Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation

Abstract

Several states have now implemented policies restricting basic writers' access to four-year universities, and the students most likely to be affected are African American, Latino, and nonnative English speakers. The pressure to speed students' mastery of standard written English, along with the trend toward more explicit instruction in second language pedagogy, has resulted in a renewed interest in teaching grammar. While some of these recommendations claim that standard written English can be taught as one code among many, used for certain rhetorical situations, such approaches may not prove more inclusive when the syntactic features of academic writing are presented as relatively benign choices, nor do they adequately explain the different ways we process spoken and written texts. This article describes an approach using open-ended games to help activate the switch all writers must make, regardless of home language, when they shift from spoken word to print text.