I'm going to own Disney World!

I thought that the video we watched for this week was both informational and entertaining. I liked how she started off by explaining some of the main differences between how girls and boys communicate in general. You could argue that it is over simplified, but I think that in general most men and women are great examples of what she was explaining.

One of her most interesting points was how our society, in general, tends to adopt a masculine form of communication. I thought this was interesting because of the points she made to back this statement up, but it was also interesting to me because my best friend is a woman. We've known each other since we were 2 years old and while growing up we communicated and acted like how Tannan said little boys act and communicate. We were competitive about almost everything. About when we turned 14 years old she started spending a little more time the girls in our neighborhood and I started spending more time hanging out with the boys, whereas before we all hung out together in a group and spent our time doing competitive activities like hide and go seek, sports, teasing, and mock fighting activities like shooting water guns. So even though our neighborhood's culture mainly communicated and acted with what Tannan describes as a masculine form of communication and action, the genders eventually adopted their generic styles of communication and action (They talked more and we kept competing. Of course that's simplifying it, but that's basically what it boils down to). That's not to say that we became distanced from each other and unable to communicate, interact, or understand each other, but we just gravitated to what we were most comfortable with while still interacting with and keeping in communication with the opposite gender.

Syntax

This has always been a dreaded subject of mine ever since I've studied linguistics (I've had one other linguistics class in my undergraduate studies). I dreaded it mainly because I don't usually think of English being split up into these different parts. I am able to recognize verb and noun phrases rather quickly just because they help to provide much of the meaning when it comes to sentences, but simple things such as prepositional phrases and determiners always threw me off. This is because my knowledge of syntax wasn't explicitly learned. In my last linguistics class I studied a lot for the final exam and I got an A, but I didn't really try to understand these tree diagrams because they annoyed me so much.

The thing that I liked about Finegan's chapter 5 on syntax though was that it explained the tree diagram slightly more explicitly than my previous linguistics text and class had. I think that many teachers assume that native speakers have this grammatical knowledge consciously (we have it subconsciously, but rarely remember what determiners are because we already know how to use them). This assumption allowed my previous teacher to skip much of the important information about tree diagrams (although we studied syntax in general more explicitly) and this is what caused me to dislike the kinds of exercises that we we're assigned for today. Since I was able to get an A in my previous course without the knowledge of the tree diagrams I assumed that I was home free and would never have to encounter them again in my life. I guess I was wrong.

This time I decided to go through Finegan's chapter and make sure that I built some conscious knowledge upon my already existing subconscious knowledge. Once I was able to do this the exercises became relatively easy and straight forward, whereas before they almost seemed like a complicated math problem. I think that these were good exercises because not only does it make sure that we know much of this syntactic knowledge consciously so that we can make our ESL/EFL students aware of it, but I think for those of us who don't pay much attention to grammar (usually native speakers) this exercise allows us to empathize with our potential students because the language must look like a complicated math problem or a puzzle at times and this can become frustrating. It is our job as teachers to give them the tools to be able to unlock and understand the language at many different levels and once this happens I think that students become heavily engaged with language learning because they now are beginning to learn the coding of the language.

हिन्दी स्क्रिप्ट, A note about Feb. 26th

(For some reason this thing started typing in Hindi!). Last week we spent most of the class preparing for our quiz that was due on Saturday. We did this by going over exercise 2-12 & 2-14 in Finegan. 2-14 proved to be easy and 2-12 wasn't too difficult, but 2-12 did create some interesting discussions in our small group at the beginning of the class. I think that some of these subjects are easy and interesting to discuss, but since many of us in this class are very knowledgable about the subjects we tend to prolong some of these discussions over many minor details that may or may not matter. This is sort of a pet peeve of mine but I have to accept it now that I am in a graduate program. It's also kind of funny when we find ourselves arguing about words and then we come to find out that both people in the argument are actually saying the exact same thing, but just in different ways. Sometimes the listening aspect of English is even disregarded by those who are proficient at it, haha.