Mark Shea
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
We often associate metalinguistic terminology with an adherence to normative language standards in students’ writing. Basing metalinguistic practice on students’ own writing can also evoke demotivating and damaging episodes in prior educational contexts. A more productive way to incorporate a focus on metalinguistic language into writing courses might be to frame metalinguistic terms as a resource for students to increase the depth and precision of their analysis of class readings. This activity provides space for attention to linguistic structure and metalinguistic terminology in quick bites that supplement major reading and writing assignments. While engaged with course readings, students select sentences which they find beautiful (or significant, or meaningful), and describe the sentence in terms of an assigned metalinguistic feature (e.g., number of clauses, use of adjectives, evocative or expressive vocabulary choices). These brief responses are easy to assess, and feedback can be provided through instructor comments or in-class discussion. The activity can also be incorporated as a pre-writing activity to generate interpretations of direct quotations students include in text-based written assignments. This activity takes a positive perspective on metalinguistic terminology, framing it as a means for going deeper into the language used by authors, rather than for labeling errors or non-standard language in students’ own writing. The activity provides rich opportunities to discuss normative language standards and rhetorical effects of particular language structures. Sequenced versions of this activity on a range of targets can be offered over a semester. Suggested targets are: choose the most significant word in the sentence and suggest a synonym; move another element of the sentence into the subject position; identify and categorize modifying elements.