While I found the names of Shaughnessy’s four stages annoying, I like her overall suggestion that in order to teach “basic writers,” teachers need to recognize that they must also learn to teach to the needs of the students. I think this is true for most classes, but I see how important it is for developing writers who enter the classroom with the “basic” title. I would have appreciated more how-to although I recognize thats not the purpose of the article—but maybe it should have been? I’ve worked with ESL students and non-ESL basic writers, and I find that they often make similar mistakes—errors in subject verb agreement, consistent tenses, and any number of grammatical errors—so I wonder if there should be a significant amount of time dedicated, within a composition course, to grammar? Or should that be a separate skills-based course? And do those even work? I know we’ve discussed in class that grammar building only works if the student is working on their own sentences, but its incredibly tedious work—so how do we strike the balance?
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