The topic my students were given to
discuss, civil disobedience in comparison to breaking the law, pulled out
strengths in the students’ writing because they seemed to be passionate about
the subject. [APPOSITIVE SET OFF MY COMMAS]. Each paper is strong
in its own way. This is interesting because the students appear to come from
different backgrounds. Student 1 is clearly an English as a Second Language (ESL) student
[APPOSITIVE SET OFF BY PARENTHESES]. While he has a strong and interesting
argument, he makes mistakes most native speakers would not. Student 2 grew up
in a different atmosphere – her
argument and syntax, strong and interesting, indicates that she grew up
in a middle-class community, and interacted with many adults throughout her
childhood [ADJECTIVES OUT-OF-ORDER]. Student 3 grew up somewhere in the middle
of Students 1 and 2; he grew up a native English speaker, but in an environment
with not a lot of adult speakers and writers for him to feed off of. He is a
strong writer, but has some issues with verb tenses that Student 2 does not.
Paper
1: “Civil Disobedience VS. Breaking The Law”
Student
1 grew up in a household where English is not the first language; this is
especially clear in some of his word choices. For example, he refers to Beth as pleading
“innocence” rather than “innocent” [PRESENT
PARTICIPIAL PHRASE NOT CONNECTED TO THE MAIN VERB] [USE OF ‘THAN’]. Most native speakers would know
the phrase – “pleading innocent” – from simply hearing it throughout their life
[APPOSITIVE SET OFF BY DASHES]. It is a common phrase in English, but not
necessarily in other languages. Another common English phrase Student 1
attempts to use is “on the other hand”. He changed the word “on” to “in”. The
way he changed the common English phrase is another indication that he did not
grow up in an English speaking family. He had probably heard the phrase before
from native English speakers, and misheard it. Young speakers have a tendency to muddle their words when
speaking, so it is no surprise that Student 1 confused the phrase in his
writing [PAST PARTICIPIAL PHRASE NOT CONNECTED TO THE MAIN VERB]. Other words Student 1 mixes up
are: “indeed”, “been”, and “thought” [APPOSITIVE SET OFF BY A COLON]. In
the context, the words he was looking for were “in need”, “being”, and “think”.
Native English speakers would not make these confusions because they can be
fixed by a familiarity with the spoken language. When students grow up hearing
the language spoken all around them, there are certain rules they understand
but can’t articulate because they can just hear
what the sentence is supposed to be. How would our writing change if we weren’t hearing the language spoken
all around us every day? [RHETORICAL QUESTION].
…
Student 1’s use of varying sentence
structure indicates that he is becoming more comfortable with the English
language – enough to explore [DASH TO EPHASIZE THE LAST ELEMENT
OF THE SENTNECE]. He also experiments with punctuation. English punctuation is
very different from other languages, so the fact that he is willing to do show
also indicates his growing relationship with English. Toward the end of the
paper, he uses a semi-colon and appears to be using it correctly. He says,
“Chris knew what he was doing; he knew that he was risking a ticket because…”
He understands that when using a semi-colon, the writer should be relating the
first part of the sentence to the second part. He uses the second part of the
semi-colon to expand on the first. Then, he makes sure that both sides of the semi-colon are complete
sentences – it cannot be determined for sure that the second part is a
complete sentence because it is cut off, but it appears as though it is going
to be a complete sentence [USE OF ‘THEN’].