The Language of Power: Beyond the Grammar Workbook

In Flynn's article The Language of Power: Beyond the Grammar Workbook, she explains the relationship between appearance and language, especially race as it relates to language. She explains that in the classroom she watched which was located in a middle-class white area, the students of color required a lot more help because their cultures didn't value the same things as their school. She specifically touches on the subject of progressive pedagogy-writers and readers workshops-which she seems to find a problem with as it relates to students of color. I found the activity where the students wrote rules for their selected language, switched with a partner, and had to write a speech based on their partners rule sets for language fascinating. This is an incredibly smart way to get students to not only learn to follow grammar rules of other languages, but it's a great way for them to see how hard it is for non-native English speakers to follow the standard English rules! (I just may use this in my classroom).

For my portfolio, I will be showing varieties of the English language: standard English, home-language English, a mesh between two different languages, etc (use of a colon to further explain the varieties of language in a list). In my case, I think it would be interesting to incorporate a lot of my home language because it is a language in itself- German/English. With my future students, it would be interesting to tell my own experience with language and how my “broken English” home has encouraged me to study English and, in a way, be very conscious of the way I talk, making sure it's always correct. My main reason for wanting to teach language and grammar is because I want to teach that everyone's language is valued and shouldn't be thrown away and replaced with standard English. I really want to teach that there is a time and place for certain language, just as other social rules, and that one language doesn't need to replace all other languages. One of my main arguments is that non-native English speakers aren't praised enough for learning another language (English) as native English speakers are praised for knowing 50 words in another foreign language. What's interesting to me is that English is one of the hardest languages to learn, yet, native Spanish speakers are rarely praised for being able to speak it fluently, but I can speak 10 words in Spanish and now I'm the coolest person in class. The system of language is a little jaded to me and I want to try to shift that in my classroom.

I think my favorite activity to do to incorporate everyone's chosen language is to do a free write at the beginning of each class. The students will each have a journal-that I will keep and pass out-and they will be able to write however they want, the only time they can write without “proper” grammar (use of parenthetical dashes to add in an un-needed but descriptive part of the sentence). This is not only a great way to incorporate their language, but it's also a great way to get to know your own students. I will allow students to share sentences out of their journal if they choose to, and as a class we can discuss why it's okay to use certain words or grammar in that situation, but maybe not in another situation. I would hope that some students would have code-switching languages like I do, so we could have a wide variety to discuss.

German-English as a Home Language

For my Languages of Power and Resistance project I am presenting German-English as a home language. This is how we speak in my household, and I thought it would be interesting to try and research and describe the differences between the two languages. I-a fluent speaker in German and English-find bilingualism fascinating [a description of myself set of by parenthetical dashes]. My final project will be more formal since I am an English education major with a focus on German, hoping to teach it one day. My project will look like a book, where you can see a showing a clear similarities compare and contrast between the two languages. My main connection between these two languages and power is that in some ways, bilingualism is praised, but in similar other cases it's definitely not that appearance plays a huge role; if you're white, bilingualism is praised and if you're anything but white, you're seen as incapable of speaking correctly. I find it fascinating that just because I look white and American, speaking German and English is awesome and people ask me a ton of questions but my Mother and Oma and Opa, speaking Hungarian, German, and English, are seen as immigrants and almost peasant-like for speaking a mixture of languages [changing the order of the usual adjective then noun to show emphasis on my family's language]. The part I have chosen to share for this blog post is a rough draft of one of the pages I will include in my blog post, most of the pages will look similar. I will add personal writings as well to show my “broken English” household language, I just haven't decided how I'm going to do that yet.

I'm challenging Edited American English as the standard English because varieties of language I think it adds so much add character and teach a lot about a person when they have their own style of language. I'm not saying one language doesn't sound better as the business language, but if I am, is it only because society taught me that was the language that sounds best? Showing culture through language is an incredible thing that I think more people should challenge themselves to do; changing to fit societies “norm” of a language is just causing an identity split. Speaking your language, expressing your culture, is something to challenge the norm and be who you are [two back-to-back present-participle phrases]. This has always been a big part of my life because I've always had two or more languages in my house. In grade school I'll admit I was embarrassed and didn't want people at school knowing I was “different,” but I soon embraced it and now I'm going on to teach it to more students!

"German-English" as a home language

Mikah Wilson, Page 1

Language and Power Project

Creating Inclusiveness: A Cultural and Linguistic Stance

Linda Christensen's article touched on many important subjects, including the use of “The Linguistic Tea Party.” I really enjoy the idea of having students critically engaged in an exciting activity that will get them interested in a specific topic, while also teaching them an important lesson. In the case of the Tea Party, the students get to feel exactly what their personal character felt; whether it be shame, humiliation, loss of language, or what have you, the students themselves get to express what happened to their character. I think that allowing students to read work from all different languages is extremely important. There is no better way to oppress a certain culture or language than to leave it out entirely. Maybe a good way to bring in languages and writings into the classroom is to not only encourage students to write in their mother tongue or home language, but have them express what that language and culture is so that the teacher can pick literature that pertains to their students.

Some challenges with bringing inclusivity into the classroom is the lack of resources teachers may have, or lack of literature from certain languages or cultures that teachers can't get their hands on. It might be difficult to bring literature in from cultures that don't have as many writings or don't pertain to the course material in any way. A way to get around this is like I said before, letting the students write in their language and share their culture, and maybe even share their literature with the class so that their identity is known. Christensen's article deepens my fear for leaving students out. One of my biggest wants as a teacher is to bring inclusivity and bridge the gap between students that some might feel is there. Whether the gap is between wealth, class, gender, race, etc., I want to help bridge it as much as I can because I know how it is to feel like an outsider due to reasons I couldn't control; I don't want any of my students feeling that way [complex sentence: dependent clause first, followed by a comma and the independent clause for emphasis]. The article really makes me think deeply about the culture in every single person and how there is so much more going on in life-in the world-that we don't even know about and can't even begin to understand. It's not until we literally take a step inside these people's shoes that we can only begin to dip into the feelings and anguish they felt as they had their identity ripped from them. I can only imagine some students feeling this way as well when they read American author after American author, never seeing someone from their native home.

I think this article helped me imagine what I want to do with my project. The article got me really interested in the idea of privilege and oppression; I just can't believe class power gives people the right to steal someone's identity and force a new identity upon them. I think this gives me the urge for my project to explore the idea of class and privilege as it relates to language, specifically code-switching. The idea that people have to switch their natural languages to fit the social norm and hold jobs is just amazing to me. I can see both sides of language and power-some languages do sound more educated, smart, and therefore business-like-but that may just be because I was born and raised into this society that values a certain language over another.

To Implement or Not to Implement: DOL in the Classroom

I think an important place to start when thinking about grammar use is the quote by Crovitz that reads: “language is learned through a process of experimentation, error-making, and self-correction” (32). It's important to remember that students wouldn't make an error on purpose, but rather, there is something else going on. The importance of explaining the correction and why the students error didn't work was shown throughout this article, especially with the underlying learning opportunities teachers face with these errors. I think parts of the article went too far in depth on these errors, sort of making something out of nothing, but other errors definitely needed to be seen, depicted, corrected, and explained [compound sentence joined with a comma+FANBOYS/Coordinating Conjunction]. An important notion explained in this article was the fear of failure after receiving too many corrections; it's extremely easy for a student to feel unmotivated after being shut down. Turning corrections into a lesson and learning opportunity is a great way to bring students together to help each other and for the teacher to help the student, rather than having the authoritative voice, with a sudden correction.

The idea of DOL was foreign to me before reading this article. DOLs seem like a good intro to grammar teaching and learning at face value but lack many aspects that are needed to learn the depth and complexity of the English language. Studying a sentence alone is a great way to pick out pronouns, punctuations, capitalization, helping words, etc., but how often do we really write just one sentence down? Reading and correcting sentences, passages, student's work might be more applicable in the teaching of grammar because then students can see writing as a whole and understand why certain things do and do not work. Instead, the best alternative would be the “discuss contextual differences between similar statements with different registers” that Crovitz talks about on page 37 [conjunctive adverb +, used to transition between two sentences]. In this exercise students would compare and contrast languages used in different discourses to learn grammar for different situations. This is great because students are usually thought what is right, what is wrong, what needs to be changed, but what they don't understand is that it's only wrong in the setting they're in-school.

Teaching contextual differences could happen in a number of different ways. For instance, if I were teaching students to write their own short story about an experience in their life relating to a book we were reading-lets say Frankenstein for the purpose of this Blog Post-I could have them incorporate home language and standard English in their writing. Both of these would be appropriate and could be shown in a number of different ways: they could write in standard english and have dialogue in their home language, they could write half in standard english and half in home language, etc. The goal of this exercise would be to show the students what is correct in academic writing and what is correct in other situations and that they can co-exist in certain circumstances. The students may choose to write about a time when they had too much knowledge about something (a theme in Frankenstein) and how it was fine and maybe even fun at first, but how it became out of hand and some point. In my editing portion of this lesson/exercise, I would correct the essays and point out parts where they correctly used standard english or home language and explain why it was correct. Students could also share with the class and have their classmates explain the different elements of the writing as well. I like the idea of a collaborative editing because I think it brings more opportunity of growth and development for all of the students instead of just one student getting one set of feedback. I'd hope this experiment would be a good lead in for more experimenting with different types of writing and editing/feedback.

I incorporated the patterns-of-the-week after I wrote my blog post because I had a lot to say on this topic and didn't want to stop to construct these sentences. I found that it's easy to write a compound sentence, so I didn't need to change any of my writing to use that pattern. I think my difficulty may be more in identifying the pattern rather than writing it. The other sentence pattern I used was the use of a conjunctive adverb. I thought both patterns I used were pretty self-explanatory and are kind of used in every day writing.

Sentence Diagramming: Pros and Cons

Source: Alway

http://1aiway.com

Date accessed: 2/7/15

Sentence diagramming can be a great visual for students and the teacher to work with while trying to understand the aspect of sentences. It has great learning strategies integrated into it, but like many other strategies, it has its shortcomings. The chapter in Grammar Alive! That talks about diagramming sentences explains how the process should be taught and used from then on, is great for visual learners, is an opening for good debate and discussions, and that it can be used as an analogy of a spine and back bones to better connect with the students.

I, myself, think sentence diagramming is a great way for students to visually see what is going on in sentences [reflexive pronoun to show emphasis on how much I love sentence diagramming!...]. It's not a foreign process to them because they write sentences practically every day. The process of sentence diagramming might be tedious and, of course, confusing at some points, but in some ways I see it necessary in figuring out what each word does to each sentence. The chapter talks about how this process of sentence diagramming might be tailored to visual learners, which I see as being truthful, but I also think it's important to students who process things in their head to still see the visual aspect. Sometimes students think they know what each word does, but there are some aspects of sentence writing that just need to be visual.

If a student for some reason doesn't learn well with the sentence diagram, I think it would be effective to have them write out their own sentences and explain what each word does for the sentence without the diagram. Although it seems this is the same thing, it gives the student freedom to pick what word they want to depict first, and it will maybe somehow show them that the sentence diagram might be a little bit easier and organized.

In my experience as a student, we actually used sentence diagramming as well. We would do the exact process that Grammar Alive! talks about and then have the chance to discuss our findings with the rest of the class. I always thought this was a great way to learn the sentences, especially since we had the chance to debate and discuss our findings with the other students and the teacher. I didn't think about it when I was a student, but it's important to be able to differentiate the assignments and give work for all different kinds of learners. I don't think the sentence diagramming hits every single type of learner (definitely not the hard-to-keep-on-task student), but I think it is vital to the learning of how sentences work [an aside set off by parentheses; use of parentheses to add in a side note, added humor in a way, because the parentheses adds a sort of "whisper" to writing]. This way of teaching definitely hits verbal and visual and interpersonal [list with all ands and no commas to emphasize how many types of learners this type of activity hits]. If other learners have trouble with this teaching, there could be other ways to integrate their learning styles in (i.e. giving students parts of sentences on paper and having them form sentences with their bodies [like we did in class]).

I chose to use all three of the sentence patterns of the week because I need more experimentation with my grammar; feel free to correct me or give feedback on any of them! I think my use of the parentheses to set aside part of the sentence was used in a good way, showing the type of student that may be opposed to using this sort of sentence learning. I actually really don't like using "and" too many times in a sentence, especially with lists, but in some cases I think its a great and effective way to show emphasis. In the sentence I used the excessive "ands" in, it works, but I think it is better with the commas. The use of the reflexive pronoun is a bit out of place in the way I used it. Saying I, myself, usually emphasizes that you're really pro-something, or it adds emphasis where it wasn't really needed in this sentence.

What is Standard English?

Source: Blogger

http://funnysmsweb.blogspot.com

Date accessed: 1/25/15

Throughout the first chapter of Grammar Alive! we learned a lot about how grammar is often forgotten and untaught, it's easily spoken but not easily written, and that even in the work-world it is forgotten. There is a certain tension between the “standard english” grammar and the home language that isn't easily bridged, especially because it's not easy to teach the difference between the two in a classroom setting. Grammar is situation and there are tons of different varieties and dialects; there is no right or wrong English [two closely connected sentences joined by a semi-colon]. This was hard for me to grasp at first, until I realized that maybe my thoughts coming into this topic were different than others. In my home, we speak sort of a German-English language that calls for certain grammar differences than “standard English” or “standard German.” We often times leave out “nonsense” words such as “is” or “the” and just stick to the needed-to-make-sense-words that are crucial to the meaning of the sentence [forming original compound words with the use of hyphens]. If we can't think of a word in English, the German word replaces it fine, but isn't necessarily grammatically correct in either standard language. But aside from the mixed-language my family speaks at home, I was taught that this is not how we speak outside the house. It was very clear to me-as taught by my parents- that it was inappropriate to use anything other than this “standard English” we spoke and wrote in school [use of the parenthetical dash to emphasize an important point].

The topic of at-home language and the idea of code-switching was brought up in chapter 2 of Grammar Alive! We learned about African American grammar and how that language uses possession in a different way than standard English does. It's important to note the difference between these situational grammar languages and to notice that neither is the correct way, they're just different. My understanding of teaching and learning grammar has always been a by-the-book type of system; when I think back to learning grammar, I remember a lot of worksheets, sentence practices, and editing of other student's sentences [two closely connected sentences joined by a semi-colon]. After reading for this class, it has come to my attention that I have been coming about grammar in all the wrong ways...Grammar isn't right or wrong, it's situational [use of ellipses to create a pause or hesitation to emphasize a point]. The reading by Christensen really related to the idea of situational grammar. She didn't want to be seen as lesser, so she used different words in place of words that she couldn't pronounce correctly. She code-switched in order to not show she had a different at-home grammar language. The teacher in Christensen's story was using a one-size fits all lesson by requesting that each child says the same word correctly. What she failed to recognize was the different languages each student brings to the classroom. In this case, Christensen couldn't speak the word and was made fun of because the children in the class expected standard English.

I incorporated the semi-colon pattern in my post because it is one I struggle with mostly. I wrote my post, in fact, and had to go back and try to squeeze one in because semi-colons just don't come naturally to me. I think the sentence I put it in for the use of the semi-colon (my understanding of teaching grammar has always been a by-the-book type of system; when I think back to learning grammar, I remember a lot of worksheets, sentence practices, and editing of other student's sentences) works better without the semi-colon, but still works just as well with it. I'd like to get more familiar with where they are needed and where they aren't. I used the parenthetical dash for my first time in this blog post. I'm still not savvy with them, but I tried in the sentence: “It was very clear to me-as taught by my parents- that it was inappropriate to use anything other than this “standard English” we spoke and wrote in school.”

Experimenting: Grammar and Punctuation

Grammar and punctuation are hard concepts to learn and teach. Maybe the use of techniques aren't terribly hard themselves, but explaining exactly how to use them and when to use them is another story. My main goal for this semester is to master the use of punctuation and be able to explain each comma, semi-colon, colon, etc., to my future students with ease.

The DASH

A common misconception is that the dash and hyphen are the same thing. While the dash and hyphen definitely do not serve the same purpose, they do have one thing in common: they cause confusion.

Example: "And yet, when the car was finally delivered—nearly three months after it was ordered—she decided she no longer wanted it, leaving the dealer with an oddly equipped car that would be difficult to sell.”

This “em dash” is used in place of the comma. The sentence could also read: “And yet, when the car was finally delivered, nearly three months after it was ordered, she decided she no longer wanted it, leaving the dealer with an oddly equipped car that would be difficult to sell.” Em dashes can be used in place of parenthesis and colons as well. The em dash can also be used in place of letters in a word. An example of this is: “Mr. J-- testified that the defendant yelled at the woman.”

COMMAS

Commas are probably one of the most used punctuation, but maybe also the most misunderstood. Commas are so common and useful that sometimes they are overused. Do we need, a comma, in every situation? It's important to understand when commas are needed and when they're just unnecessary.

Source: Spiro

http://www.spiro.ir/photo/

Date accessed: 1/18/15

SENTENCE STRUCTURE

How boring is it to read a paragraph with all the same sentence structure? How hard is it to stay engaged when there is no variety? How can one change their sentence patterns to keep readers interested? Exactly; sentence structure is an important skill to master in order to produce effective writing.

Example: “Men and women, young and old, looked forward to the New Yam Festival because it began the season of plenty-the new year. On the last night before the festival, yams of the old year were all disposed of by those who still had them. The new year must begin with tasty, fresh yams and not the shriveled and fibrous crop of the previous year. All cooking pots, calabashes and wooden bowls were throughly washed, especially wooden mortar in which yam was pounded.” - Things Fall Apart (p.36).

This excerpt from “Things Fall Apart” is effectively written because the sentences all vary in length, structure, and word strength. If the author, Chinua Achebe, would have had a list as every sentence, or no versatility/punctuation at all, the paragraph wouldn't have been as great.

Favorite sentence structures

Semi-colon use- the use of semi-colons can be exceptionally beautiful; they add a touch of skill that not everyone can master, including me.

Ellipsis- not every punctuation can take the place of an ellipsis. They add a drawn out explanation, almost like a surprise that you can't really get from a comma, dash, or even exclamation point.