Question:
I teach in a program in which the final written examination
is what determines a student's eligibility to "mainstream" with non-ESL
students....they do not have to pass a reding or speaking or comprehension
test. As a result, this written exam takes on huge important and with it,
punctuation. The examination papers are frequently evaluated by teachers of
"regular" (native speaker) classes, who have a tendency to grade poorly
anything that seems foreign. For example, an American student might leave
out a comma in a particular place, and that is a "standard" error. But an
ESL student might make the error of inserting too MANY commmas (rather
than not enough). This latter kind of mistake seems to be graded more
harshly because it sounds more "strange" (ie "foreign"). Anyway, whatever
the reason, punctuation takes on much more importance that it deserves (IMHO).
So, does anyone have any good ideas for teacher punctuation in English,
particularly to speakers of other European languages, who naturally tend to
apply the rules for their own languages when writing English.
My colleagues here in the faculty room share my concern with punctuation,
and I imagine there are many other teachers out there in the virtual "lounge"
with the same question, so please reply to the list so that others besides me
get the benefit of the shared wisdom!
Answer:
My observation is that it isn't punctuation in general, but commas
in particular which are difficult for students.
I've even had students, when I was explaining some type of clause, ask
me: Shouldn't there be a comma there?
A student question, of course, is the easiest entree into explaining
differences in punctuation usage.
Teaching punctuation along with clauses is not bad.
Also, in reading classes, I include the use of the semi-colon (vs the
tendency of certain languages, especially Spanish in my experience,
to use a comma) to link two independent clauses which have closely
related ideas. (This would be at a time in which I was talking about
the ideas various transition devices signal to the readers.)
If I were going to focus more attention on this, I might hand out a
lengthy article with a fair amount of punctuation/number of commas.
I would first have the student do something with it that involved reading
and understanding the article. I would then have them go back through
and look for all the punctuation/commas/whatever, and ask them to
also note where they would have put punctuation that the author
didn't. Discussion would follow, of course.
Not yet a user of concordances/corpora, it would seem to me there
might be a way for people more skilled in their use to have the
students use them to search for punctuation.
One of the problems with teaching punctuation, of course, is that
NS writers do not use commas consistently. There are quite a
few commas that I consider "optional", and that I include only when
they help make my ideas clearer. College handbooks and
highly prescriptive English instructors do not always agree with me
on everything I consider optional, even if I point out examples in
"good" writing that follow the pattern I support.
There are even times when I would normally put in commas,
but make a conscious decision to eliminate them (or use parentheses
or dashes) because there are already a lot of commas in the
sentence, and it would start to be confusing to the reader which
commas "went with" ( or were independent of) other commas
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