One More Tool for the Toolbox Summary

Ann L. Bjorklund’s article One More Tool for the Toolbox illustrates the difficulties that a teacher has in adding technology to his/her curriculum and also emphasizes the positive effects that happen when technology is used as a learning tool. Bjorklund begins her essay by lining out the obstacles of technology and possible ways of overcoming problems. For instance, Bjorklund stresses the idea that student computers, no matter how many are in the classroom, should be spread throughout the room rather then grouped together. She claims that this increases the productivity of a particular lesson while decreasing the chances that the students will get sidetracked by engaging in social conversations. Bjorklund then suggests some helpful activities that will allow students to become acquainted with technology as an educational tool while letting them have fun and get excited about upcoming units. She advises small projects to promote enthusiasm, such as taking a personality quiz online to tell what job the student would have in the Middle Ages as a lead in to the Canterbury Tales. Other tasks include groups creating power point presentations to teach the rest of the class key grammar points. Bjorklund notes that the student who knows their peers will be viewing his/her work tries harder and therefore learns more. Bjorklund concludes her article by admitting that technology takes up several class periods and therefore shortens her teaching curriculum, perhaps cutting down her reading list for the year. However, Bjorklund reassures that while the technology may take up time, it increases the depth of the students’ learning and also prepares them for their future.

SLANG: A LESSON IN NINTH-GRADE COMPOSITION

This is an article from 1925 called SLANG: A LESSON IN NINTH-GRADE COMPOSITION. It is actually the dialect between a teacher and his/her students on the subject of slang. The footnotes include what the teacher has written on the board for further understanding of his topic, the slang that they are talking about in class and what is written on the blackboard. The teacher tells what the word slang derived from (slenja meaning "to sling the jaw" or "talk abusively") and who mainly spoke slang. It was thieves. Their reason for this language usage was to conceal thoughts from others. However, this class is taught the purpose of language is to express thoughts and not conceal them. The teacher is overall negative toward slang by stating that he feels language is for expression and not concealment and by stating that it is a “thieves’ language”. His students also comment on slang being improper but common and changing depending on who the speaker is talking to. (This is just as we have talked about in class.) The teacher also states that the only way slang will last is if it is not “offensive.” I had never thought of this in terms of whether slang would last, but some of the classroom discussion words that were being used as slang then are common now, such as window-shopping, cut it out, speeding, joy ride, and a has-been. Maybe the reason these words are still common is like this teacher said, because there were no other words in the English language to convey the thoughts so clearly or possibly just because they were inoffensive.

In-Class, Jan. 30th: Slang of Social Groups

Reading Assignment:

Read the chapter "Learning the Language" from A Not Entirely Benign Procedure by Perri Klass which deals with nurses' slang. I will distribute hard copies in class.


Group work (3 people per group): Create a WebQuest about another Group's Slang

This will be your first lesson plan, and it will be created as an online document.

Create a WebQuest (one of you has to sign up for a free 30-day trial). I will model how to get signed in. Here is one of my sample WebQuests: Anne Frank, for 11th grade German Honors
Another one: Helen Keller, for 9th grade English third track (learning disabled)

Write all your group members' names in this WebQuest.

Your task is to instruct a class of 6th grade English students in the slang vocabulary of one certain group of society. You have to match your information with the age group of your audience, which means that you should employ graphics (pictures, photos, colors, etc.). One of your instructional examples can be the text for our Blog 3 (the teacher from 1925 instructing his 9th grade about slang terms). I have emailed that to you.

Look up the slang vocabulary of one special group of society on the Internet.
Examples:
soldiers' slang (Slang from Operation Iraqui Freedom)
prison inmates
rhyming slang (England; Cockney)
police slang
computer slang
railroad slang
1920's slang
1960's slang
Mountain Bike Slang
Australian Slang
Death Slang
Antarctic slang
and many, many more sites.........

Create a lesson on WebQuest with links to your society's slang vocabulary that 6th grade students might enjoy. They need to get some background knowledge about the society you talk about, and they need to have online access to its vocabulary (insert the link!). They also need to be given a certain task (for example, a role play using some of those slang words, or a creative writing assignment -- be inventive!). Then, there needs to be some kind of assessment, which means you have to post your grading rubric on the WebQuest, so your students know how you are going to evaluate their performance/writing task.

What I will be grading about your WebQuest:

1) Adequacy for grade level (6th grade): pictures, right tone, motivation, colors, layout, user-friendliness
2) Content (information about the slang of one group of society, and why it is important to know about slang)
3) Links provided (WebQuests are for online perusal of students in a self-inquiry study)
4) Task(s) given (what your students have to do)
5) Assessment (how you will grade your students' performance)
6) Presentation of your WebQuest to whole class (5 min. per group; you just show it off on the smartboard, give some examples of the vocabulary, tell us about the task for your students, etc.)

Distribute the tasks fairly among your group members, so everyone gets involved:
Tasks
a) typing into the WebQuest
b) prewriting on paper, or in a word document
c) looking up matching pictures
d) looking up links to vocabulary
e) inventing tasks for your students
f) establishing a grading system
g) demonstrate on smartboard, etc.

Time for the whole project: 3 class periods (1 just for presentations)

Internet Slang

Read the following excerpt from Language and the Internet:

"A Mori/Lycos UK survey published in September 2000 showed that 81% of mobile phone users between the ages of 15 and 24 were using their phone for sending text messages, typically to co-ordinate their social lives, to engage in language play, to flirt, or just to send a 'thinking of you' message. Apparently, 37% of all messagers have used the service to tell someone they love them. At the same time, reports suggest that the service is being used for other purposes, such as sexual harassment, school bullying, political rumour-mongering, and interaction between drug dealers and clients.

The challenge of the small screen size and its limited character space (about 160 characters), as well as the small keypad, has motivated the evolution of an even more abbreviated language than emerged in chatgroups and virtual worlds (...). Some of the same abbreviations appear, either because of their 'obvious' rebus-like potential (e.g. NE1, 2day, B4, C U l8r ['later'], and Z ['said']) or because the generally youthful population of users were familiar with Netspeak shorthand in its other situations (e.g. Msg ['message'], BRB ['be right back']).

Basic smileys (...) are also used. Capital letters can be given syllabic values, as in thN ['then'] and nEd ['need']. But the medium has motivated some new forms (e.g. c%l ['cool']) and its own range of direct-address items, such as F2T ['free to talk?'], Mob ['mobile'], PCM ['please call me'], MMYT ['Mail me your thoughts'], and RUOK ['are you OK?']. Multi-word sentences and sequences of response utterances, especially of a stereotyped kind, can be reduced to a sequence of initial letters: SWDYT ['So what do you think?'], BCBC ['Beggars can't be choosers'], BTDT ['Been there, done that'], YYSSW ['Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, whatever'], HHOJ ['Ha, ha, only joking']. Users seem to be aware of the information value of consonants as opposed to vowels, judging by such vowel-less items as TXT ['text'] and XLNT ['excellent'].

The process saves a great deal of time and energy (given the awkwardness of selecting letters on the small keypad), and in those companies which still charge by the character (as opposed to the whole message), there is an economic value in abbreviation, too. In a creation such as ru2cn mel8r ['Are you two seeing me later?'], less than half the characters of the full form of the sentence are used. Even more ingenious coded abbreviations have been devised, especially among those for whom argot is a desirable safeguard against unwelcome surveillance."

Crystal, David (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England. Pages 229-230.

_________

Task 1: Creative Writing... (post on blog)

Pick one partner. Pretend you are high school students. Develop a short blog entry with any kind of text written in text-messaging slang (employing emoticons, if you wish).

Exchange it with a peer, let him/her translate yours, and try to translate his/hers WITHOUT using the dictionary at first. If you don’t get it all, you can use a guide, for example http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp
http://www.lingo2word.com/lists/emoticon_listA.html

Publish the original message along with your translation as one blog comment. (Remember to post both your names.)

Have fun!


Task 2: Critical Statement.... (email to me)

Write a short essay-type comment (max. ~500 words) about how you perceive people's use of text-messaging slang (your students, yourself, your friends, peers, etc....). Do you see it as a problem at all? What do you think about the English language of the future? What is your personal experience? Do you use it yourself? Do you have examples (from student teaching, etc.)? How do you deal with it? If you've never encountered it before - how would you react if your students / team mates, etc. would use this kind of language in official writing (school, newspaper, etc.)?

Plagiarism Survey and Homework

Dear all,

Please read the attachment that I sent everyone per email. It deals with the academic integrity at SIU, and informs us that on February 7th, Professor McCabe will visit our campus to present the results of a plagiarism survey that all faculty and students are asked to take.

So today at the beginning of class, we are all taking this wonderful survey about "student cheating."

Then, we are going to hear our mini lesson about clauses and phrases.

After that, we'll discuss text-messaging language, and then we'll proceed to our homework for coming Monday, which will be:

Read pp. 58-72 in your Weaver textbook, the beginning of chapter 4, "Toward a Perspective on Error." It deals with language (and grammar) acquisition of children, and error-making. Answer the following questions as homework assignment (you can either email them to me for next Monday, or bring them to class on paper):

1. Discuss the author’s stance that “children do not learn the basic structures of their native language through direct instruction, but through their own discovery and by formulating increasingly sophisticated hypotheses” (58). Use the text, as well as your personal knowledge and opinion.

2. Why can the drawings on p. 61 stand as a symbol of a child’s language/grammar acquisition? Explain in your own words.

3. Why are errors important for learning? What is the author’s opinion / your own opinion?

4. What do you personally think about “invented spelling” or “constructed spellings”? Can you give an example from your own childhood, or your children, or your students, and/or your own observances?

5. What is the difference between the behavioral approach, and the constructivist approach regarding errors? (Refer to page 63.) Which approach would you favor? Could any of those (behaviorism / constructivism) become your personal teaching philosophy? Why, or why not?

Code Switching

This article by Rebecca Wheeler addresses the concept of code switching. This is something we have all encountered before. We all know that you use language differently when you are speaking to your parents than when you are talking to your friends. You even use language differently when you write in different contexts. For example, typically people don’t use the same language to write an essay as they would on an instant messenger. Wheeler specifically addresses code switching as a way to teach African American students to understand and retain the difference between Standard English (SE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). She suggests that if we, as teachers, simply tell students the “correct” way to write and speak that we are doing the students no good. In fact, we would do them harm. The resolution that Wheeler give us is that rather than a corrective approach to teaching language, we take a contrastive approach. Not teaching that one is wrong and the other is right, but rather, discussing both variations of English and the different contexts in which to use them. This approach can be used between more than just SE and AAVE, which makes it a nice classroom tool. Wheeler gives us many examples, including statistics, of where this approach strongly avails its opponent. In addition, using such an approach allows both African American and European American Children to perform on an equal playing field when it comes to standardized tests. I feel that this article was useful for us as future teachers because, at least for me, it shows a way to accomplish language competency regardless of the dialect spoken.

Bonnie Bilyeu

In-Class Assignment, Jan. 23rd

In-class assignment:

Now that we have gotten acquainted with AAE, we are going to learn about the language peculiarities of another special sub-group of our future students.

Task 1: Pick a partner, and proofread the sample text below. Try to underline and correct as many mistakes as you can find.


The Beijing is a modern city and there are a lot of places to visit. First, there are many new building was build. One of the new buildings, it looks like a bird’s nest. Then, it have a big history. You can visit a lot of old buildings to know the history, just like “the summer Palace”. Finally, many people come from different country, there are kinds of restaurant. You can eat which you want to taste. Beijing is a nice place.


Task 2: With your partner, create a list of specific errors that occurred. Group these errors into categories.

Here is an example for a category: modifiers

In Chinese, modifiers always precede the noun, whereas in English they can follow the noun, especially for attributive clauses. Therefore, Chinese students often have problems constructing an attributive clause. For example:

· Their owners may want to come to the store knows the pets better.
· These are all good strategies should be used.
· There are some people want to live in the countryside.
· The Plan provides lots of good statistic numbers which very helpful.
· My grandfather is the only person who influenced by his actions.

Another category: pronouns

One salient error is the leaving out of the relative pronouns, because they don’t exist in Chinese. For instance, the first sentence, if written in Chinese, would belike: “Their owners may want to come to knows the pets better the store.”

To find more categories, take the following ERIC document for help. (Look only on pp. 47-62 for specific error types.)


Task 3: Pick one of your categories, or one category mentioned on pp. 47-62, and write a short passage how you as a teacher/tutor/editor would explain to an Asian writer WHY this can’t be said in English. Give plausible examples of right/wrong sentences, and explain to the ESL student how to use the grammatical form you picked correctly. Email this to me (if you do it as a pair, write both your names in the email.)

Example:
In a case study, a Costa Rican boy used the “the” too often, for example, “the nature has a lot of secrets.” The teacher replies: “Let me ask you, if you are walking in the woods, where is nature?” – “It’s in the trees. It’s kind of … everywhere,” the student replies. “Right. It’s everywhere. So nature is a very general noun. We talk about nature but we are not talking about a specific place or specific trees…” (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1983, 9-10).

Learning Cycles for Mini Lessons

For your mini lessons, you will need the following information:

We will do them in the form of learning cycles (the 5 E's). That means, you need to

1. ENGAGE: an attention catcher (to engage your audience)
2. EXPLORE: time for students to explore hands-on material (inquiry-based self-instruction)
3. EXPLAIN: let students explain in their own words (you can help with definitions/rules)
4. EXTEND: students get time to apply their learning to a new example by themselves
5. EVALUATE: tell students whether they were right or wrong; do online/paper quizzes, games, etc. (appraisal/feedback)

It does not only work in science, but also in English. Be creative!

Evaluating transcription into AAE

Prompt:
(Keep in mind that this is not a "racist" assignment, but founded on scientific research; we will express our criticism/thoughts about AAE and Ebonics later, after we've explored the "rules.")

Read the following short story by Alice Walker, "Everyday Use":
http://www.bow.k12.nh.us/jmcdermott/everyday_use__by_alice_walker.htm

Then, proofread the text I distributed in class - it was written by a student who was told to relate the same story from the viewpoint of Maggie, the uneducated sister, but as a transcription into AAE. Did he/she do a good job imitating the tone? Did he/she follow the rules correctly that you established? Where did he/she commit errors, or could have improved? Grade the student's transcription. Publish the grade and a brief statement of evaluation on this blog as a comment.

This text served as an example. Now it is your turn: homework will be to select ANY short text (maximum: 1 page) and to transcribe it into AAE. Email me both the original text and your transcription for Wednesday, Jan. 23rd. Follow as many "rules" as possible, making it sound genuine. It can be a text with dialogue, or just a third person narrator text, or a poem....You can use the Internet for help, or stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Dunbar, and others to gain corresponding vocabulary. You can also INVENT your AAE text - but then, you need to write me a transcription into Standard English! In the end, I need both versions from you.

After composing your AAE creative writing assignment, write a short statement (~ 50-100 words) of what you thought about that assignment (whether it was exceptionally difficult, easy, boring, useful, whatever....).

That's it!

Answer on 9/14/2008

Von’Dragas Smalley

This article intends to show the reader how students begin writing atrociously from an early age. Students start by learning English in a manner that is neither comfortable nor effective for writing. The text books that students learn from give them a false model for purely efficient English. Doomed from the start, students believe their teachers are looking for scholarly language that the student is clearly not familiar with. According to the author Ken Macrorie, “Even the textbook begins with an Engfish sentence, and surely it should be a model of writing for students.” The early learning of English incorrectly, therefore, leads to speaking and writing ineffectively. Macrorie has termed this atrocious and wrong writing style as “Engfish” in his book Telling Writing.

Regina Evans

The article the Poison Fish is a commentary on the use of English grammar in today’s society. It speaks about a person’s personal use of English as an expression of themselves. The article points out that many teachers’ grade punctuation and grammar usage and not for content.

I believe that every language needs to have rules and boundaries to be effective. Being effective means to understand what is being express and to utilize the information given. In certain situations, depending on who the audience is, “creative writing,” can have a powerful impact on the audience.

Regina M. Evans

Engfish

After reading this article it made me think about previous writings I have done and I have used Engfish in my writing. My biggest problem with writing is expressing my thoughts with clarity as well as making my writing come alive, which sometimes will leave the reader bored. Like the author stated at the end about the third grader “writing sharply and truly making his words come alive” is something older students tend to forget when writing. I agree with the author on that statement because I do that quite frequently without even paying attention to what I am writing. In my college experience I am constantly writing papers and I sometimes procrastinate, so when I am meeting a deadline my writing will lack. Now I have become more aware of what Engfish is and now I will try to pay closer attention to my writing.

response to ENG fish

I have never really utilized ENG fish. My major is pre-professional. I am trying to become an editor, not a teacher. The article did seem very interesting though. The grammatical errors and things of that nature that were used to display how to use ENG fish were eye-opening. I believe that any further information that we use on ENG fish will be beneficial to my future studies.

Welcome!

Welcome to our ENGL 300-001 grammar for teachers class!! This is going to be a fun course.
Let's jump in at the deep end right away: here's your first prompt - go to the following link

http://www.kristisiegel.com/engfish2.htm

Read the excerpt "The Poison Fish" from Ken Marcrorie's book Telling Writing.
It talks about ENGFISH, a common form of student writing that you will encounter during your future career as teachers.

Your task: write a short blog entry about your personal experience with ENGFISH - are you maybe student teaching already, and have seen it in your kids' writing? Did they serve you ENGFISH in their final exams when they wrote: "When I came into this class I knew nothing, but this semester I've learned so much; I owe it all to you, and you are a great teacher"?! Or did you produce ENGFISH texts yourself in certain situations? What do you think about the term? Does it work for you, or do you think it is inadequate? Or do you perhaps have a funny example of ENGFISH you want to share?