First-Year Writing Teachers' Emotions and Grammar Instruction: A Mixed Methods Study

This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers' experiences learning grammar impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson and Martha Kolln agree that some knowledge of grammar helps students' rhetorical acuity but not when taught with rules and isolated exercises. CCCC's "Students Rights to Their Own Language" and the work of scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have shed light on the language-identity relationship and the damage that standardization inflicts on a person's sense of self. This pedagogical paradigm has created tension for writing teachers and their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic. Joseph Williams wondered at the rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay "The Phenomenology of Errors." This dissertation builds on Williams' work, suggesting we look to teachers' histories to understand their emotions and find usefulness in these emotions. Using grounded theory, I code six interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their memorable encounters with grammar instruction. I then identify patterns in these stories and the interviewees' practices and compare them against the results of a nation-wide survey of over a hundred first-year writing teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the instruction impacts the learner's sense of self. I trace a connection between these encounters and teachers' feelings of empathy for their students and passion for grammar instruction's reform. I argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers locate points of empathy for their students' experiences of grammars and promote productive conversations about grammar instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that educators of first-year writing teachers implement grammar-focused reflection into their teacher training as a way of leveraging teachers' emotions toward the topic of grammar to facilitate productive conversations about grammar instruction.

In the first chapter, I question the impact of teachers' emotional resonances from personal encounters with grammar instruction. I introduce my emotional encounter with grammar instruction and describe the emotional reactions I have encountered when attempting to engage writing teachers in conversations about grammar instruction. After reviewing the project, I situate my work in scholarship on emotions in composition. My findings respond to Joseph Williams' "Phenomenology of Errors" in which he explores why people respond strongly to "grammar errors." My work also contributes to inquiries in teacher training and the use of self reflection as professional development. I suggest that student teachers reflect on their past encounters with grammar to better empathize with their students' experiences.

Chapter Two constructs a history of grammar instruction in America, from the 1860s to the present, mid-twenty-first century. Through this review, I show how pedagogical debates and language anxiety have always followed grammar and, depending on the person's skill and class, made it the source of anger, fear, hope, or shame. I highlight the social and educational shifts that formed grammar around the ugly shapes of class and race discrimination, including the East Coast's development, regional dialects, and increased demand for education.

Chapter Three details my methods of investigation. Here I explain the rationale behind my study design, which uses surveys and interviews. The interviews provided qualitative details beyond what the heavily structured survey could and allowed teachers to describe their beliefs and experiences in their own words. It was important to collect these first-hand accounts to better understand the internal processes behind teachers' reactions. The survey provided quantitative data with which to identify overarching trends and test theories devised from the interviews. These steps in turn indicated the generalizability of the findings. This chapter also explains my use of Critical Incident Theory to write the survey and interview questions and my use of grounded theory to code and analyze the data.

In Chapter Four, I present the results of the nation-wide survey and the six, one-on-one interviews. By comparing responses to different survey questions, (e.g. number of respondents to report having had positive emotions at the time of their experience and now hold negative emotions toward teaching grammar), I determined that the teachers' emotions at the time of their experience did not correlate with any particular teaching practices or feelings toward teaching grammar. However, 72% of all teachers surveyed and 89% of teachers who had "very negative" emotions at the time of their experience reported that their experience has impacted their teaching of grammar. This means grammar studies that hope to change teachers' practices will need to consider how to address teachers' past experiences.

Chapter Five is the first of two analysis chapters. By attending to content and word choice of survey and interview responses, I find that the teachers whose stories include evidence of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction tend to show empathy for students' diversity and the negative experiences their students may have had with grammars. Furthermore, most of these teachers spoke of teaching practices they implement to serve multilingual/multidialectal students. Teacher training can benefit from these findings since self-reflection on transformational learning experiences could be used in teacher training to help teachers appreciate the issues surrounding grammars and respond to them with sensitive practices.

In Chapter Six, I show how in addition to empathy, teachers with epiphanic encounters also tend to feel passion. I use the term passion to designate heightened emotions, such as anger or excitement, that compel teachers to teach new perspectives on grammars in classes and/or social settings. I find that this emotion is not always pleasant for the teachers experiencing it, but their beliefs in a more equitable teaching of grammars motivates them to spread alternative understandings of writing instruction and grammars' role in it. Additionally, this chapter compares the survey data to the interview data and finds evidence that the pattern of passion exists in this larger sample. This finding strengthens the likelihood that this trend extends to most first-year writing teachers, making grammar-focused reflection a viable tool to motivate new teachers to continue valuable conversations needed to spread new knowledge about grammars.

In the final two chapters, I present a lesson plan to be used to prepare student teachers to address grammars in a way that honors students' identities and language rights. This activity has teachers reflect on their emotional encounters with grammar instruction and consider how their students' experiences may be similar or different. The discussion questions push student teachers to dig deep into the complicated and uncomfortable issues surrounding grammar instruction. After the lesson, students should understand the most common debates about grammar instruction and have strategies to teach grammars rhetorically and respectfully.