Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Spoken Language Interference Patterns (SLIPs)



Pot Legal

Phonology
Error SLIPs: Spelling and print code deviations
Nonerror SLIPs: Short words, pronoun frequency, contractions
Inverse SLIPs: Print code conventions (including spelling and punctuation), long words

Examples:

The spelling of marijuana as “mariguana”  Maybe the misspelling represents the way the student hears the word in relation to a phoneme-grapheme correspondence in his L1? 

Morphology
Error SLIPs: Inflectional deletions (subject-verb agreement, verb tense) inventions, inconsistencies
Nonerror SLIPs: Present tense, high frequency of first and second person pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, indefinite pronouns and IT
Inverse SLIPs: Past tense, third person pronouns, archaic or foreign abbreviations and morphemes

Examples:

“There are many issues that mariguana develop in a family.”  Maybe this student would leave out the /s/ when orally saying “develop” in this sentence.  

“...if mariguana were to be leagalize..”  This student, when speaking, might leave out the -ed sound/not state the full past participle in this sentence.  Maybe this is also a phonological error.  

- “Drug is well known around the world.”  Plurality and S/V agreement.  

Syntax
Error SLIPs: Sentence boundaries, awkward structures, double negatives
Nonerror: Independent clause coordination, sentence relatives, because as a subordinator, there constructions, do as a proverb, questions, analytic negations, that deletion
Inverse: Phrasal coordination, passives, nominalizations, synthetic negation, participial clauses, gerunds.  

Examples:

-”A person who lives daily in what we call high conditions can not, is not possible getting a Bachelors in life.”  

“The symptoms that families develop within are a thousand.”  

Semantics
Error: Colloquialisms, wordiness, low variety, wrong word
Nonerror: Discourse particles, amplifiers, hedges, emphatics, private verbs
Inverse: Downtoners, conjuncts, high type/token ratio, archaic or foreign words.  

Examples:

-”He got ecstasy as a try on; got hooked on it and now is an addict who dropped school.”  Maybe “try on” is a phrasal verb this student uses when speaking.  He might also say “dropped school” instead of “dropped out of.”  

Pragmatics
Error: Writer’s block, lack of unity, coherence and/or organization, vagueness, phatic function
Nonerror: Expectation of reader knowledge, omission of details, expressive function
Inverse: Organization, unity, coherence, explicitness, informative function

Examples:

-The lack of consistency, in terms of whom the student is addressing (Gray or someone else)...

Weird Friday

Phonology

“...I don’t know mom were ever you want...”

“I got up, got my blank it an fold it.”  

These spelling issues might stem from how the student hears the words.  

Morphology

- “When my mom was finish...”

The student might leave out the -ed or might not use past participles in his speech. 

Syntax

-....”and that’s what goanna talk am about...”

Semantics

- “We did hella things in one day...”

There is a lot of colloquial language in this essay. 

Pragmatics

Writer’s block doesn’t seem to be a huge problem but there are some coherence and organizational issues.  

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

End Notes


Weird Friday:

You told an entertaining story using your own unique writing style.  I enjoyed reading your paper and could really picture the scenes, which you described very well. 

To improve your paper, let’s look at when words should be formal in academic writing, and when they can be informal.  Look at the words I put a square around, and try to think of a more formal version of each word.  For example, if I say “I’m gonna talk about…” is there another way to say “gonna” that sounds more “academic?”  Here’s a chart you can use:

Informal Words                           Formal words that mean the same thing
I’m gonna                                      I’m going to
We did hella things…                     We did _______ things…

Also, look at your use of the word thing.  Look at where I circled thing in your paper, and try to find a more specific word that actually tells your reader what each thing is. 
You are off to a great start, and I’m looking forward to reading your revised draft! 

This writer seems comfortable putting words on paper, but needs a little help with more academic language.  I think the trick is to find a way to teach him some more formal vocabulary, with causing him to feel blocked by having to write more academically.  
 

Pot Legal:

I enjoyed reading your essay.  Your opinion is very clear, and you included some good examples.  To improve this paper:
1.       Create a reverse outline.  (An example of a reverse outline is attached, and we’ll work on doing this with your papers this week in class).  A reverse outline will help you organize your paper, and find out if you have a main idea in each paragraph.

2.        Put a circle around each punctuation mark (commas and periods).  Decide if you want to keep the punctuation mark the same, or change it to something else.  See my notes in the margins with hints. 

3.       …..

I’m a little stuck on this one; there are a lot of sentence-level, word order and organizational issues, but not a lot of obvious patterns.



Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Strategies that are useful for me when working on grammar with tutees

Search for patterns of errors in each paper.  Choose which structures to focus on accordingly.
Promote and teach awareness raising strategies.  

When the tutee reads to self-correct, have her focus on one type of error at a time.  

Use examples from the students paper to present grammar inductively, if necessary.

Consider factors which might make grammatical terminology useful or useless to the tutee.

Provide opportunities for controlled and free grammar practice when appropriate. 

Find resources that are available and useful.  Search for a variety of them. 

Resist the urge to provide too much direct feedback, if indirect feedback would be more useful to the student. 

Differentiate between global versus local errors and errors versus mistakes.  

Use read aloud strategies when appropriate, but understand when reading aloud might hinder rather than help the student.  

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Responding to Ability to Dance



Recommendations in terms of responding to this particular student:

  • Focus on only one or two sentence or word-level errors, based on patterns seen in the paper. 
  • Focus on global errors and some structural issues.  
  • Don’t overwhelm this particular student with symbols or codes.  
  • Locate errors; many of the corrections can be indirect.  
  • Don’t try to correct every error. 
  • Provide opportunity for the student to revise and rewrite.  

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Responding to Student Errors: Issues and Strategies

Ferris Chapter 4

Some researchers believe that error correction is useless. Ferris, however, argues that well-constructed error feedback and grammar mini lessons can actually be quite valuable to learners' development and second language acquisition. The chapter explores various issues related to such feedback.

Teachers should consider a variety of issues and questions raised, such as:


  • Which errors to correct
  • When to provide feedback
  • How to give feedback
  • How to help students process and utilize feedback effectively
  • How to avoid the burnout which can occur on the part of teachers who provide feedback  


When choosing which errors to mark, it is useful and most effective to focus on patterns of errors.  Don't focus on writing style (except when teaching very advanced students) for style is more likely acquired from exposure to the target language.

When deciding which errors to mark, the answer comes in three stages of understanding:


  1. Understanding the types of errors that are most common.  Such errors spread across morphological, lexical, syntactic and mechanical categories, and different errors need different types of treatment.
  2. Understanding that different students make different types of errors.  There are  differences between international students and permanent residents. Contrastive  analysis must also be taken into consideration when considering students' L1s. There are differences in L2 proficiency as well, and the random/ emergent and systematic/stabilization error recognition phases should be understood as they relate to different levels.
  3. Understanding the need to prioritize error feedback for individual students. Decide which errors to mark based on global versus local versus frequent errors and structures elicited by the assignment. 

Not marking errors on a draft might be a missed teaching opportunity.  L2 student writers often benefit from simultaneous feedback on both content and form (on the same draft). At the same time, students aren't likely to go back and correct marked errors on a completed project.

Consider when to give direct versus indirect feedback. Also consider error location versus error identification, larger versus smaller error categories, codes versus symbols versus verbal comments and textual correction versus end notes.  Be sure not to put words into students' mouths or assume that you know what they mean (if it is unclear).

It is important to help students understand and utilize error correction.

It is also important to carefully consider how to conserve energy and avoid burnout

Sent from my iPad

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Grammar Rants

Kyle Wiens won't hire people who use "poor grammar."  He is one of the powerful people Lindblom & Dunn describe, who speak for the powerful segment of society which hires and fires.  Wiens' grammar rant takes the form of a Harvard Business Journal blog, and can be found here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

He argues for an extreme, zero-tolerance approach to "poor grammar" when faced with hiring computer programmers for his company.  This CEO gives all prospective employees a grammar test, and the smallest of grammatical errors seemingly deems an applicant unworthy of programming (or even stocking shelves).    He blogs:

On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?

Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use     "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

 Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school  English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

...

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

ReMembering the Sentence

Sharon A. Myers summarizes Conners' "The Erasure of the Sentence." She feels that it is a well-thought-out article about the importance of sentence-based pedagogies, relevant history and connections to linguistic and psychological theories.

Myers argues for the usefulness of sentence combining as a pedagogical strategy.  We can now understand, theoretically, why sentence combining and imitation exercises help students to become more effective writers.  A lot of this relates to corpus linguistics, lexis, and the way phrases are learned in chunks.

Collocations must be learned.  Sentences combining can help with this as well, as such exercises are rich in vocabulary.

When grammar is taught traditionally, idiosyncrasies related to lexis are often not learned.

These idiosyncrasies revolve around register, countability, collocations, whether a verb is transitive or instransitive etc.  Sentence-level grammar is important, but words and such knowledge of words are needed to build sentences.  The grammar of words is important.

Pattern-recognition abilities come into play.  Language learning is not always rule governed.  Humans are extremely sensitive to patterns when exposed to data.

Myers discusses pedagogical perspectives, such as inductive approaches, trends in communicative language teaching and the growing importance of emphasizing lexis.

Templates can be used to teach grammatical structures.  Templates can relate to students' specific fields.

Concordancing is also a powerful tool for modeling sentences and teaching word grammar.

There is a place for sentence pedagogies.  New exercises using knowledge from corpus linguistics can be implemented.  Furthermore, while composition theorists have largely stopped considering non-English theories, Myers hopes that work in other fields, such as linguistics and psychology should be incorporated if such knowledge is useful to students.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

My Tutoring Experience


Most of my teaching and tutoring experience has taken place through private language schools in Europe and Southern California.  I spent two years in Prague teaching small group and one-to-one EFL lessons.  Most of my students were adults (working in business settings) but a few were in high school or what they referred to as post secondary (pre-college, intensive English training) situations.  My students in Southern California were from countries such as Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Vietnam, Korea, China, Brazil, Panama, France, Poland etc. etc.  Some were young adults hoping to attend universities in the US but their reasons for studying English and being in California were pretty varied.  Last semester I tutored two students in the CMS program at SF State and the focus of our tutoring sessions was mostly grammar.  I feel pretty comfortable working with ESL students, but my experience with Generation 1.5 and native English speakers in university settings is more limited.  I find that I learn a lot about teaching from each tutoring situation I'm thrown into, and I'm looking forward to meeting the tutees I'll work with for English 704.
Sent from my iPad

Tutoring Tips

Negotiate and create an agenda for each tutoring session.

Remain flexible when dealing with agendas, plans and expectations.

Strategies that work for one tutee might not work at all for another.

Meet tutees where they are at (in terms of abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc)

Try to avoid making assumptions about students' levels or abilities based on the classes they are enrolled in, their backgrounds or anything else.

Find ways to assess tutees' needs and goals.

Promote strategies that will encourage tutees to notice their own errors and mistakes.

Learn to differentiate between errors and mistakes.

Find and respond to strengths as well as weaknesses.

It's okay to not know all the answers

Monday, September 3, 2012

Useful Tutoring Resources



I was searching for material related to a writing textbook called Evergreen and stumbled across this instead.  It’s the Evergreen College Writing Center's resource page.  This particular section of it includes quite a few useful tutoring handouts.



This section of the Dartmouth Writing Program website deals with how to assist ESL writers from the perspective of understanding contrastive rhetoric.  



I think most of us have included the Owl sites.  (Sorry for being unoriginal.)  This section is for ESL instructors and tutors.  



This is the Owl Purdue “Writing Tutors” page.



You can download a variety of English and ESL course materials here.  



This site can be handy if you need a quick and easy-to-find grammar lesson.  (Type some keywords into the search box and other people’s lesson plans come up.)  It’s mostly geared toward ESL students who can grasp some grammatical metalanguage. There are some good ESL news lessons as well if you ever for any reason need one of those.