I used to be one of the persons who assumed that written expression was a minor matter compared to "the facts" and "the findings of my research" (Barzun,1975). Taking some graduate writing courses at school and reading books like Simple and Direct (Barzun,1975) and The Craft of Research (Booth et al, 2008) changed my thought completely. Though my professors acknowledged that I have made progress in academic writing, I know there is much to learn and some seemingly impassable barrier lurking on the way. To be honest, I cannot say the process of studying to write is full of pleasure. When the composition on which I've spent hours drafting and revising was criticized here and there, I doubted my eligibility for graduate school. After all, writing is the most common task students would face in graduate school, especially for those who are majoring in humanities. That being said, I still cherish the harsh and direct feedback and contemplate how to improve my writing as well as why my carefully-worded work does not meet the standard.
The first reason for my work not meeting the academic standard is that I failed to use academic words and their derivatives. As long as my meaning is clearly expressed, the diction does not matter that much to me, so the style of my work does not seem scholarly. Since my first language is Chinese, a language is not cognates with English at all. (Cognates, as defined by Moss (1992) in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, it refers to “Akin, descended from a common ancestor.”) Route learning is the principal way for me to learn the vocabulary. The accompanying side-effect of mere memorizing is semantic mistakes and collocation misuse. I did well in English exams where the items being tested are something I've learned before, but when it comes to the output part that I am required to write something on my own, things are quite different from the test. Besides, the structure of my article is problematic as well. Though I have a clear framework of the thesis statement and supporting points in mind, the sentences become discursive when the idea comes to words. My meandering paragraphs lead readers to circle at the same point rather than move back or forward. Once I learned that I have such problem in writing, I have been trying to correct myself, but it does not seem to work well. Then I started wondering if there was something different in the way of thinking between the westerners and me, and if thinking should go before writing or the other way around. Thanks to Rachel Cayley's blog, I confirmed that the thinking before writing totally makes sense. Therefore, I am more committed to looking for the answer for the first question. The concept of Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric happened to popped up in my view when I was browsing online for solutions. Kaplan saw that "cultural differences in the nature of rhetoric supply the key to understanding the difference in international students' writing" (Connor, 1996: 11). Many scholars, like Spack, Zamel, and Scollon, later criticized the contrastive rhetoric because its stress on differences tended to apply polarized characterizations to cultural difference. Connor improved the traditional contrastive theory by bringing up the intercultural rhetoric. In her 1996 book Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second-Language Writing, she described the intercultural rhetoric from three aspects: culture is a complex intersection of national, disciplinary and other cultures; texts must be studied in the social contexts in which they were written and spoken; written discourse encounters necessitate negotiation and accommodation. Case studies carried out in China are also introduced in the book, which confirms the existence of differentiation between Chinese students' writing with westerners' writing. Having read the theories and studies, I think that it is not my ability that should take the blame. Rather, it could be the deep-rooted Chinese cultural background guide me to write in a different way. Using euphemistic sentences to support my idea is a habit just like using chopsticks to have meals for me. Though I feel relieved to a certain extent, cultural difference cannot be the excuse keeping me stop trying to better my writing skills to present appropriate scholar works. If you have encountered similar situations, say, not sure about the usage of collocations, you may would like to refer to this website http://ozdic.com/ . If you have make semantic mistakes too, broadly reading good works might help. Even if it takes time to make a difference in writing, I'm sure such skill will be collected into our arsenal in the end. References: Barzun, J. (1975). Simple & direct: A rhetoric for writers. New York: Harper & Row; Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2008). The craft of research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cayley, R. (2014, April 23). Writing as Thinking. [Web log]. Retrieved from: https://explorationsofstyle.com/2014/04/23/writing-as-thinking/ Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, U. (2003, March 08). New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric. Tesol Quarterly, 36, 4, 493-510. Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, W. V. (2007). Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. Moss, G. (1992). Cognate recognition: Its importance in the teaching of ESP reading courses to Spanish speakers. English for Specific Purposes 11:141–58.
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TeachingWhat is a homonym/ homophone/homograph? G is a ninth-grade francophone student I tutored in YMCA. She was scratching her head because of the English homework when I came to her. The teacher asked G to revise the first part of her composition and to go on finishing the rest of the detective story. G told me that both the teacher and her mother, who is another English teacher, commented that her story doesn't make sense. We are not going to go over how I posited myself back to an age full of imagination and came up with some plausible scenarios to force the bad guys to be clumsy enough to leave some clues for the police. The constant misuse of homophones in her passage caught my eye. There is no difficulty for G to express herself orally, partly because she was born and raised in the states until she was eight. However, when it comes to writing tasks, she has trouble in lexical selection from time to time, especially the frequently encountered homographs. In G's composition, "She found TOO bracelets on the ground." contains a homophone of "two" which she intended to use in the beginning. This is not the only misused pair of homophones appeared in her passage. Typical examples like "by" and "buy" can also be found. I don't think the problem lies in G's overall English level. In contrast, there might be something peculiar about the homonym.
Then I looked up some materials about homonyms. Jared et al (2016) carried out three experiments to examine the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. They used the homophone error paradigm, which assumes that if readers activate the meanings of words using phonology, then homophone errors should be harder to detect than spelling control errors. When homophone errors are embedded in contexts of sentences or stories, both good and poor readers detect less homophone errors than spelling control errors. These three experiments provide clear evidence that phonology makes an important contribution to the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 readers. I also found an interesting effect named homophone effect. Homophone effect mainly refers to that a person need more lexical decision time compared to non-homophones. The homophone effect has been attributed to orthographic competition created by feedback from phonology. In addition, they suggest that homophone effects could not be diminished(Pexman et al., 2001). More recently, Newman (2011) discussed the the homophone effects during visual word recognition among children in greater detail. She conducted some experiments with a group of children aging between 7 and 13, leading them to participate in a lexical decision task in which lexical frequency and homophony were manipulated. The study found that homophony has a significant impact on children’s lexical decision times and brain activation patterns and that this effect was modulated by age. Since the significance of the homophone effects is revealed and there are surely quite a few students having trouble telling the homophones from each other, we need to think about what teachers can do to help solve the problem. I happened to come across an exercise on the other day. Student C had an exercise requiring him to use pairs of homographs to make up a sentence. The exercise includes "lead(n.) & lead(v.)", "tear(n.) & tear(v.)", "flour & flower" and "soar & sore". Such exercise raises students' awareness about the existence of homonyms though they don't know there is such a word called homonym, but how aware they can be when the words are put back into contexts remains unknown. On the other hand, such exercise poses to be a good opportunity to push the student to resort to the dictionary because there is no illustrative pictures or anything about the meaning. The teacher or the instruction should have clearly told the students that they should look the words up if they don't understand. Student C didn't know what "soar" means and he didn't have a dictionary with him. I explained two meanings of "soar" to C: The price of a bottle of juice goes up from $1 to $100; An eagle swoops down on a rabbit, and then? (with my hand gesturing flying up to the sky). At last we decided to use the latter meaning of soar here for the sake of easiness. Casenhiser's research clearly demonstrates children's dispreference in learning a different, unrelated meaning for a known word when that word is used in a linguistic context that fails to bias strongly for a new meaning. If language language exists for communication, it is possible that sound and meaning will evolve to form a one-to-one correspondence for the sake of avoiding ambiguity. Anyway, let's see! References: Casenhiser, D. M. (May 14, 2005). Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms. Journal of Child Language, 32, 2, 319-343. Choose your words: Homonym, Homophone, Homograph. Retrieved from: https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-homophone- homograph/; "homograph". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: from http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homograph; "homonym". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homonym; "homophone". (2015). In Longman Dictionary. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/homophone; Jared, D., Ashby, J., Agauas, S. J., & Levy, B. A. (January 01, 2016). Phonological activation of word meanings in grade 5 readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 4, 524-41. Newman, S. D. (January 01, 2012). The homophone effect during visual word recognition in children: an fMRI study. Psychological Research, 76, 3, 280-91. Pexman, P. M., Lupker, S. J., & Jared, D. (January 01, 2001). Homophone effects in lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1, 139-56. |