“Written Communication” is the title of this article and it aims
to take a closer look at the level of participation student’s offer in a
classroom. K, cool. But what strikes me as fascinating is that Wolfe does her
study by comparing face-face and Computer mediated communication, but does not
call attention to the fact that one medium is purely textual and the other is a
lived experience. Not really at leas Did I miss it? Some of the students mention this and
she talks about them noticing this difference, but I almost feel that this
difference should be researched, probably has or is researched, and that her work, without taking this into
consideration or at least allowing a section to talk about it and discuss it a bit more, is … lacking? Inaccurate? IDK- those aren't the appropriate words
to use to convey my meaning but I thought about them and on some level I feel
they are kinda correct to what I am trying to say. I mean, in a face to face interaction, you
are speaking and interacting, not writing and interacting. This is like the
biggest fucking issue ever- that speaking doesn't translate to writing and vice
versa when limited to a purely academic mode of communicating. But maybe since it is only about participation,
this emphasis on standard academic English is not so strict. But I wonder, even if this is the case, how
ingrained is this need to speak and write in SAE for students that even if you
don’t mention it, they are subconsciously being shaped by this feeling of
having to communicate in a certain genre.
I believe this is key a difference and point of analysis that is ignored
by her research and in my mind – it explains a lot of the findings and “surprises”
of her research.
While reading this I thought of how a student’s nonstandard English
could not only be appropriate, but understood in a face to face interaction
because of the physical gestures, hand motions, register and tone of the
speaker. The visual itself of seeing a
person speak adds context literally as the words come out of their mouth. Think of someone who is dressed in pajamas
and starts to recite Aristotle. That moment
of conflicting biases? (pajama= wtf or bum, Aristotle= educated, legitimate *stereotypes, I know, that is the point)
creates confusion and ultimately effects how one interprets the speaker and
their interaction with the material, the class, another student, the
instructor, etc. That may have been a
shitty example, but it’s all I got at the moment.
Now in the CMC interaction, although you may see a name, and
possibly be able to put a face to that name, that context is gone. The audio-visual experience that assists the
speaker in communicating meaning is gone.
Now the speaker is completely reliant on the words he or she uses. At this point, I wonder how many of the
students studied suffer from second language issues or things along those lines
because if I know that I struggle to speak and write standard academic English, then my
CMC is going to be limited because unlike in the classroom where you see me and
I can talk and perform my way towards communication, on the computer, with pure
text, that is not so easy. And even if I
feel or am told I can speak colloquially, there is still this underlying need
to be clear and coherent by academic English standards. You can’t help but think…fuck, these guys
are going to judge me if I say that, or they are going to think I can’t talk or
read or write or I’m stupid because the way my dialect or vernacular or slang
or broken English translates into text.
Get me?
Interesting read. I
also wonder how this data would change now that colleges are filled with more
females than males. Data taken in 2000 seems obsolete at the rate information and technology is going.
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