The article by Richard Hudson and John Walmsley discusses grammar in the 20th century. The authors try to determine what caused the decline of grammar. They conclude that one of the factors in the demise of teaching grammar in schools was the lack of research on English grammar. The article claims that for several decades up to about 2000, most state schools in England taught little or no grammar, and it is still normal for students to know virtually nothing about grammar upon leaving school.
The authors believe that grammar children should learn grammar for several reason. To expand their grammatical compentence, to underpin this competence in performance, to support foreign-language learning, to develop their thinking skills, to develop their investigation skills, and to develop a critical response to some of the ways in which language is used in their everyday environment.
In recent efforts, grammar awareness has gained momentum. Governments have recongnized the problem with grammar and tried to counter-attack it in their best way. The government in England has implemented new regulations for teachers, in-service training. In-service training has been more realistic at least in the sense that it recognises the extent of the problem. A man by the name of Carter led a large scale project called Language in the National Curriculum.Its main achievement was probably to establish, in the teaching community, the general principle that explicit knowledge about language, including grammar, is in fact relevant and important for English teaching.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The "Klingon Language"
In the article written by Glen Proechel, the Klingon language is being compared to the Esperanto language. The Klingon language and the Esperanto language have both been created for a entertainment. The Klingon language was made to be used in the Star Trek films. Although this language has been created, most people have taken a liking to it and have decided to learn this verbal form.
The Klingon language is very interesting. After reading through the breakdown of some of the grammar points included in the language, this dialect seems like it would be very challenging to learn. The author of the article mentions that many individuals are interested in learning this language form. Many Klingon language programs and language materials have been created to help learn this speech.
Dr. Okrand, who has established the Klingon dictionary, says, “That the Klingon language is one that is unlike any other speech form, this is built on the foundation that it belongs or has been created for an alien race.” The basis of syntax in the language is completely opposite to that of the English language. Surface cognates, are slim to none in the Klingon language, which is different than the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language pays close attention to the vowel endings that are presented in the words, whereas Klingon does not put as much emphasis on this aspect of the language.
I had never heard of this created language. I found it very interesting to read about. As far as ever being interested in learning it, that answer would be not so much. I would not have the patience to learn this language, and honestly no desire to. I do not really see a benefit in learning it, because the chances of someone else knowing this Klingon language are few and far between. I do not feel as though the people that I communicate with on a regular basis would have any knowledge of this material. What do you think? Would you learn this Klingon language?
The Klingon language is very interesting. After reading through the breakdown of some of the grammar points included in the language, this dialect seems like it would be very challenging to learn. The author of the article mentions that many individuals are interested in learning this language form. Many Klingon language programs and language materials have been created to help learn this speech.
Dr. Okrand, who has established the Klingon dictionary, says, “That the Klingon language is one that is unlike any other speech form, this is built on the foundation that it belongs or has been created for an alien race.” The basis of syntax in the language is completely opposite to that of the English language. Surface cognates, are slim to none in the Klingon language, which is different than the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language pays close attention to the vowel endings that are presented in the words, whereas Klingon does not put as much emphasis on this aspect of the language.
I had never heard of this created language. I found it very interesting to read about. As far as ever being interested in learning it, that answer would be not so much. I would not have the patience to learn this language, and honestly no desire to. I do not really see a benefit in learning it, because the chances of someone else knowing this Klingon language are few and far between. I do not feel as though the people that I communicate with on a regular basis would have any knowledge of this material. What do you think? Would you learn this Klingon language?
Monday, November 15, 2010
Humor in Grammar Teachings: The Strawman Meets His Match
This article, by Alleen and Don Nilsen proposes an interesting idea of teaching English classes with a more humorous style. They argue that humor should be incorporated into teaching because it will allow for students to learn and appreciate the subject more, and give six arguments for the study of humor in English classes. The article uses a clever approach, by using a “Straw Man”, to acknowledge the six arguments. But Alleen and Don Nilsen make some good rebuttals against the arguments. And at the end of the article, the authors give a few good in-class lessons/activities for teachers to try with their classes.
The first argument against the use of humor in class is that kids already receive enough humor outside of school. Alleen and Don Nilsen make some good points against this statement though. In doing so, they state that by using subtle forms of humor in the class, students can, indeed, become more mature. In the article they mention such examples of humor as David Letterman’s “Top Ten” lists. Not all people are educated enough to know what some of the things Letterman talks about are, and that is what they want to teach more.
The next argument that the Straw Man makes is teaching humor will take away from time of teaching all other English courses. In response to this the authors mention that students will have more fun by incorporating humor into the study. Dangling modifiers are a good way to use humor because it helps students realize the obvious mistakes while learning why the mistake should be changed too. They go on to say that writing and speaking are easier when it comes to writing something humorous too, because it is generally something a student is more comfortable with talking about. Following this statement was a list of 10 different features that people tend to find to be most funny, which I am not going to get into.
The next argument made by the Straw Man brings to forth the idea that teachers are supposed to be preparing kids to earn a living. To respond to this, the Nilsens’ talk about a specific time in recent years when television comedies were at an all time high and were in need of script writers. Due to a lack of talent in the field though, made it hard for networks to find experienced writers. Least to say, there are many of jobs out there that allow for humor. People in all professions are capable of using humor. In many cases humor is said to relieve stress from a rather stressful job. Humor may help people get through the day easier.
After this the Straw Man argues that bringing humor into the class will create censorship problems, because people may bring up touchy subjects. The authors believe that humor of this nature should be taught effectively too though. By this they mean that humor should be taught with an appropriate and respectful mind set. Yet, it is possible to bring up rational topics and still be polite about it according to the two, and that is what they would like to teach.
This connects to the Straw Man’s next argument, that humor hurts people’s feelings. In response they state that humor is a communication tool that can build or tear someone apart. None the less, teaching humor is a good way to talk about cultural differences, as long as its portrayed in a good manner. It may not necessarily be alright for someone to make humor about a minority group, but if a person of that minority group pokes fun at themselves, then it may be seen as okay.
The final argument the Straw Man makes argues that humor cannot be taught if the person does not know how to tell a joke or write a funny letter. So in response the authors list several different ways to gather material (writing parodies, gathering news clips, using humorous icons, etc). Again, it is these ideas that the authors believe will make the classroom a more fun filled and encouraging way to learning. And I could not agree with them more. Making English fun and humorous makes it that much easier and more enjoyable to learn.
The first argument against the use of humor in class is that kids already receive enough humor outside of school. Alleen and Don Nilsen make some good points against this statement though. In doing so, they state that by using subtle forms of humor in the class, students can, indeed, become more mature. In the article they mention such examples of humor as David Letterman’s “Top Ten” lists. Not all people are educated enough to know what some of the things Letterman talks about are, and that is what they want to teach more.
The next argument that the Straw Man makes is teaching humor will take away from time of teaching all other English courses. In response to this the authors mention that students will have more fun by incorporating humor into the study. Dangling modifiers are a good way to use humor because it helps students realize the obvious mistakes while learning why the mistake should be changed too. They go on to say that writing and speaking are easier when it comes to writing something humorous too, because it is generally something a student is more comfortable with talking about. Following this statement was a list of 10 different features that people tend to find to be most funny, which I am not going to get into.
The next argument made by the Straw Man brings to forth the idea that teachers are supposed to be preparing kids to earn a living. To respond to this, the Nilsens’ talk about a specific time in recent years when television comedies were at an all time high and were in need of script writers. Due to a lack of talent in the field though, made it hard for networks to find experienced writers. Least to say, there are many of jobs out there that allow for humor. People in all professions are capable of using humor. In many cases humor is said to relieve stress from a rather stressful job. Humor may help people get through the day easier.
After this the Straw Man argues that bringing humor into the class will create censorship problems, because people may bring up touchy subjects. The authors believe that humor of this nature should be taught effectively too though. By this they mean that humor should be taught with an appropriate and respectful mind set. Yet, it is possible to bring up rational topics and still be polite about it according to the two, and that is what they would like to teach.
This connects to the Straw Man’s next argument, that humor hurts people’s feelings. In response they state that humor is a communication tool that can build or tear someone apart. None the less, teaching humor is a good way to talk about cultural differences, as long as its portrayed in a good manner. It may not necessarily be alright for someone to make humor about a minority group, but if a person of that minority group pokes fun at themselves, then it may be seen as okay.
The final argument the Straw Man makes argues that humor cannot be taught if the person does not know how to tell a joke or write a funny letter. So in response the authors list several different ways to gather material (writing parodies, gathering news clips, using humorous icons, etc). Again, it is these ideas that the authors believe will make the classroom a more fun filled and encouraging way to learning. And I could not agree with them more. Making English fun and humorous makes it that much easier and more enjoyable to learn.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Blog 25: The Language of the Piraha
Living without numbers and time explains the small group of people of the Brazil's Piraha. The Piraha's language is the most grammatically challenging for Linguists because they hardly use any words associated with time, past tense verb and conjugations don't exist. Their language does not have any words to describe past tense such as liked or finished. This challenges linguists because it allows the Piraha language to go without subordinate clauses and it doesn't help the theory of how homo sapiens learn vocal language. It is further from the existing theories of how language is formed. The most influential theorist cannot understand Piraha's language because it is completely different form the cultures that surrounds them geographically. Furthermore, the Piraha's interact with those neighboring cultures frequently which makes the Linguists understanding increasingly complex. Along with not using past tense words and having only three pronouns in their language they also go without colors and numbers. They don't have a way of saying "It is 5 o'clock" or " I have one purple frog" . The simplistic culture of the Piraha's baffled Linguist Dan Everette so much that it took him seven years to publish his findings. Through his finding he realized after unsuccessfully trying to teach the Piraha how to count to ten in Spanish, that "people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words". It is best to think of The Brazilian Piraha's with the theory of The language being created by the culture because their culture is based on "live here and now."
Friday, November 12, 2010
Blog 22: To grammar, or not to grammar
by: Kristyn Looper
The responses are due on Monday, Nov. 15th, 2010, at class time.
_____________________________________________
Should we teach grammar, or shouldn’t we?”
Often presented with this apparent all-or- nothing choice, even the teachers
asking the question may not have clear
instructional goals for teaching grammar;
they may simply think they should teach it.
Sometimes they have other reasons,
though, for thinking they ought to teach
grammar: they find parents, the public,
and even the politicians clamoring for
grammar instruction in the hope that
teaching traditional grammar from handbooks
or CDs will somehow improve
students writing, or at least their ability to
avoid “errors.”
Most often it doesn’t.
Yes, some students learn the conventions of grammar,
usage, and punctuation from a handbook. Or
at least they appear to have learned these conventions
when doing and drill exercises on one concept
at a time, followed by related tests. But do
students remember and apply these conventions
in their own writing? Here, the payoff severely
declines.
The problems with this common view of “why
teach grammar” lie deeper than most people realize.
First, we must contend with an underlying,
implicit, and largely erroneous learning theory: if
teachers teach something well, students will learn
it and, what’s more, will apply it well. What we
now know from cognitive psychology is that students
need guidance in developing concepts, such
as the concepts of “sentence” and “not sentence.”
In addition, no matter how motivated the students
may be to apply such concepts—for example, to
avoid or eliminate run-ons and fragments in their
writing—they still often need help applying these
concepts in practical situations. Such help may be
needed even by the students who enjoy and take
pride in their schoolwork and who love analyzing
data.
Much of what we teach in the name of grammar
amounts to labeling parts of speech and their
functions or identifying kinds of sentences, yet students
need very little of this to learn the conventions
of written edited English. For most students,
teaching grammar as sentence analysis is another
reason why the grammar doesn’t transfer to student
writing.
It is convenient for us to be able to refer to
“nouns,” “verbs,” “subjects,” and “predicates”
when talking about things like subject-verb agreement.
However, a little grammar goes a long way
when it comes to helping students edit for the use
of standard conventions in their writing, and the
concepts can be taught as we discuss literature and
the students’ own writing.
The responses are due on Monday, Nov. 15th, 2010, at class time.
_____________________________________________
Should we teach grammar, or shouldn’t we?”
Often presented with this apparent all-or- nothing choice, even the teachers
asking the question may not have clear
instructional goals for teaching grammar;
they may simply think they should teach it.
Sometimes they have other reasons,
though, for thinking they ought to teach
grammar: they find parents, the public,
and even the politicians clamoring for
grammar instruction in the hope that
teaching traditional grammar from handbooks
or CDs will somehow improve
students writing, or at least their ability to
avoid “errors.”
Most often it doesn’t.
Yes, some students learn the conventions of grammar,
usage, and punctuation from a handbook. Or
at least they appear to have learned these conventions
when doing and drill exercises on one concept
at a time, followed by related tests. But do
students remember and apply these conventions
in their own writing? Here, the payoff severely
declines.
The problems with this common view of “why
teach grammar” lie deeper than most people realize.
First, we must contend with an underlying,
implicit, and largely erroneous learning theory: if
teachers teach something well, students will learn
it and, what’s more, will apply it well. What we
now know from cognitive psychology is that students
need guidance in developing concepts, such
as the concepts of “sentence” and “not sentence.”
In addition, no matter how motivated the students
may be to apply such concepts—for example, to
avoid or eliminate run-ons and fragments in their
writing—they still often need help applying these
concepts in practical situations. Such help may be
needed even by the students who enjoy and take
pride in their schoolwork and who love analyzing
data.
Much of what we teach in the name of grammar
amounts to labeling parts of speech and their
functions or identifying kinds of sentences, yet students
need very little of this to learn the conventions
of written edited English. For most students,
teaching grammar as sentence analysis is another
reason why the grammar doesn’t transfer to student
writing.
It is convenient for us to be able to refer to
“nouns,” “verbs,” “subjects,” and “predicates”
when talking about things like subject-verb agreement.
However, a little grammar goes a long way
when it comes to helping students edit for the use
of standard conventions in their writing, and the
concepts can be taught as we discuss literature and
the students’ own writing.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Fry Graph: How to Calculate Your Own Readabilty
In this reading, by author Edward Fry, he talks about the importance of readabilty versus leveling. As stated in this article, readabilty and leveling are procedures that can help teachers select books for readers at different stages. As the working definition, readabilty is denotated as the ease of comprhension because of the style of writing; and selecting books to match the competencies of a reader or writer.
The history and background of the readabilty formula and leveling in the United States of America was founded in the year of 1923. As time progressed, readabilty and leveling increased as well and was better developed by professional writers. Researchers have found that most traditional readabilty formulas are based off of two measures; syntactic difficulty, meaning grammatical complexity, and semantic difficulty, which is meaning or word meaning. Many say that readabilty formulas are objective, however, leveling is quite different than readabilty formulas. Leveling takes a vast number of text suppoting factors into consoderation such as content, illustrations, length, curriculum, and language structure. Content deals with whether or not it is appropriate or familiar to the age group or audience. Illustrations specifically discuss whther the pictures tell the story or not. Length deals with the number of pages pertaining to the reading. The curriculum deals with if the levels deal with the teaching methods or framework? Lastly, the language structure deals with whether there are repetitious wording or phrases.
This is an appropriate example of how to calculate your on readability into a fry graph:
Randomly select 300 words from a passage or article and plot average number of syllabals and average number of sentences per 100 words to determine the grade level of your material. Count proper nouns, numericals, and symbols as words and count a syllabal for each symbol. When ploted into a graph after calculating the average, you can plot your points and determine the grade level of your readabilty.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Decline and Fall of Esperanto: Lessons for Standards Committees
Robert Patterson and Stanley Huff discuss how Polish physician Ludovic Zamenhof introduced the Esperanto language. He wanted it to be a simple easy-to-learn language, his goal for the language was to erase communication barriers between ethnic groups "providing them with a politically neutral, culturally free standard language."(444) Interest in the language peaked in the late 1970's and since then has been fading since then. Esperanto never really took as a worldwide language, so instead English has become the closest language to be called the international language.
" Growing up in 19th century Poland, Ludovic Zamenhof
(1859–1917) faced a plethora of languages. His
own family spoke Polish and Yiddish, the official government
language was Russian, and his neighbors
were Lithuanians and German-speaking Poles."
Zamenhof had to go through the struggles of having different ethnic backgrounds, and the diversity of languages he had to go through as well. So having gone through that there is no doubt that he would try and create a language to make the world come together, and just have one language that would be recognized around the world. He went through many different test to see how old languages that have not been used for many years would fair against languages that have prospered for many years. He found out that it would be to difficult to revive those because they were just too complex. "In 1887, Zamenhof introduced Esperanto1,2; the name means "one who hopes"." (444) The language was very simple and easy to learn, verbs were never irregular, and the spelling was always phonetic. This is good because most languages are very hard to learn and comprehend, but with this language everything is just plain and simple. Since there are probably over 5,000 languages out there today in the world, it is good that at least one could be simple enough to make it the world language. Zamenhof just wanted a common tongue to bring peace to Europe and the world.
Esperanto began to get popular in Eastern Europe and china after the Second World War. These countries felt like there was a need for a common language, and in the United States it didn't take so well. As of late scholars have not been giving this language much interest, but there is talk about making Esperanto an official language of a new European Union, but nothing has been done yet to do so. So does the world need a language? If so when will it be introduced to the world, will it be a hard language to learn, and what will happen to all the other languages that have been in existence for so long? Will this language be introduced in our lifetime? Is Esperanto going to be a forgotten language overwhelmed by the crazy amount of languages already out there, or can it be evolved and changed to make the communication of the world simpler.
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