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According to Daniel de Vise (2006), a staff writer for The Washington Post, in 1985 the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a highly respected source for accepted focus and implementation, made an about-face regarding grammar drills that were once characterized as "a deterrent to the improvement of students' speaking and writing" (p. A02). According to one of the NCTE’s publications:
What you have is a generation of teachers from the early to mid-'70s who don't know grammar, who never learned it. We have armies of teachers, elementary teachers and English teachers, who don't have the language to talk about language. It's kind of their dirty little secret. (p. A02)
To hear a teacher use the wrong verb tense or pronoun should be a thing of the past. Administrators should make this one of the foci for their district as well as themselves. Teacher education programs should hold students accountable before admitting them to the teacher education program when poor grammar and writing are evident. If there is a problem, then steps should be in place to give them the remediation they need while maintaining their dignity and privacy. We must remediate the college students’ deficiencies before they add to an existing problem. In order to help students in the 21st century improve their writing skills, the pre-service teachers who are trained in our nation's teacher education programs need to be proficient writers.
Computer-assisted instruction might offer one such solution. According to Caverly (1995), using meta-analysis techniques for college populations, the effect sizes (for using computer-assisted instruction) have been low but positive, averaging .31 for achievement. That is, summaries of research suggest that computer-assisted instruction raises an experimental group’s performance about 10 percentile points over that of the control group. Yet another solution might come directly from the students themselves. The teens surveyed in the Parent and Teen Survey on Writing (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008) indicated that their writing skills “would be improved by two potential changes to their
school curricula: teachers who have them spend more time writing in class and teachers using more computer-based tools (such as games, writing help programs or websites, or multimedia) to teach writing” (p. iv). This adds further credence to the idea that a computer-assisted program may well assist students in gaining skills in the conventions of writing.
Another possible solution to remediating writing difficulties in higher education settings rests on the use of individual/small group writing conferences. Eight percent of teachers reported that they meet with students about their writing at least one to two times per week and an additional 29% held writing conferences one to two times per month (Kiuhara, Graham, and Hawken, 2009). Writing conferences typically consist of questioning the author of a piece of writing to gain a better understanding of the author’s thought processes. Gunning (2010) suggested using three types of questions – opening, following, and process. These questions “are nonjudgmental and are intended to evoke an open and honest response” (p. 521). While Gunning discussed writing conferences with elementary students, these three question types may also be appropriate for college students. “Through questioning, the teacher comes to an understanding of the writer. Using this understanding, the teacher is better able to supply the guidance that will best help the writer develop” (Gunning, 2010, p. 522).