Error Revisited

After reading Kendall's "The Assignment Sheet Mystery" and Bartholomae's "The Study of Error", I became concerned that I could have handled my review of a friend's paper (the subject of my last post) better than I did. Given the apparently tight relationship between speaking and writing, I decided to revisit the paper with my friend, just so test out a few things.

He was a little apprehensive. He had already turned his paper in and wasn't seeking general English lessons, but I told him it would help me for a class and he submitted. I highlighted some of the most grammatically hazardous passages in his paper, and asked them to read them aloud. He read the first one, and looked up towards me. I had this a facial expression that screamed, "Do you hear that? You get it now, right?" But his face was blank. I asked if he heard anything wrong with the last sentence he had read, and he responded "No".

I repeated the exercise for all of the highlighted passages. Of the nine passages I highlighted, he thought that seven of them sounded perfectly fine, and that two of them could be phrased better, but that "I chose to phrase the sentence like I did. I could change it, but I don't see the point." This put an interesting spin on the role of "error analysis" that Bartholomae discusses.

I was trying to extract what he was doing correct: The quotes were relevant to his argument, his ideas adequately responded to the assignment sheet, and he supported his argument with sources. He clearly understood the paper topic and the aim of the paper. His ideas simply were not translating over well from Chinese to English and verbal communication wasn't getting him to notice it. This wasn't an error of speech to text, but language to language.

The two most consistent errors I found were unnecessary extra words like "multiple many" or "because since", and problems with tense and number such as "The crusaders was fought" or "People liking be knighted". I'm not a grammar scholar, but I explained the problems with both of these errors to him. He said he understood the examples I explained to him, but when I asked him to correct a different sentence, his correction maintained the issue. The influence that the structure of his primary language plays still plagues the clarity of his writing, however, I hope that at least by making him aware of two of his most consistent errors he'll begin to start catching himself in future papers and that I'll learn how to better explain his English grammatical errors to him later.