as changes to our heartbeat, body

temperature, and even muscle strength. Our body shakes with laughter when we feel joy and our

eyes water with tears when we feel sadness. Panic, terror, fury, intense emotions are often a full-

body experience. For Bethany, the thought of teaching grammar in FYW causes her such intense

emotions, she expresses it as a physical experience.

While elaborating on her memorable experience of grammar instruction and its impact on

her teaching, Bethany added to her list of emotions toward teaching grammar feelings of

“nostalgia,” “sorrow,” and “inadequacy.” She explained that she feels these emotions because

she cannot find a way to recreate a wonderful experience similar to hers in a 50-minute class

where there are so many more important things to cover. Again, Bethany’s word choice is

striking. This time, her descriptors reflect surprising intimacy. “Nostalgia” cannot be felt on

behalf of another; it is only felt when something dearly personal has come to an end and cannot

be achieved again. “Inadequacy” is similarly personal. The word can only be used with a linking

verb such as seem, feel, or some form of a BE-verb. This means that although a person can

perceive another as inadequate, can call them inadequate, and even make a person feel

inadequate, no one can actually make another person inadequate. A person cannot cause another

person inadequacy in the same way that a person can cause another person sorrow. Inadequacy

does not share the blame. It is, therefore, deeply personal and likely intense.

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Seemingly as a result of these heightened emotions, Bethany feels compelled to re-

educate her students about grammar instruction. Although she expressed frustration with faculty

who misunderstand grammar’s role in writing, she did not mention engaging debates with such

faculty. Instead, she seems to focus her attention on changing students’ understandings of

grammar. Students, she said, often list vocabulary and grammar as their main writing concerns

when they first start FYW with her. She teaches them early on that these are mechanical issues,

and in place of the drill and kill activities the students expect, she implements conversations

about audience and reader needs.

Bethany’s story is an example of how a person can experience positive epiphanic

encounters with grammar instruction and still have intensely negative emotions about the

teaching of grammar and feel compelled to reform students’ notions about writing and the topic

of grammar.

Trevor expressed a similar passion for reforming students’ understanding of the topic of

grammar. This passion is evident in the lengthiness of his write-in answer to the survey’s inquiry

about his emotions toward teaching grammar. The question could have easily been answered

with a simple list of emotions. Many survey respondents answered the question in this way.

Trevor, however, wrote 81 words to explain his feelings toward teaching grammar. In the first

part of his response, he explained, “I feel excited to empower students and honor their unique

voices and syntax while giving them tools to navigate alternative contexts where the rules of

grammar may be more rigid.” With this description, Trevor reflects an optimism that some form

of grammar can be taught to students as an empowering experience. His reference to uniqueness

also indicates his hope that grammar instruction can support students’ individual identities rather

than change those identities, as he experienced. At the same time, Trevor acknowledges the

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challenge to balance his views with instruction that prepares students to write for audiences who

hold more traditional views of grammar. He showed this awareness in the second part of his

survey response: “I feel a little anxiety about how to convey these differences between contexts

because I want students to have access to their voice and to use it to communicate while

understanding that outside of my classroom grammar is often used as a gatekeeping tool to

oppress and marginalize those same voices.” He again expressed this sentiment in his interview,

when he explained, “I don't want to set them [students] up for failure in that psychology class or

when they go into industry and they're applying for jobs with a resume and potentially a writing

sample. But I also don't want to devalue their voice and their agency in my classroom or in

higher ed in general.” This combination of excitement and anxiety seems to indicate that Trevor

has a healthy respect for the complexity of grammar debates.

It was clear in listening to Trevor speak that even though the topic’s complexity causes

him anxiety, he engages with the sensitive issues and reflects on his personal experience while

searching for ways to address these issues. Trevor’s story is a clear case of a negative epiphanic

encounter with grammar instruction that later developed a willingness to grapple with the

complexity of grammar instruction. Similar to Bethany, he expressed heightened emotions

toward teaching grammar in FYW and indicated intentional efforts to teach his students a fresh,

empowering take on grammar.

Like Bethany, Lisa described her feelings at the time of her experience as positive, yet

she now has negative feelings about teaching grammar in FYW. Unlike Bethany, Lisa feels

positive feelings in addition to her negative ones. The fact that her emotions are mixed does not

mean they are mild, though. She describes her feelings with an intensity that rivals those of the

other teachers. In the survey she wrote nearly fifty words to fully express her emotions toward

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teaching grammar in FYW. She described her feelings as “passion and excitement for teaching

students the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Frustration when thinking

about how most faculty outside of FYW view grammar as only prescriptive. Frustration at the

continued punishment of writers who deploy language use that does not align with standard (i.e.,

White) written English.” Even without any discourse analysis, we know Lisa feels passionately

about grammar instruction because she tells us as much. Beyond her stating her passion, her

repetition of the word “frustration” further expresses her intensely negative feelings and the

strong motivation that drives her to continue teaching a more progressive view of grammar

despite this frustration.

Lisa identified a connection between her emotions at the time of her memorable

experience and her current emotions about grammar instruction: “... because the emotions were

very positive … it does make me [pause] I was going to say the word ferocious [about reforming

perspectives on grammar].” Lisa decided that the word ferocious was not positive and settled on

the word adamant in its place, but her first word choice seems to reveal the intensity of her

emotions. The word ferocious connotes images of a wild animal trapped in a fight or flight

situation. Lisa’s first instinct to describe herself as ferocious could reflect the intense level of

devotion she feels to her students. Her concern for her students motivates her to teach them that

grammars exist beyond only prescriptive ones.

Passion to Change Faculty and Staff Perceptions

Heather did not seem to personally believe her community’s Englishes were less

legitimate than the traditional English taught in her college course on the structure of the English

language, but she seemed affected by the knowledge that academia attributed negative qualities,

namely illegitimacy, to her community dialects. Her current feelings about teaching grammar

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match the intensity of teachers like Trevor who experienced a direct threat to his self identity

when learning traditional grammar. In response to the survey question about feelings toward

teaching grammar in FYW, Heather wrote, “Irritated. Exhausted about how often I have to tell

instructors that they're not linguists or grammar teachers and that their whitely notions of

correctness are racist.” As was the case with the other teachers discussed, Heather goes beyond

listing her emotions in order to fully explain her feelings toward teaching grammar. “Exhausted”

carries similar physicality as Bethany’s descriptors and “have to,” a syntactically unnecessary

embellishment, conveys the cause and extent of her frustration. Additionally, what she does not

write is expressive of her intense emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW. Qualifiers are

notably absent in her response. Her statement would not express the same level of intensity had

she hedged it and written something like “Exhausted about how often I have to tell some

instructors that they’re not really linguists or grammar teachers and that their whitely notions of

correctness can at times be somewhat racist.” Instead, Heather’s statement is unwavering and

unapologetic, clearly reflecting the exhaustion she tells us she feels. For this study at least, where

she is anonymous and where her personal opinion has been requested, Bethany’s frustration

seems too overwhelming for her to worry about softening her statement.

Despite, or perhaps to spite, her emotions, Heather continues making it her mission to

change the perspectives of those with the power to penalize students for using non-traditional

grammar. She organizes workshops and events she calls “town halls” as a way of informing

others on anti-racist approaches to teaching composition. She also makes the most of her position

as co-director of her university’s Writing Center by training her tutors to approach the topic of

grammar rhetorically in consultations. She teaches her tutors to talk to clients about the impact of

their writing choices. By focusing on choice rather than correctness, Heather’s tutors are able to

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move superficial conversations about formal grammar into more critical considerations of higher

order concepts.

Even though Heather feels no current impact from her experience with the college

English course that excluded non-traditional Englishes, her dedication to educating instructors

and Writing Center tutors about traditional grammar’s injustice suggests that she feels

passionately about creating environments that protect students from similar experiences. In the

case of this teacher, even an indirect addition of a negative trait to her self identity seems to have

helped her form a set of beliefs which she feels strongly enough about that she continually works

at re-educating faculty and staff on the topic of grammar.

Evidence of Passion in Survey Data

My findings which showed particular passion among interviewed teachers who have had

epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction inspired me to explore how this trend would hold

up in a larger sample. I therefore developed a method of identifying survey responses that

indicate epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and compared these responses against

those that did not indicate epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. The main source of

information I used to sort responses was respondents’ write-in answers to the survey questions

what emotions did you feel at the time when you had this experience and what emotions do you

feel now as you recall that experience. The following traits in these answers were considered

indication of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction:

● Pride listed as an emotion ATE

● Shame or embarrassment listed as an emotion ATE

● Membership to a specific community, such as graduate students or writers, included to

explain the respondent’s emotions.

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● Descriptors that indicate large-scale impact such as “life-changing.”

The first two traits were selected as indicators based on most recent understandings of self

identity as connected to self-esteem. The third trait was included as an indicator according to

social identity theory, which considers group memberships an integral part of self identity

(Joseph 13). The final trait was included under the rationale of identity theory, which teaches that

one of the conditions that insights identity change is the need to reconcile one’s identity with a

changed environment (Burke and Stets n.p.). According to this understanding, an experience that

leads to a drastic change to a person’s environment will likely require change to that person’s

identity in order to adapt to that environment. As an example for how this sorting operated, a

write-in that only listed “bored” as the extent of the respondent’s emotions ATE without further

context was not flagged as an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction since this emotion is

typically attributed to an outside source, not the self. Forty-two of the 109 survey respondents

met one or more criterias that indicate an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction. This

number alone is revealing, since the survey only requested that respondents name their emotions

without other details, and yet so many responses clearly described epiphanic encounters with

grammar instruction. In fact, many respondents went out of their way to describe their

experience in detail even though the small answer box (the box expanded only as the person

wrote) would have encouraged a short answer. It is possible that these respondents’ thoroughness

is due to an appreciation for clear, comprehensive writing and likely their comfort with

expressing themselves in writing. If we assume these traits of writing teachers, however, then it

is just as logical to assume that they also value concision. I believe we can honor these

respondents by recognizing their verbosity as indication that they see meaning in their stories.

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Recalling the encounters that had originally inspired my research, I wondered if

epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction could help explain why some teachers assert their

stance to “not care about grammar” so aggressively and seem anxious to shut down

conversations about the topic. I realized that in a serendipitous turn of events, my survey

question, which I had intended solely as a means of obtaining interview participants, provided

me a way to conservatively identify from my sample one group of teachers with low motivation

to discuss grammar instruction and one with high motivation, based on whether they agreed to a

follow up interview. Admittedly, there are limitations to this method of identification. It is

possible that some respondents feel passionately about grammar instruction and regularly

participate in conversations about the topic but could not afford to dedicate an hour to take part

in an interview. In fact, several respondents noted as much along with their decline to an

interview. This categorization, though problematic, does hold some merit. Though sparing an

hour to discuss grammar instruction may have been more difficult for some respondents than

others, those who agreed to this sacrifice show an elevated level of devotion to discussing the

topic. Easy or not, these individuals were motivated to converse about emotions and grammar.

Therefore, I do not claim that those who declined an interview do not care about discussing the

topic of grammar, but I suggest that those who agreed are more likely to feel a stronger

conviction to such conversations.

Twenty-nine respondents of the forty-two with epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction agreed to a followup interview, only slightly more than half and therefore an

unremarkable number in itself. Where an interesting trend appears is in the impact that these

voluntary respondents say their epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction has had on their

teaching. Only seventeen of the forty-two respondents with epiphanic encounters with grammar

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instruction reported high impact on their current teaching, but sixteen out of these seventeen

agreed to an interview. This means all but one highly impacted respondent with an epiphanic

encounter with grammar instruction felt compelled to participate in an interview. This percentage

of voluntary respondents is unmatched by any of the other groups, including respondents

impacted to any other degree by their experience or respondents without indication of an

epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction. See Graph 6.1, below.

Furthermore, this number means out of the respondents in this category (possessing an epiphanic

encounter with grammar instruction) who agreed to an interview, fifty-five percent of them (16

out of 29) had experiences that impact their teaching of grammar a lot. This is the highest

percentage to agree to an interview out of all the degrees of impact. See graph 6.2, below. None

of the five respondents who indicated an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction with no

impact agreed to an interview.

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I realized this distribution, high as it is, may be the same for respondents without

epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. In other words, it is possible that a high

percentage of highly impacted respondents agreed to an interview regardless of whether their

experience involved an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction. To test this possibility, I

made the same calculations for all respondents who agreed to an interview, regardless of whether

they indicated an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction. A total of fifty-one respondents,

out of the 109 responses I received to my survey, agreed to an interview, with thirty-eight

reporting high impact, forty reporting low impact, twenty-four reporting no impact, and seven

reporting uncertainty about impact. The respondents in each of these categories volunteered for

an interview in the following percentages: sixty-six percent (25 out of 38) of those who reported

an impact of a lot, forty percent (16 out of 40) of those who reported an impact of a little, twenty-

nine percent (7 out of 24) of those who reported no impact, and forty-three percent (3 out of 7) of

those who were not sure about the impact level. See Graph 6.2, below.

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By comparing the two graphs above, it can be seen that in the overall sample, the

percentage of respondents who agreed to an interview is lower for both those impacted a lot and

a little than for those who had epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and were impacted

a lot or a little. This lower percentage means normal distribution cannot explain the high

percentage of respondents who agreed to an interview in the group that had epiphanic encounters

with grammar instruction and were impacted a lot or a little. This finding means that although an

epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction does not guarantee devotion to conversations

about grammar instruction, such an experience is likely to motivate teachers to hold such

conversations if that experience also impacted the teachers. Teachers who do not fit these criteria

may still actively discuss grammar instruction, but they appear to do so with less consistency.

It is important to note that this trend did not exist for respondents who met only one of

the necessary criteria. Respondents who had epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction but

no or uncertain impact did not show any correlations to willingness to discuss grammar

instruction. Nor did this correlation exist for respondents whose experiences impacted their

teaching a lot or a little but did not involve change to the teachers’ identities.

Conclusions

I began this study wondering how emotional histories might explain why some writing

teachers emphatically shut down conversations about grammars and grammar instruction. The

data, however, ended up turning my attention to the way teachers’ emotional histories make them

more passionate about discussing grammars for the sake of changing others’ understandings of

the topic. FYW teachers who experienced grammar instruction that changed their sense of self

showed devotion in their efforts to reform perspectives on grammars and described intensely

negative and intensely positive emotions about grammar instruction. FYW teachers are

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particularly important in determining where the state of grammar instruction goes next. They do

a great deal of work re-educating the youngest college students about what constitutes as a

grammar and how to use grammars to serve their writing. Often, these FYW teachers have the

privilege and challenge of building new college students’ writing confidence after what might

have been twelve years of prescriptive grammar education that convinced them they cannot

write. Assuming that empathy and passion are desirable traits in the writing teachers responsible

for shaping the future of grammar instruction, the logical question is how we might use the

knowledge from this research to encourage these traits in more teachers. The next chapter

suggests how GTA training might use narratives as a way of having teachers share in others’

experiences of grammar instruction and explore their own, all for the sake of facilitating the

empathy and passion witnessed in this study.

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Chapter Seven: Implications for Composition Programs

Results of the current study indicate FYW teachers who have experienced an epiphanic

encounter with grammar instruction commonly develop empathy for their students and passion

for the reformation of grammar education. In this chapter, I will review the implications of these

findings as they relate to R&C and will suggest possible applications.

Reflection on Epiphanic Encounters

The data from this study indicates that FYW teachers who reflect on personal epiphanic

encounters with grammar instruction are guided by feelings of empathy and passion when

teaching or discussing grammars and grammar instruction. Furthermore, these same teachers

often demonstrated or stated connections between these emotions and their concerns for students'

rights to their own language. Rights to a home language has been and continues to be a core

value in R&C, as evidenced by CCCC’s statement on the subject and many publications (noted

in previous chapters) addressing the issue, but writing teachers are still discovering what it looks

like to put this value into practice, especially when it comes to grammar instruction. While

sharing his ideas for how to teach grammar to diverse classes, Kim Lovejoy states with a tone of

hope,

As more teachers develop their pedagogies to accommodate diverse students and their

linguistic differences, we will begin to see the kind of programmatic changes in writing

programs that can have an impact on large numbers of students and create an

environment for teachers to share best practices and to talk, reflectively and productively,

about issues of linguistic diversity in the classroom. (96)

The grammar-focused self reflection I suggest is one such program change that can help cultivate

these “reflective and productive” talks. By sharing their own emotional encounters with grammar

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instruction and reflecting on the way this instruction may have impacted their sense of self at the

time, writing teachers can find empathy for the similarly transformative encounters their students

may have had and motivation to discuss ways of responding to the issues of grammar instruction.

Because so much more needs to be done to define grammars’ role in the 21st century

composition classroom, teachers must continue discussing grammar instruction to find answers

to very real and current concerns about linguistic justice in academia. When considering

applications for the current study’s findings, it is important to note that the empathy and passion

seemed to occur consistently for teachers who reflected regularly on their past epiphanic

encounters. Reflection is, therefore, a promising area of research to carry these findings into. The

rest of this chapter details how honed reflection can help teacher educators better train student

teachers to empathize with their students’ grammar histories and persevere in the efforts to

reform grammar education.

Self reflection has been a fruitful area of research for teacher development for many

years. John Dewey first suggested the practice for teacher education in 1933. Generally,

reflection for teachers include three steps: 1) identifying one’s beliefs, their origins, and the

practices based on those beliefs, 2) questioning these beliefs, and 3) modifying these beliefs

(Shandomo 101). For how one goes about these steps, there are many approaches. Some of these

approaches are descriptive reflection (Willis), journaling (Farrell “ESL/EFL Teacher

Development”), and classroom observation (Farrell “‘Keeping Score’”). In his teacher handbook

Reflective Practice in Action: Reflection Breaks for Busy Teachers,” Thomas Farrell suggests

different inspirations for reflection. One of these points of inspiration is personal critical

incidents, which he defines as “an event that resulted in a major change in the teacher’s

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professional life” (95). As noted in the discussion of critical incident technique (see Chapter

Three), epiphanic encounters are a type of critical incident.

Although much of the success seen with self reflection has come from studies of middle

or high school teachers, a few have implemented the practice for GTA training (McDonough;

Juklova). Most colleges with graduate programs in English now provide a teaching practicum for

students before making them an instructor of record for a class. It is possible for a person to have

18 graduate credit hours and be hired to teach without any prior training, but these cases are now

the exception to the generally standard practice. Because these practicums are often the only

formal training college writing teachers will receive, this is the ideal point at which to introduce

self reflection as a tool for professional development. It is for this reason that I recommend that

teachers of these practicums incorporate into the class a reflection activity that has students study

how their past emotional experiences impact their feelings and beliefs about grammar

instruction.

The type of reflection I call for differs from that recommended by Farrell in its

specificity. Farrell’s version asks teachers to consider “What critical incidents in your youth

shaped you as a teacher? (Reflective Practice in Action 96). The vaguity of this question is

valuable for starting a teacher on reflection, but teacher educators can use more specific prompts

to engage student teachers in select topics.

Not every teacher will necessarily have a transformative experience where grammar

instruction impacted their sense of self, but the teachers in this study who indicated the greatest

impact from an epiphanic encounter with grammar instruction also indicated that they spent time

thinking about the transformative experience and its impact. Those teachers who were unsure

about the impact of their experience and who may not have reflected much on the experience

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tended to show less dedication to discussing the topic, agreeing to interviews at a lower rate.

These findings mean teachers may be more likely to recall and gain the benefits of

transformative experiences if they intentionally reflect on their histories with these criteria in

mind. A study on literacy narratives, another form of reflection, found that teachers’

understandings of literacy education grew in complexity even when the narratives were not their

own (Clark and Medina). This means that teachers who have not experienced epiphanic

encounters with grammar instruction themselves might gain greater empathy and passion by

listening to and reflecting on other’s stories of such experiences. While interviewing Christie, I

asked if she felt inhibited by the fact that she never had a transformational experience with

grammar instruction. She expressed confidence that she did not feel that she was inhibited by her

neutral experience with grammar instruction. She still empathized with her students who struggle

with traumatic encounters with grammar instruction and says she is able to understand them

simply by listening to them. Christie reminds us that second-hand experiences can at times reap

the same rewards as first-hand ones but time must be taken to first listen. Although we cannot

guarantee that every participant will recall a transformative experience and receive the benefits

of such an experience, the activity I suggest (below) creates an optimal environment to increase

the chances that teachers will either recall an informative experience of their own or experience

benefits from hearing others’ experiences.

Writing teachers can reflect on their personal epiphanic encounters privately and benefit

from the experience. However, because sharing and listening is such an important part of

reflection, the practice will likely produce greater results when done with a group. For this

reason, I suggest that this honed reflection be used in teaching practicums.

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The prompt for grammar-focused reflection may take a variety of forms, but here I offer

one version as a starting point. I hope instructors of teaching practicums will freely adapt this

sample assignment. For this activity, I recommend allowing 20-30 minutes and having students

form small groups, 3-4 students ideally. The instructions have been written to be used as an in-

class exercise, but it could also be revised to allow students to reflect in writing outside of class.

For either option, I recommend scaffolding the lesson with readings that will familiarize students

with the issues surrounding grammar instruction and alternatives to traditional grammar

instruction. Below is a list of some of my favorite texts for these topics. Most of them are around

eight pages, so 1-2 readings from each category should make a reasonable reading load for a

graduate course.

On Grammars’ Role in Identity Formation

● Chapter 1 of Carmen Llamas Watt’s Language and Identities (8 pp.)

● Jonathan Foer’s “A Primary for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” (8 pp.)

On Grammar Arguments

● Amy Benjamin et al.’s “Teacher to Teacher: What is your Most Compelling Reason for

Teaching Grammar?” (3 pp.)

● Ed Vavra’s “On Not Teaching Grammar” (also presents some teaching ideas) (5 pp.)

● Joseph Williams’ “The Phenomenology of Errors” (16 pp.)

● Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” (8 pp.)

Alternatives to Traditional Grammar Instruction

● Debra Myhill et al.’s “Playful Explicitness with Grammar” (8 pp.)

● John Dawkins’ “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool” (15 pp.)

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● Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia Dunn “Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to

Traditional Grammar Instruction” (6 pp.)

Chapter 1 of Llamas and Watt’s book is a little more tedious to read than the other texts

in the list, but it reviews some of the key concepts and studies on the language-identity

relationship. This reading can be used to prime students to consider the ways they and their

future students are shaped by their heritage languages or home dialects.

Foer’s article, from The New Yorker, is not academic in the strict sense. It is valuable

nonetheless because it is an example of an author using non-traditional grammar to convey a

message and evoke emotions in readers. In this essay, Foer describes a system of punctuation he

made up to explain his family’s communication and the way it has impacted him.

“Teacher to Teacher: What is Your Most Compelling Reason for Teaching Grammar” is

a collection of responses from teachers who answered The English Journal’s quiry. This article

raises key points made by advocates of grammar instruction. These include students’ need for a

vocabulary to discuss language and the critical unity between form and content.

Vavra’s essay presents some of the common arguments made by both sides of the

grammar debate. He explains problematic logic of these arguments and suggests a rhetorical

approach to teaching grammar where students learn to consider how the brain processes

language instead of focusing on grammar rules.

The article by Williams is particularly engaging because it is both informative and

interactive. Williams begins by questioning why people respond so strongly to certain deviations

from standardized grammar but hardly notice others. He suggests that the answer lies in the

pleasure felt when correcting others. At the end of the essay, Williams reveals that he has

incorporated typos and non-traditional grammar throughout the text and challenges readers to

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honestly answer whether they noticed. This piece shows traditional grammar’s troubling

connection to elitism and can easily lead to class discussions about linguistic racism and

classism.

Young’s essay, written completely in AAV, is another playfully written piece. While he

argues against language standardization, he supports his point that dialect differences do not get

in the way of comprehension. Like Smitherman’s essays, this piece does critical work by

providing a model of AAV in an academic context. For its logic and demonstration, Young’s text

prepares students to participate in rich conversations.

Myhill et al.’s article details a study performed to observe the effects of grammar

intervention on a group of middle school students’ writing. The intervention taught rhetorical

grammar embedded in writing instruction. After presenting the results, which showed positive

success, the authors provide examples of the type of lessons used. Although the lessons are

juvenile for a college writing class, student teachers can glean ideas from this text and use the

general ideas to design more appropriate versions.

Though one of the longer and more in depth texts in this list, Dawkins' essay is a great

guide to teaching rhetorical grammar. After making a persuasive argument for teaching grammar

rhetorically, Dawkins explains the effects of punctuation marks by presenting them as

hierarchical systems. Warning though, this piece does use a good deal of formal grammar terms,

so you may need to prepare students ahead of time by giving them a refresher on terms like

independent clauses, comma splices, and coordinators. You may also want to instruct students to

skim over the sections about Dawkins’ technique if you want students to focus on the general

way he presents punctuation rhetorically by discussing its different effects.

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Lindblom and Dunn’s article provides a fantastic technique for teaching the topic of

grammar and the issues surrounding it. They describe the way they have taught these concepts

through discourse analysis of published grammar rants. This approach not only teaches

grammars in context, but it also has students critically analyze problematic arguments about the

topic of grammar. This is a great reading to invite student teachers to consider whether they have

an obligation to reform students’ thoughts about writing in addition to their writing.

Sample Lesson Plan

Lesson in Grammar-Focused Reflection

In this lesson, student teachers will learn the issues with traditional grammar instruction. By

comparing and contrasting their own learning experiences, students will consider how their

students’ experiences may be similar or different and how their teaching should respond in light

of these comparisons.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lesson, students should be able to

● Explain issues surrounding grammar instruction.

● Locate commonalities between their epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction and

those their students may have experienced.

● Evaluate techniques for teaching grammars.

● Adapt techniques for teaching rhetorical grammars in a way that recognizes the value of

multiple grammars and helps students form positive associations with the topic.

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Instructions

1. Display CCC quote and read for students.

In “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” CCC commits to “affirm the students' right

to their own patterns and varieties of language -- the dialects of their nurture or whatever

dialects in which they find their own identity and style.”

2. Explain that a community is any group of people who share something in common and a

person’s communities play a central role in forming their language and, by extension,

their identity.

3. Place students in groups of 2-3 and distribute the following instructions.

Step One: Think of a community with which you identify strongly. How has/does this identity

impact your speech patterns, word choice, accent, or medium of communication? What kind of

narratives have you learned about this identity from the grammar instruction you were given?

Try to pinpoint a specific instructional moment when you remember learning this narrative. This

moment can be negative or positive and can have taken place inside or outside of school.

Step Two: Relive that moment in as much detail as possible. Note any emotions or beliefs that

surface as you relive this memory but don’t write anything yet. Take 3 minutes of silence to

settle into this memory and experience it fully.

Step Three: Write about what you just experienced. Record what details you remembered (who,

what, when, where), how you felt/feel, and what the instruction made you believe about yourself.

Step Four: Share with the group your responses to the following questions:

● How did your experience make you feel about yourself when it occurred?

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● How did your experience disrupt or expand your beliefs about grammars, language,

writing, or yourself? How did this disruption or expansion of your beliefs make you feel?

● If you have not had a transformative experience with grammar instruction, why do you

think that is? If it’s because formal grammar came easily to you, what beliefs about

yourself did this ease reinforce?

The CCC statement quoted above ends with this call: “... teachers must have the experiences and

training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own

language.” Write your response to the following questions and be prepared to share with the

class.

● In what ways do you think the experience you just recalled helps you relate to or

empathize with first year college students?

● In what ways do you imagine your students’ past experiences with grammars will be

similar or different from your own?

● Keeping in mind the ways your experiences might be similar to or different from your

students’ experiences, what are some practices you can reasonably implement into your

classes in order to teach students about grammars in a way that values and further

develops their identities?

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Chapter Eight: Conclusions and Future Research

Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall define identity as “the social positioning of self and other”

(in Llamas et al. 18). Language is one way we publicly announce our social positioning. Gloria

Anzaldúa articulated this idea in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza when she famously

wrote, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language” (1588). This close

relationship between language and identity begins to shed light on why for some students,

feedback like “this tense is wrong” can quickly spiral into “my language is wrong,” “my culture

is wrong,” and finally, “I am wrong.”

Jean Quigley explores this idea in his article “Psychology and Grammar: The

Construction of the Autobiographical Self.” In his abstract, Quigley challenges research,

insisting that the field of psychology needs to concern itself with “how the individual is actually

constructed via her or his own language choices, how one's sense of self, of identity, of agency,

of moral responsibility, and so on, is constructed: the real-time effects of a speaker's grammatical

choices and situated opinions.” The fact that Quigley, a psychologist, places such importance on

language gives credence to the idea that language not only performs identity but actually aids in

forming one’s identity.

Quigley approaches language from a psychologist’s perspective, but R&C scholars echo

the same idea. Carmen Llamas et al.’s edited collection and Django Paris’ book Language across

Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools discuss

language as an integral part of identity. Paris, while documenting five students’ thoughts about

spoken and written language in their community, reflects on the experience of one student whose

heritage language was rarely found among his peers. “There was some sadness and frustration in

Rahul’s comments,” he contemplates, “It was, after all, ‘his own language,’ a treasured facet of

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ethnic identity, but he did not ‘get a chance’ to use it” (75). Paris notes an important feature in

the way Rahul expressed his situation. Rahul described the speech he could not converse in as

“my own language.” The possessive pronoun combined with the intimate “own” highlights how

closely the self exists to a person’s language. Cassie Brownell, who specializes in literacy and

teacher education, also observed minority students in the classroom setting. In concluding her

findings, she affirms the language-identity relationship and calls teachers to create opportunities

for students to explore language and literacy. Although these studies observed elementary school

students, the same can reasonably be assumed true of college students, since many of them are

exploring their identities on their own for the first time.

When language is understood as central to a person’s identity, it should not be surprising

that reactions to grammar instruction (when perceived as modification) are so often emotional

for students and teachers alike. As a linguist and an African American scholar, Smitherman’s

insights grow out of both professional and personal experience. She retells in her article “’Dat

Teacher Be Hollin at Us’: What is Ebonics?” the emotional experience that threatened her

identity. She writes, “I had my first taste of linguistic pedagogy for the Great Unwashed when

my European American elementary school teachers attacked my Ebonics (though it was not

called that in those days) and demoted me half a year.” Smitherman goes on to tell how she

learned to navigate the education system at the cost of her young voice. Then, in college, she was

again labeled deficient purely for her language patterns and was placed in speech therapy. She

says this experience “aroused the fighting spirit in me and took me from literature into critical

linguistics, after which I entered the lists of the language wars” (139). Based on her own

reflection, Smitherman recognizes the impact her epiphanic experience had on her professional

endeavors. After over a hundred publications on African American literacy and education, she

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remains devoted to propelling conversations about grammar instruction and raising awareness

for prescriptive grammar’s racist undertones. The current study goes to show Smitherman is not

alone in this reaction. Emotional histories concerning grammar instruction commonly drive

students to later become writing teachers so they might change the system that oppressed them.

Epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction, negative or positive, can grow empathy and

passion in students who later become writing teachers.

Although I began this study with the impression that emotions hindered discussions of

grammar instruction, my findings indicate that these feelings of empathy and passion that result

from epiphanic experiences actually keep the discussions alive. Such passionate and empathetic

FYW teachers appear to be some of the main leaders in the brigade behind grammar instruction’s

reform. It is important to note that this reform does not necessarily forsake all grammars or avoid

the term. These teachers dare to engage in conversations about grammars and grammar

instruction regularly in their work in classrooms and writing centers, public and private spaces,

professional and social environments. At the end of my research, I did not find the source of the

aggressive reactions to the topic of grammar of which I experienced. Instead, my research took

on a more fruitful endeavor to uncover the source of emotions that drive teachers to take to the

helm and steer the direction R&C takes with its instruction of grammars.

Recommended Future Research

To conclude, I would like to turn briefly to several findings that fell beyond the scope of

this study but which promise to be valuable topics of inquiry. I have divided these secondary

findings into two categories: those which suggest change in the way R&C thinks about grammar

instruction and those that, with further research, could provide more knowledge of the

relationship between teachers’ emotional histories with grammars and their current methods of

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interaction with the topic. In this final chapter, I will present these secondary findings along with

possible theories and questions that could ground their future research. The chapter ends with

concluding thoughts regarding the current study’s results and how they might translate into

practical actions for mentors of FYW teachers.

The data collected with this study’s survey revealed evidence of changes to First-Year

Writing classes. The survey participants described ideas and practices which suggest a shift in

how the majority of FYW teachers view grammar. Most teachers who responded to the survey

indicated that they use class time more often to teach critical thinking than mechanics. This

priority was apparent in the following trends identified in survey responses:

● Slightly more than half, fifty-one percent (56 out of 109), of teachers surveyed do not

schedule class time for teaching grammar.

● More than half, fifty-five percent (31 out of 56), of teachers surveyed who do not

schedule grammar instruction teach students style, and the majority of them, seventy-one

percent (40 out of 56), teach rhetoric. Very few of the teachers who do not schedule class

time for teaching grammar teach punctuation (11 out of 56 or twenty percent) or

mechanics (13 out of 56 or twenty-three percent).

● Most, eighty-three percent (44 out of 53), of the teachers who schedule grammar

instruction teach it through contextualized feedback on students’ writing. Very few,

fifteen percent (8 out of 53), teach through drills or worksheets.

● The majority of teachers instruct students to use grammar to improve clarity (85 out of

109 or seventy-eight percent) or think rhetorically, either in their writing (70 or sixty-four

percent) or their reading (55 or fifty percent). Thirty-one percent (34 out of 109) of the

teachers have students use grammar for the sake of identifying errors.

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● Twenty-eight percent (31 out of 109) of the teachers use the term grammar when

teaching punctuation. Almost twice as many, fifty-five percent (60 out of 109), use the

term grammar when students initiate use of it.

● None of the teachers factor grammar heavily into students’ grades.

Together, these trends indicate a holistic shift in how the majority of FYW teachers perceive

grammar. Although a sample size of 109 teachers does not fully represent all teachers, it seems

most FWY teachers have abandoned worksheets and drills and focus on rhetorical concepts more

than mechanical correctness. Equally important to what the teachers selected as uses for

grammar are the uses teachers did not report teaching to students. One of the options selected

least by teachers was “to identify errors.” Since traditional grammar has primarily been taught to

identify and correct “errors,” I anticipated that teachers would still teach it as a tool for

correction, even if this use was taught among other, more rhetorical uses. However, only thirty-

one percent (34 out of 109) of respondents reported having students use grammar to “identify

errors.” These results are promising evidence that among FYW teachers, rhetorical grammar is

not only being taught but is actually replacing the teaching of traditional grammar.

In light of this finding, it is perhaps surprising that only twenty-three percent (25) of

respondents reported using the term grammar when teaching rhetoric. Instead, most respondents

indicated that they use the term either “when students initiate use of the term” and/or “when

teaching conventions.” This finding does not, however, negate the previous finding. It is possible

that teachers are teaching grammars rhetorically but either do not recognize it as such or

intentionally avoid using the term grammar for personal or pedagogical reasons. If this is indeed

the case, these teachers already present to their students an advanced and practical view on

grammars, an achievement worthy of praise. The name these teachers give this instruction is

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certainly a concern of lesser importance as long as syntax and punctuation are being taught

critically. Name is, nonetheless, a concern worth pursuing secondarily.

Even though she supports rhetorical grammar, and uses that term, Micciche recognizes,

“Grammar instruction, in short, is decidedly not sexy but school-marmish, not empowering but

disempowering, not rhetorical but decontextualize” (“Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar”

718). Some might question if it is possible or worth the effort to reclaim the term grammar. Even

Kolln, rhetorical grammar’s other major advocate, admits that traditional school grammar “is

what grammar means to the masses - and, despite definitions to the contrary, will probably

continue to do so” (Kolln and Hancock 18). Understandably, the public has deeply rooted the

term grammar in very toxic associations. It’s logical to wonder why not adopt another, less

troublesome term?

Despite what sounds like a sentencing of the term grammar to eternal villainy, both of the

aforementioned scholars adopt the term rhetorical grammar to name the reformed approach they

teach. After giving the unbecoming description of grammar quoted above, Micciche writes

another fifteen pages on how important rhetorical grammar is. Part of this importance, she

argues, is that studying rhetorical grammar creates opportunities for students to realize how

language is “central to constructions of identity and culture” (721). If thoughtfully designed,

lessons in style could perform the same task, but what I think Micciche understood when she

wrote this is that the history that makes the term grammar so troublesome is also what makes the

term so useful. What better way to teach students the constructive power of language than to

enlighten them to the ways traditional grammar has been oppressively used and how new

conceptualizations of grammars can allow these groups to reclaim dignity and legitimacy for

their genders, races, and cultures. Like Micciche, Martha Kolln and Loretta Gray refused to shy

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away from the word grammar when they titled their 1991 student textbook Rhetorical Grammar:

Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. Although they do not specifically explain their choice

of this term, Kolln and Gray’s expertise in writing studies means they would have been well-

aware of alternative terms such as style and the risks of using the word grammar. I think it

reasonable, then, to assume they were being strategic in this choice. Afterall, the whole argument

of their text is that every writing choice should be intentional. I believe Kolln and Gray provide a

clue to why they support the use of the term grammar (when joined to the word rhetorical) when

they wrote “This book, then, substitutes for that negative association of grammar a positive and

functional point of view -- a rhetorical view: that an understanding of grammar is an important

tool for the writer; that it can be taught and learned successfully if it is presented in the right way

and in the right place, in connection with composition” (xiii). The negative association Kolln and

Gray speak of is that grammar instruction is remedial work where students find and fix “errors.”

Therefore, like Micciche, they wanted to change students’ understanding of the word grammar.

They knew college students would likely be familiar with the term grammar, so they used that

familiarity as a starting point to introduce a less familiar concept: rhetoric. I see wisdom in this

framing. It is true that most college students go years understanding grammar to be one thing,

often a restrictive thing, and I admit that re-teaching them will take work. In my experience,

though, I find college students permeable and enthusiastic about challenging their preconceived

notions. By combining the term grammar with rhetorical, teachers challenge students to apply

what they learn about rhetoric to what they thought they knew about the topic of grammar.

In addition to students’ familiarity with the term grammar and the opportunities the term

creates for critical reflection, I feel the term is useful because of the innate emotional attachments

so many have with the term. Barbara Wallraff, editor and columnist for The Atlantic Monthly

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from 1983 to 2009, describes the “word disputes” she has been called on to resolve, and the list

of disputes is long and shocking. The examples she gives include disagreements between

employee and boss, husband and wife, siblings, and even friends of over fifty years which,

according to the inquirer, “hinges on your expertise” (6). The passion with which people debate

topics of “correct grammar” ensures that public and professional audiences will continue to feel

vested in the topic, ensuring opportunities to present grammar instruction’s problematic past and

promote new understandings of plural rhetorical grammars.

My involvement with this study has strengthened my belief in using the term grammar

despite its connotations. My recruitment email and my questions clearly identified this as a study

about grammar, and I believe this framing is why participants raised so many important issues

(e.g. racism, equal opportunity, transferability, expertise, confidence). Had I been vague about

the topic of the study, perhaps introduced it as a study of the teaching of writing conventions,

some of this data may have been lost. I’m not yet convinced that the term grammar has reached

the end of its usefulness. Words’ value is, afterall, determined by its usefulness, right? So

perhaps its usefulness has changed and its new usefulness is risky, but I at least see the reward

worth that risk. This is how we reform the term grammar: by putting the term in its place, by

harnessing it to rhetoric in both name and action, and by doing this in view of our students.

Otherwise, I fear that many students, and teachers, will think ethos, pathos, and logos is all

rhetoric has to offer when in actuality, it is through micro elements like those that form

grammars that these appeals are achieved. Teachers’ term usage and its effects on student

learning is, therefore, a critical area worthy of future research.

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Table 8.1 Number of Teachers Who Teach Application

Grammar Applications Number of Teachers Who

Have Students Use

Application

Percentage of Teachers Who

Have Students Use Application

Out of Total 1097

To Identify Errors 34 31%

To Analyze Texts for

Their Rhetorical Effects

55 50%

To Provide Terms with

Which to Discuss Writing

35 32%

To Create Rhetorical

Effects in Their Writing

70 64%

To Revise Writing to be

More Clear

85 78%

To Vary Sentences 54 50%

Other 12 11%

The design of the study resulted in certain findings that, though somewhat related to the

current study, require further research in order to draw conclusions. These findings concern

FYW teachers’ feelings of guilt and inadequacy in relation to grammar as well as the role grade

level might play in shaping the nature of encounters with grammar instruction. Follow up studies

to explore these findings might implement a survey designed to specifically probe these areas.

For example, a new survey could be distributed to teachers who report feeling guilt in relation to

grammar and could ask respondents to explain the source of this guilt. This could reveal valuable

7 Percentages add up to greater than 100% because respondents could select more than one option.

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information about how teachers might be trained so that they feel more confident in their

knowledge of grammars and secure in having anti-racist/anti-classict approached to teaching it.

These findings are numbered and discussed below.

1. Nearly all of the teachers’ memorable experiences learning grammar involved a teacher

and occurred in either primary school or college.

Table 8.2 Relation of Instructor from Experience

Relation of Instructor

from Experience

Number of Teachers Percentage of Teachers

out of Total 109

Teacher 95 87%

Other 7 6%

Family member 5 5%

Friend 1 1%

Peer (not a friend) 1 1%

Elder (not related to you) 0 0%

Boss/Supervisor 0 0%

2. Positive emotional encounters with grammar instruction occur most often in primary

school.

While studying the survey data, I wondered if age plays a role in how positive or negative

emotional experiences with grammar instruction are for students who later become writing

teachers. Many of the studies exploring the effectiveness of grammar instruction select a specific

grade level to study and acknowledge that their findings cannot be generalized to all grades

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(Harris R.; Elley et al.; Bateman and Zidonis). If grade level affects students’ attitudes toward

grammar instruction, this would need to be an additional consideration when deciding what

grades basic or rhetorical grammars should be taught. To explore this inquiry, Table 8.3, below,

compares the respondents’ emotions ATE and the grade level at which it occurred. Grade level

was determined based on the survey question that asked respondents the location of the

experience.

Almost all of the teachers’ memorable experiences occurred at school, in primary school,

high school, or college. Although it is not surprising that most memorable experiences learning

grammar occurred in an educational setting, since this is usually where people receive the most

direct instruction in formal grammar. It is, though, curious that middle school was not a common

location. If this trend extends to general students, not just students who go on to be writing

teachers, it might indicate a period between basic grammar and advanced grammar when

instruction is less transformational for students. This could be an important finding because it

would mean these education levels are most critical in defining a person’s relationship with

grammars, making it particularly important to train teachers of these levels how to teach

grammars rhetorically and with respect to identity.

The emotions that respondents reported having during the memorable experiences in

these three grade levels were nearly evenly dispersed across the six categories of emotions. The

solitary outlier is the group of respondents whose experience occurred in primary school. Thirty-

nine percent (20 out of 51) of these respondents reported having “very positive” emotions at the

time of their memorable experience. Positive emotions are not necessarily an indication of

successful learning and cannot prove or disprove the best grade at which to teach grammars. It

does, however, suggest that students might experience positive emotions toward grammar

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instruction more often when in primary school. It is unclear why experiences are more positive at

this grade level. The explanation could reside with teachers’ methods at this level, the students

themselves, or some other factor. This finding warrants more research to better understand the

cause, since it may indicate that postponing grammar instruction until later grades will increase

the likelihood that students will experience instruction negatively.

Table 8.3 Number of Teachers with Emotion ATE at Grade Level

Emotion ATE

Grade8

Level

Very Neg. Somewhat

Neg.

Very Pos. Somewhat

Pos.

Neither Both Total

Responses for

Grade Level

Primary 18% (9) 18% (9) 39% (20) 16% (8) 8% (4) 2% (1) 51

High

School

20% (4) 20% (4) 35% (7) 15% (3) 5% (1) 5% (1) 20

College 24% (10) 24% (10) 26% (11) 17% (7) 2% (1) 7% (3) 42

3. In relation to grammar instruction, many teachers feel frustrated.

The questions asking participants what emotions they experienced at the time of their

memorable experience, now as they recall that experience and when currently thinking about

teaching grammar, were all formatted as fill in the blank questions so that participants described

their emotions in their own words and could use multiple descriptors. Although participants were

8 Middle school was removed along with the out-of-school locations since their totals were too small to draw

conclusions from.

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free to use any terms to describe their emotions, many of them used similar terms. By far the

most frequently appearing term was "frustration/frustrated/frustrating," which appeared forty-

eight times in the survey responses. This impressive number gives a picture of how writing

teachers feel about grammar instruction. They are not indifferent about the issues and they more

often harbor tension about the topic than pleasure. The second most frequent term,

"excitement/excited/exciting," appearing seventeen times in the survey responses, does not even

come close to this front runner. “Excited” is closely followed by the terms

"confused/confusion/confusing" and "annoyed/annoyance/annoying," each used sixteen times in

the survey responses. See Table 8.4, below, for a breakdown of repeated terms and their

frequency.

.

Table 8.4 Frequency of Descriptors for Emotions Related to Grammar Instruction

Descriptors Number of Teachers Who Wrote

Descriptor in Survey Responses

Percentage of Total Number of

Teachers9

Frustrated 48 44%

Excited 17 16%

Annoyed 16 15%

Confused 16 15%

9Numbers are out of 109, the total number of survey respondents. If a respondent used the term more than once in

one or more responses, it was counted once.

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Anger 15 14%

Embarrassed 14 13%

Bored 13 12%

References

to

Oppression

13 12%

Shame 11 10%

Curious 11 10%

Irritation 9 8%

Joy 9 8%

Love 8 7%

Fear 6 6%

Fun 6 6%

Nostalgia 6 6%

Stress 5 5%

Trapped 3 3%

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Nervous 3 3%

Awe 2 2%

4. Teachers with negative emotional experiences learning grammar may empathize, with

some consistency, with student writing anxiety.

The current study has shown that teachers with epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction often grow empathy for their students’ experiences of grammars. Some data suggests

this empathy specifically concerns writing anxiety. Table 8.5, below, compares respondents’

emotions ATE with their approach to grading grammar. No one indicated that they factor

grammar heavily into grades. For five of the six groups of respondents (based on emotions

ATE), the assessment most often selected was “I comment on grammar and it factors slightly

into the grade.” This trend may mean that teacher training and resources sufficiently address the

topic of grammar in relation to assessment. This knowledge can help guide further development

of teacher training. The only group to have most respondents select an alternate assessment

practice was the group who qualified their emotions ATE as “very negative.” The majority of

respondents in this group reported that they “comment on grammar but it does not factor into the

grade.” This trend, unique to teachers who described their memorable experience as “very

negative,” could indicate that teachers with negative emotional experiences learning grammar

empathize strongly with student writing anxiety (as described by Baker-Bell and Shaughnessy)

and therefore penalize grammar “errors” less often than teachers who have had other types of

emotional experiences. If true, this causal relationship would mean that reflection on negative

past experiences could help writing teachers better understand why penalizing non-traditional

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grammar, a practice from traditional grammar instruction, does not create a fair or productive

experience for all students. Another explanation might be that teachers with negative experiences

prioritize other writing skills over formal grammar. A larger sample of teachers with negative

experiences is needed to confirm either of these explanations.

Table 8.5 Comparison of Emotions ATE and Teachers’ Grading of Grammar

Comment

on but Do

Not Grade

Comment

on and

Factor

Slightly

into Grade

Comment

on and

Factor

Heavily

into Grade

Do Not

Comment

on and Do

Not Grade

Other Total of

Teachers with

Emotion ATE

Very Neg.

ATE

47% (9*) 26% (5) 0% 11% (2) 16% (3) 19

Somewhat

Neg. ATE

17% (4) 58% (14) 0% 4% (1) 21% (5) 24

Very Pos.

ATE

11% (4) 43% (16) 0% 19% (7) 27% (10) 37

Somewhat

Pos. ATE

19% (3) 44% (7) 0% 25% (4) 13% (2) 16

Neither ATE 29% (2) 29% (2) 0% 0% 43% (3) 7

Both ATE 17% (1) 33% (2) 0% 33% (2) 17% (1) 6

There are other possible explanations for the teachers’ factoring grammar low in grades.

Muriel Harris’ essay in Bad Ideas about Writing critiques over-commenting on student papers.

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According to Harris, over-commenting is a common error among writing teachers (269).

Interestingly, the teachers surveyed were unanimous in not factoring grammar heavily into

grades, but the majority of them do comment on grammar to some extent. The fact that most

teachers comment on grammar indicates that they see some benefit to grammar instruction, even

if they themselves do not highly value traditional English grammar “proficiency.” What is

interesting, then, is that many respondents choose not to grade this skill. One of the issues Harris

points out about over-commenting is the way teacher comments can misrepresent the hierarchy

of writing skills. According to Harris, too many comments can overwhelm students, leaving

them unsure as to which revisions are most important and leading them to address only the

easier, lower-level concerns (270-271). It is possible that teachers do not heavily factor grammar

into grades because they consider it a less important skill compared to higher order concerns.

However, unless teachers clearly explain in class their grading criteria and rationale, students

might still be misled by the comments and end up believing good writing equates to “correct”

formal grammar.

Another explanation as to why the majority of teachers do not heavily factor grammar

into grades could be that teachers do not want to privilege native speakers with higher grades

simply because they have implicit knowledge of their native language. In interviews, FYW

teachers generally considered multilingual/multidialectal students (e.g. international, first-

generation, ESL, and AAVE speaking students).

Conclusions

The goal of this study was to learn how to better understand First-Year Writing teachers’

emotional histories involving their grammar education to better understand their reactions toward

the topic of grammar. I expected that teachers’ current views of grammar instruction would run

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parallel with their own experiences, with positive histories leading to positive views and negative

ones resulting in negative views. The data from the survey indicated, however, that emotions at

the time of a memorable experience learning grammar do not consistently result in those same

emotions toward teaching grammar in FYW. In fact, the data showed that teachers with positive

past experiences learning grammar often now hold negative feelings toward teaching grammar.

This means that teachers who experienced positive emotions learning grammar are not hindered

in their ability to understand the issues surrounding grammar instruction. Instead of trying to

recreate their experiences, teachers with positive experiences frequently reported in the survey

that they avoid teaching grammar. This avoidance seems to be, at least in part, an attempt to

avoid creating negative experiences for their students. This theory was born out of survey data

which shows teachers with positive experiences expressing awareness for the ways traditional

grammar is often used to oppress minority groups and suppress diverse voices. One possible

explanation for this trend is that teachers with positive experiences learning grammar feel they

owe their positive experiences to certain unjust advantages. A follow up study of this finding

might survey teachers’ feelings as well as their nationality, race, and language practices to better

understand if a correlation exists between certain demographic-based privileges and feelings

about grammar instruction. Another option would be to ask respondents if their concerns for

linguistic discrimination comes from training, research, or personal experience. This information

could reveal the most effective methods of training teachers in these issues.

Another puzzling finding from this study is that the negativity toward grammar that

teachers with positive past experiences expressed was not always negativity toward the subject.

Instead, some teachers with positive past experiences listed negative emotions toward themselves

as teachers of grammar. In such instances, the teachers described their negative emotions toward

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teaching grammar as “confusion” or “anxiety.” These particular emotions seem to indicate that

while some writing teachers have experienced first-hand how positive grammar instruction can

be, they feel underprepared to relay such positive experiences to their own students. It could be

that teachers who have only positive experiences of grammar instruction feel particularly

unqualified to navigate the issues of grammar instruction, explaining why many of them avoid

teaching the topic. Although such teachers may worry that their positive experiences do not

qualify them to teach rhetorical grammars, my interviews showed that positive experiences of

grammar instruction can alert writing teachers of the impact their instruction can have on a

student’s self identity, making such teachers just as sensitive and, arguably, suitable teachers of

rhetorical grammars.

I began this study with the following questions:

1. How might emotional resonances from past experiences as learners of grammar inform

FYW teachers’ positions on grammar instruction?

2. In what ways do FYW teachers consult their past encounters with grammar instruction

when attempting to shape productive and uplifting writing encounters for their students?

3. How do resonating emotions from past experiences affect FYW teachers’ motivation for

discussing grammar instruction?

I have reached the following conclusions to these questions based on the results of my research.

Question 1

Based on the results of this study, teachers’ emotional histories appear to impact their

positions on grammar instruction, but the relationship is not a simple direct correlation. Negative

experiences often resulted in a teacher holding negative views of grammar instruction, but in

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many cases so did positive experiences. The type of emotions at the time of a teachers’

experience of grammar instruction does not appear to predict how that teacher will later feel

about grammar instruction. Instead of the quality of emotions ATE, epiphanic encounters with

grammar instruction proved to be the significant factor. Teachers with these encounters

consistently expressed empathy and passion—empathy in their teaching of grammar(s) and

passion for reforming ideas about grammars and grammar instruction.

Question 2

Participants who indicated having had epiphanic encounters reported, sometimes in direct

relation to their experiences, that they consider their students’ sense of belonging and security.

At least one of the interviewed teachers specifically mentioned CCCC’s “Students’ Rights to

Their Own Language” and others spoke of their interest in social justice in the context of R&C.

Some of this awareness likely comes from training, mentors, or familiarity with current

literature, but as several of the participants themselves reported, their epiphanic encounters also

play a role in shaping their sensitivity to students’ identities. In most cases, they see issues with

the instruction they were given, even if they felt pleasure from it at the time. These findings

show that some FYW teachers consult their personal experiences in deciding if/how they

approach grammars in their classes in an attempt to give their students more productive and

uplifting experiences.

Question 3

For several of the interviewed teachers, it was clear that it was not enough to reform their

own teaching practices and that their experiences helped motivate their advocacy. The teachers

spoke of holding formal and informal conversations about rethinking formal grammar’s role in

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composition. These conversations were held with students, faculty, and the general public. This

reaction to the topic of grammar is a critical one for writing teachers because grammar continues

to be a topic of concern in all kinds of spaces, from virtual chats to familial interactions. If we

are to avoid the pitfalls of the public intellects Paul Butler warns against, writing teachers must

be willing to entertain conversations about grammar instruction’s past and present roles.

Although some writing teachers already promote these conversations, reflection on past

epiphanic encounters can help more teachers continue this work for longer. The interviewees in

this study expressed their frustration with the public’s slow uptake of new understandings of

grammars, but their past experiences continued to motivate their efforts.

Final Thoughts

Unexpectedly, the current study required crossing into studies in emotions, identity

formation, and narratology. The survey responses and the stories shared by select teachers

revealed exciting avenues for ways that teacher educators can help FYW teachers access

empathy and passion, adding to recent research on the usefulness of emotions (outlined in

Chapter Two). Rather than hinder progress, emotions from epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction proved valuable to the advancement of grammar education. The findings from this

study also builds on the growing literature on the language-identity relationship, including the

way narration can help the linguistically oppressed reflect on their identity in respect to their

literacy story and determine the shape and message of their experiences. The added knowledge

from this study serves the R&C field by bringing to light the positive self reflection many FYW

teachers already practice in response to their personal epiphanic encounters with grammar

instruction. Now that we recognize this reflection and its benefits, my hope is that departments

191

will help more writing teachers engage their emotional histories intentionally and leverage their

epiphanic encounters to become the empathetic and passionate teachers needed in the field.

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Afterword

Before this project, I had given little thought to multiple grammars. Having my childhood

split between living in New Jersey and Georgia means I was aware that dialects could be

rhetorical. I had grown up hearing jokes to “fuhgeddaboudit,” an expression made famous by

The Sopranos and supposedly common slang in the New York region--I had never heard it used

seriously. When friends from the North visited, they would tell me I had adopted some of the

accent, calling it “cute.” I quickly learned that talking like a New Yorker carried some street cred

and talking like a Southern belle made a girl sweet. But both were laughed at. Even though I had

given a lot of thought about dialects and what they could do for a person socially, I hadn’t been

forced to consider what they meant for my teaching.

I knew writing could be formal or informal and that slang sometimes had its rhetorical

place in writing, but I took for granted that my job as a composition teacher was to teach one

English, the dominant English. This project forced me to face difficult questions. I listened to

and read trauma stories from students who were made to feel that their speech patterns were

unnatural and saw how, in some cases, these traumas carried into adulthood and impacted the

instructional practices of those who later became FYW teachers. Scholars like Smitherman

enlightened me to the fact that Black English is not a dialect but a language and that English

should be Englishes. By tracing the history of grammar instruction, I found hard evidence that

standardized grammar really was as arbitrary as it felt, and that its dominance in the US is the

result of outdated power structures.

The inspiration for this study began with my own discomfort with the change that would

be required if I agreed with the argument put forward by Asao Inoue’s CCCC address. If I agreed

that writing standards were racist, what would I teach?! I chose a teaching path because I

193

enjoyed teaching students how to communicate more effectively, and here I was, having not even

started my teaching career, being asked to forsake the conventions I had learned to operate and

had hoped to reveal to young writers. Honestly, this troubling feeling followed me throughout

this project, not always spotlighted but always nagging. I felt that if I truly entertained the ideas I

was reading, I would have a mid-career crisis before my career had started. How could I teach

writing if I couldn’t tell students what to write? How could I direct without directives? There is

no unseeing what I have seen, though, and no denying that standardized grammar is a false

standard that privileges some groups over others.

I struggled a lot with these thoughts because I wanted my research to mean something for

my teaching. How, though, could I justly represent all the national Englishes in one, introductory

course? I guess this question was still on my mind as I unwound to a competitive cooking show

one night. As I watched chefs scurry, I thought now there’s a space that has gotten diversity

right. Chefs create dishes out of the inspiration of their culture all the time and they rarely if ever

seem to break out into emotionally charged fights because of it. So why could so many

intellectuals not figure out how to do the same with grammars? Why is it so difficult to accept

Vershawn Ashanti Young’s perspective and treat code meshing as a way to add “flavor and

style” to writing (114) when so many people readily accept variety in their dishes? I realize

some may be thinking academia, with its long-lasting consequences on societal thinking, cannot

be compared to a commercial kitchen. But aren't those effects all the more reason why

curriculums need restructuring?

Ideally, I would like to one day see English departments structure special topic grammar

courses on a rotating basis. These courses could cover the rules and patterns that make each of

the different style discourses unique but legitimate languages. They would also expose students

194

to the histories of each English grammar, building their awareness for the ways languages

interact with social and political power structures. Just as many schools offer multiple,

specialized literature courses, they could also offer courses in Black English grammar,

Appilachian grammar, Louisianan grammar, etc. These wouldn’t be relegated under linguistics

as if these grammars are only good for observation and experimentation. They would be an

integral part of the English curriculum. Just as students are often required to take a literature

course, they would have to take a grammar course. Students won’t learn all the English

grammars in this one course, but through this one course they will learn to appreciate the

multiplicity of grammars, equally recognized by English departments.

The teachers and scholars in this study convinced me that until something can be done on

a grand scale, the first step to helping students embrace their English grammar(s) is a simple and

personal responsibility. Going back to Whitney’s recommended step, we must “educate thyself.”

If we are going to encourage a variety of language patterns, we must be prepared to teach those

patterns, to help native and non-native speakers of those Englishes learn the rules and appreciate

the rhetoric. Knowing isn’t enough, though. As Inoue declared in that CCCC address, it isn’t

enough for writing teachers to value diversity internally; unless we take action to change how

and what we teach, we support racist structures. We need to implement diverse language in the

literature we assign and design prompts that allow for more than one form and style of

communication, but most important is that teachers are informed. I find that students sense what

we ourselves believe as teachers, and we cannot expect students to know and value the grammars

of their families and peers if we do not first know and value them ourselves.

195

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Appendix A

1. On the survey, you reported having a [negative/positive] experience learning grammar in

[context]. Can you tell me about that experience? For example, what was the

environment and who was present?

2. What made that experience [positive/negative] for you in that moment?

3. What makes that experience [positive/negative] for you now as you recall it?

4. How do these emotions impact your current understanding of grammar and grammar

instruction?

5. On the survey, you answered that the experience you described in the survey has [degree

indicated] impacted your approaches to teaching grammar? Can you please elaborate?

6. On the survey, you indicated that you feel [emotions from survey] when you think about

currently teaching grammar in FYW. Why do you think you feel this way?

7. On the survey, you reported that you use the term grammar with FYW students

[contexts]. What is the reason you use the term this way?

The following questions were included in the interview only if applicable to the individual.

8. If the participant indicated that they do not schedule class time to teach grammar: On the

survey, you indicated that you do not schedule class time for teaching grammar? What is

the main reason for this?

9. If the participant answered that they teach any of the subjects from Question 2: On the

survey you indicated that you do not teach grammar but you do teach [alternate subject].

What guides this decision? What do you see as the relationship between grammar and

[alternate subject]