Class Last Week

Actually, this would have been class two weeks ago; it seems like a million years have passed, for some reason... I think I share the same feelings as many of my classmates about getting frustrated with the tree diagram exercise – it was just very difficult to manipulate the mouse to diagram the sentences. I tried to help out and ended up erasing what my group mates had contributed. Anyway, I hopefully redeemed myself by figuring out how to diagram via word and posting it for my group. Incidentally, the woman who was voted Minnesota teacher of the year in 2008 has her English students diagram sentences. She believes that it leads to a better understanding of grammar and to better writing. It seems that the trend is moving back towards more explicit grammar instruction. Many people disagree with this, but it’s not necessarily an entirely bad idea. Many college freshmen that I work with express frustration that they were never taught these things in high school.

Freeman & Freeman - Chapter 7:
Chapter 7 focuses upon how words are formed, word classification, and how words enter a language.
Morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning. ‘Cat’ is an example; when the inflectional morpheme ‘s’ is added, the word becomes ‘cats’ – ‘s’ cannot stand on its own, therefore it is a bound morpheme. Words can also consist of 2 free morphemes to become compounds such as ‘ catnip’. English has 8 inflectional morphemes, while other languages are polysynthetic, meaning they have many more inflections than English.
Traditionally, English words were classified as nouns, verbs adjectives, etc., Freeman & Freeman point out that memorizing parts of speech doesn’t seem to help students. I was confused about this point because explain the difference of how an adverb or an adjective functions, does seem to help some of the students whom I have worked with. However, they point out that current approaches seem to focus more upon ‘morphological evidence,’ or patterns when teaching morphology, and that the more current explanation may be more thorough. Additionally, new terms to describe words have been developed (intensifier, determiner). Frankly, having been taught more traditionally, I find the shift in terminology a little confusing because the article/noun/verb thing is so deeply embedded in my brain that it’s hard to re-conceptualize parts of language.
I always enjoy discussions related to word etymologies, so I enjoyed the section about how words enter a language. It is also fun to observe how language evolves as new ideas come into language. For example ‘google ‘ is now a verb, but my spell-check still catches it. I wonder when this will stop? Words enter language because they are ‘coined’, or colloquialisms become acceptable (I.E.: metrosexual – which my spell check highlights), or they are borrowed. ‘Taboo’ came into the language in 1770, ‘amuck’ in 1510, and ‘bagel’ not until 1930. ‘Metrosexual’ was admitted to Webster’s dictionary in 1994, but my spell-check hasn’t caught up!

Freeman and Freeman Chapters 7 and 8

This was a nice review/ perspective that went well with the Finegan chapter read previously. I believe, like others in our class, that the sociolinguistic approach seems more viable, at least to me. This probably because language seems primarily based on interaction and communication. The word recognition approach had useful points, but it seems like memorization techniques do not work so well when placed out of a meaningful context. Chapter 8 discussed the not so useful practice of teaching ‘grammar’ (I.E : verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) to younger students, because this sort of ‘divorces’ the form/meaning/use interplay. Perhaps, though, a very general discussion about verbs changing form and adjectives describing things, could be useful. I mostly work with ELL student who have had some college education in their different countries, and the classification of words seems familiar and helpful to them. Having rarely worked with younger ELL students, I am curious about what my classmates who work with younger students think about this.

Additionally, I also liked the discussion about the gap between conversational English and academic English in chapt. 8. This struck me as very relevant. Last semester I focused research on how a 100 level composition class could potentially contain underprepared U.S. students. International students, and ELL students who’d been partially educated in the U.S. Each group has different strengths and needs. For example, an international student may be very adept at understanding and explaining grammar structures, but may have difficulty with producing longer pieces of written work, or with conversational / informal English. Other groups will have different needs and abilities. Of course this all varies with individuals, but Freeman and Freeman’s point about this discrepancy seemed very appropriate and indicated that all English language learners are not a homogeneous group. I agree with this and appreciate their point.

The more technical explanations RE: morphology were interesting, and as I discussed in my posting this week, they could be helpful, depending on the student’s proficiency and language background. I have had some luck with this, but only with students who were more advanced, and/or whose L1 shared some characteristics with English. For beginning learners, I think that a lot of information about prefixes, suffixes and word roots could, perhaps, interfere with learning.

Class 2/19

I enjoyed class tonight because I actually enjoy learning about English grammar, formally. I agree with my fellow English L1 classmates, that often, you intuitively know grammar, but can’t really explain it. I think I’ve become a much better teacher having studied grammar on a more structural basis. I also very much enjoyed the presentation on Chinese characters, and it made me consider how this very different representation of sounds and words could lead to many different ways of processing ideas and language. It was interesting and the character worksheets (PDF files on D2L) helped to enhance my understanding. Thanks to my classmates who put this together!

Finegan chapter one

Finegan presents an overview of languages, their patterns, structures and their complexity. All languages are patterned and all language evolve. Language is a three sided triangle that is concerned with meaning, context and expression. Language can be seen as an umbrella that encompasses many dialects. Grammar, simply put, is how language is organized. Communication involves writing, speaking and signs. Some attempts have been made to connect the manner that chimps learns signing to how children acquire language, but there is no conclusive evidence of a connection between the species. Corpus linguistics has made it possible to examine informal speech on a large scale.

I don’t have much to add to this summary because it is fairly straightforward. Some of the points, like “is there a proper English?” worked very well with the American Tongues video. Also, the point that all utterances are grammatical (in that they are patterned, meaningful and are evolving), is interesting, but can cause a quandary for people who want to teach a language in a manner that will most benefit an individual. As American Tongues stressed, dialect, and grammar choices carry connotations. It’s just a delicate balance between recognizing how closely social identity is connected to language, and trying to create the optimal success for students.

American Tongues

I love this production and all my Wisconsin friends who talk about ‘bubblers’ and ‘signal lights’☻- It’s a great way to demonstrate the variety and richness of English dialects. The main point that I appreciated was the stress on what is considered ‘proper’ and how people tend to base opinions/impressions based on dialect. Also, I simply liked hearing all the different ways of speaking. The fact that dialects can be traced to immigrant populations from early settlers’ points of origin is fascinating. I don’t know if any of my fellow classmates are insomniacs like me, but I have caught a PBS program called (I think) ‘How to Speak American’ late at night a few times, and it is very interesting and reminds me of this video.

How do we learn these attitudes? That’s also very interesting. I have been reading “Strawberry Girl” by Lois Lensky with my daughter – it takes place in Florida in the later 1800s and is written in a strong regional vernacular.- and my daughter commented that she was afraid she was starting to talk like a ‘hill-billy!’ I have no idea where she got the idea that one dialect was inferior to another (not from me!), but she just turned 8 and already has very clear ideas about what is ‘proper English’. Interesting.

This video went well with the Finegan chapter, especially the idea of the triangle and the living nature of language.

Freeman chapter two

Again, this is a review for me, but I confess that I have to re-look up terms like behaviorism and constructivism from time to time. The main tension that seems apparent is that some schools tend to stress teaching grammatical forms that forms habits (Krashen). The sociolinguistic approach seems to see language learning as more embedded social context, and that thought and speech are intertwined. This divide in language instruction seems to even exist in my TESL coursework at times, as some instructors stress formal grammar knowledge and other advocate a ‘meaning and context’ approach, if that makes sense. I noticed than some of my classmates who have learned another language did not find the learning of structures to be particularly helpful. I do agree, but would like to add that when I learned French academically, all those structures came into real use when I went to the country. In other words, some of the drilling did embed itself in my mind and became automatic for social/communicative purposes. The chapter mainly appears to discuss whether language is learned or acquired; I have never been able to take a firm position on this because it really seems to be a little of both.

Freeman chapter one

Much of this was review for me. I have enjoyed other texts by Freeman in the past few years. I especially like the form/meaning/use concept, because it illustrates the dynamics of language acquisition in a comprehensive manner.

Freeman discusses oral language acquisition in terms of developmental psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. Developmental psychologists often (like Chomsky) believe children have an inborn capacity to learn language ( language acquisition device - LAD). Sociological and anthropological approaches focus on environment and culture. The linguistic approach looks at generative and universal grammar, and I find this a bit complex. However, the point that children do not acquire language by pure mimicry seemed relevant. As children learn to speak, they often make mistakes that suggest they are following a pattern For example, my daughter used to say things like “mommy boughted it” indicating that she understood the past tense pattern, but applied it in an over generalized way. This little example seems to indicate that there is a universal grammar because even though the grammatical knowledge may not be built in, there seems to be a capacity absorb and conceptualize patterns.