It Ain't Whatcha Say

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe what appears to be a successful experiment in teaching levels of diction recently carried out in the freshman composition course for EFL students at Southern Illinois University. This course, required of all non-native undergraduate speakers of English, was established on the premise that the needs of such students are in many ways different from those of students who are native speakers of the language. It closely parallels the regular composition course in content and format but is different chiefly in methodology, for it is designed to break down the linguistic inhibitions so common to EFL students and so detrimental to the internalization process. The course is getting good results. It is taught by graduate students working toward the M.A. in the University's EFL program; they are closely supervised by an experienced composition and EFL teacher, in this instance the present writer, who devised and applied the pedagogic experiment summarized below. The experiment grew out of the conviction that EFL students beginning college work are frequently more inhibited by their lack of awareness of the rhetorical principle of appropriateness than by difficulties of vocabulary and syntax. Indeed, the EFL student is often more creative in using English than the native American student, who has usually become as indifferent to his language as he is to his pleura. If it gets a bit tarclogged and edemic but still functions, the average American student assumes it will never give him problems. The EFL student has no such confidence. Where the native student needs training that will stimulate an awareness of the power of his language, a pride and facility in his own usage, and a sensitivity to its significance as a cultural manifestation, the EFL student has not yet fully developed an idiolect, an identifiable dialect, or a carefree attitude toward the English language. Thus, his needs as a composition student are substantially different from those of his American counterpart. Most of the EFL students in the SIU program have had from six months to two years of traditional pattern practice and substitution drills. They are under several handicaps. First, they have often committed to memory words and syntactic patterns without really understanding the significant nuances of lexical or syntactic synonymy. Second, they have not become aware of the arbitrariness involved in determining conventional correctness in either oral or written English. Third, because they sense their own linguistic inadequacy, they are disinclined to seek out friends or to partici-