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?

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Grammar instructions: What Teachers Say

Brenda Arnett Petruzzella discusses how "there are sometimes differences between what colleges teach perspective teachers in education and what practicing teachers in schools actually do" (1) Petruzzella (while trying to teach the basic concepts of writing) realized that in her instruction of teaching grammar in writing , what seemed to make the most impact with students was individual discussion. This is good because in many cases, students learn better when given the hands on experience. Sometimes learning individually is better for students because there are no other students around and no distractions which gives the teacher the students undivided attention. This enables the student to be more aware of what is being discussed which is helpful in them learning the topic effectively but, in all actuality, its hard for teachers to meet individually with a class of 30 especially when you teach more than one class. . When it comes to grammar instructions, Petruzzella noted that teachers didn't see the purpose discussing the structure of grammar in college classes (how it is being taught). Some teachers feel that a set of prescriptive rules to be followed for a writer,[grammar] is not useful, but if you teach grammar as a description of what a writer does, and as a vocabulary to talk about writing, it's very useful.In fact,you can't teach writing without it. (3) In the article, it was brought up by a teacher that every English teacher that she knew felt that in order to teach writing, you have to teach some grammatical skills. Petruzzella also mentioned in her article that "Education colleges need to clarify that abandoning formal, traditional grammar instruction does not mean abandoning all attempts to teach the conventions of standard English". (5)
Petruzzella mentioned that teachers from urban schools have,
given up teaching all but the most basic skills, and there is still a fair
amount of frustration about students who
refuse to learn even those skills. The urban
teachers spoke often about the benefits of
using computers in writing classes with less able or more reluctant students. If teachers are giving up on the basic skills of grammar, how do they expect students not to?

Grammar without Grammar,by Kenneth Dixon

Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are solely taught to students in order to better writing skills. Grammar deals with agreement of words, phrases and mainly ensures that sentences are composed correctly. Punctuation ensures that sentences flow and transitions from word-to-word occur in an effective manner. Spelling ensures that words are articulated and written correctly. The above are all components to have effective writing skills according to writer Deborah Dean, the author of the article “Grammar without Grammar: Just Playing Around, Writing”. Deborah Dean is a teacher, who encounters a negative reaction from her pupils’ parents when she follows the school district’s curriculum. The lessons given to her are to teach the identification of adverbs and verbs, as well as diagramming subjects and direct objects. Where Dean goes wrong is when begins teaching verbals with comic strips to a ninth grade honors class. A student’s parents sends a letter stating that his or her child is not learning how to write by doing meaningless exercises that were being administered. From that point on the curriculum is inherently dismantled. Dean, now starting on clean slate, needed to find a way to improve her students writing skills. She basically went back to drawing board. Having difficulties locating various ways to connect her lessons and vocabulary in an effective method to teach the students in her class, Dean spent years strategizing. Little did she know a book would help her improve teaching skills. The new method she learned was incorporated into Dean’s lessons in class and her students began to write. Using similar items and examples used in the book, Dean wrote an example of a sentence and explained to the students to write something similar to the example. The writing thus began and the students writing continued to develop. By teaching and incorporating fun into her lessons, students started enjoying writing. Lessons seemingly became understandable and more students participating. According to the article students generally wrote about things the new or did. Interactions the students had on a daily basis was the topic of the writing. That made it easier to write about for the students. From there the author discusses her discoveries of a wide variety of writings, in example magazines, books, novels, etc. The various writings strengthened Dean’s ideas of writing methods to teach to the students. Writing was becoming more interactive with the children; association of real life concepts and interactions broadened the students’ ideas for writing. Some of the readings included Sports Illustrated, the children’s book Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Valiska Gregory’s Through the Mickle Woods. Good writing examples were used from these articles to aid in the pupil’s learning. The model sentences helped the students overtime in improving their writing. Although their writing was not always perfect, it was a start and a huge development from where the student’s skills began. The knowledge of grammar was finally in their heads from all the model sentences and examples that been given, whether they recognized it or not.

Conceptions of Grammar Teaching: A Case Study of Teachers’ Beliefs and Classroom Practices

This is a case study that focuses on two English teachers in Singapore. The person conducting the survey wants to find how beliefs are incorporated into the lessons that the teachers perform. It is said that teachers have set beliefs that somehow are reflected while teaching. The survey conductor cited many articles that backed up this idea of teachers showing their beliefs in the classroom. One of the articles cited said, “These beliefs are said to form a structured set of principles and are derived from a teacher's prior experiences, school practices, and a teacher's individual personality (Borg, 2003). Although there have been other studies, this particular study focuses on the primary level of schooling. So what is a belief? A belief is "An attitude consistently applied to an activity".

There are three basic assumptions about teachers’ beliefs according to Johnson: 1) Teachers' beliefs influence perception and judgment. 2) Teachers' beliefs play a role in how information on teaching is translated into classroom practices. 3) Understanding teachers' beliefs is essential to improving teaching practices and teacher education programs.

The surveyor asked the two teachers 2 questions regarding beliefs: 1) What are the two teachers' beliefs about the way grammar should be taught in primary school? 2)What are their actual classroom practices of teaching grammar?

It is also noted the number of years that each of the teachers has been teaching. One has taught for 24 years and the other for 10 years.

The data collected was based on observation, pre-study interviews, pre-lesson and post-lesson interviews, and a collection of random samples of students’ written work. Observations were made for two months, and the interviews allowed the surveyor to observe the beliefs of the teachers.

The findings of the students’ data were matched with convergent or divergent beliefs or practices. After studying the data, the surveyor made a chart to show the teachers’ stated beliefs. This chart had a grading scale of agrees, does not agree, not stated, and both approaches. Examples in the chart are: grammar involves teaching language structures, grammar is important and needs to be taught, and grammar is concerned with using the correct tenses. Both teachers agreed that teaching grammar was crucial for their students to use proper sentence and grammar structuring. The one teacher believed heavily on re-teaching is she saw that students had not successfully grasped the structure. Also, both teachers believed in grammar drills for their students.

There was also another table presented that showed the teachers’ common form of teaching. Both of the teachers represented some type of traditional approach. Also the lessons were mostly teacher-centered with explanations and instruction. The teachers used worksheets and different sentence examples to teach their students, and they provided their students feedback on all compositions.

The surveyor believes that teachers use their beliefs to determine how they will teach and what practices they will use. Whether the teacher implicate their beliefs in the classroom or not, they still have certain standards that they have to abide by. The teachers have time constraints, they are not supposed to incorporate religion or beliefs in the classroom, and each teacher has his/her own attitude when it comes to teaching.

In the conclusion, the surveyor found that teachers sometimes convey their beliefs to the students in complicated lessons. The surveyor also hopes that other teachers will reflect on how they use their own beliefs in the classroom.