teaching writing
Stereotypes in writing essays
Tweet Students often use stereotypes to support their ideas. They will write, “Everyone thinks teenagers are lazy,” or “City people are rude,” or “People in Mississippi are prejudiced.” They do this without a second thought, and, of course, it is up to their teacher to make them think a second time. Some stereotypes are so […]
Saving Endangered Languages … still more
Tweet Here are a few more reasons why we should make the effort to save endangered languages. Languages contain our history. Take away Shakespeare, Pepys, Wordsworth, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, Stephen Sondheim, and a host of other poets, authors, and lyricists and much of English speaking culture becomes invisible. As the Irish seek […]
A confession
Tweet What do you do when a college freshman, who has passed the required classes and tests to get into college, says the Subject of the sentence, After being forced to look into a deeper meaning I realized how that one little factor could alter your mood, is “mood?” (Please ignore the other problems with […]
Evaluating students’ work
Tweet It is the beginning of a new semester, and I have to evaluate the initial work of students to see if they are properly placed. It took a week in my ESL class to discover that two students should be in a more advanced class. The key was not in the students (who welcomed […]
Thinking
Tweet My linguistics professor once posed the question, “What is an idea?” I must admit that I am still unsure. There is a complex process which occurs between thinking something and speaking or writing it. When we speak, we have not taken the time to figure out exactly what we think beforehand. The American Heritage […]
September 11th, 9-11, 9/11 – Words from our worst day
Tweet We still are not sure how to refer to that awful day — is it “nine eleven” or “September 11th?” As a society, we’re still vacillating. In 2001, 9-11 (or equivalents) was the Word of the Year, according to the American Dialect Society. In 2002, it was Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). What do […]
Testing for sentence fragments
Tweet We use sentence fragments all the time in conversation. All speakers recall what has been said before and are familiar with the attitudes and expectations of the people they are speaking with. A person might even say, “Coming?” which is obviously not a full sentence, but given a clear context, it would be easily […]
Song lyrics as a language form
Tweet The students in my English as a Second Language (ESL) class will be writing an essay about their “immigrant experience.” I put that in quotation marks because a student is not really an immigrant, but he or she experiences the same culture shocks as an immigrant does, the same homesickness, and the same rebellion […]
Happiness and Sadness
Tweet In his book, The Geography of Bliss, author Eric Weiner claims that there are more words in English for states of unhappiness than for states of happiness. I’m not sure this is true, but it would be an interesting claim to test. Exercise: In connection with writing a short in-class essay, have students gather […]
The skeleton sentence expanded
Tweet Language probably began when people gave names to things, people, and actions. It has developed into a sophisticated, flexible instrument since then. The language in the exercise below is akin to a primitive pidgin, but was probably the way our earliest ancestors spoke when language was first developing. Exercise: Take the skeletal sentence elements […]