I met with Jee and Ann the other weekend at the small Korean restaurant on Tennessee Street. The two were preparing for a debate and wanted some tips over dinner. The topic was on being a vegetarian with Ann being pro-vegetarian and Jee being pro-meat. They had printed out a guide from the internet.
Oh the internet… I was trying to read some of the points out loud to Francis, but the English was not American. The arguments were vague and obtuse, the vocabulary out-dated, child-like, and almost off-topic. The whole worksheet was distracting, and I had to reread paragraphs for each argument at least twice. Jee sighed with relief when I told her this wasn’t an American way of speaking, writing, or forming an argument and that she should simplify the language in her points.
Rather than simply give Jee the answers to formulate her argument, I asked Ann what her main points were. Jee and I wrote them down in a notebook and I asked Jee how she might naturally counter them in a regular conversation. She was a little nervous that the class would agree that there were more benefits to being a vegetarian, so I asked her if she would become a vegetarian. No. So I asked her to come up with her reasons why. On her own, Jee was able to counter most of the points Ann was making- as she wrote out these points I told her she didn’t necessarily need the article. (This “article” was a chart of mini-paragraphs in boxes of pro side and con side arguments to vegetarian points. But all of it was hodge-podge English.) Instead we went through the paragraphs argument by argument, I asked Jee to summarize the main idea- and then compare the article’s arguments to her own.
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