Week 10

In this week's reading (Kumar chap. 7 & 8, Brown chap. 22), I learned about language awareness and heuristics. Chapter 22 of Brown discusses the three parts of language: grammar, semantics, and pragmatics. Though language has been divided into three distinct groups, each of these three group cannot be sufficient alone. For example, we cannot teach our students semantics without having taught them pragmatics and grammar. I don't think it's necessarily difficult to teach these different aspects of language, but I think the hard part actually becomes figuring out how much to teach one area. How do I determine what I need to spend more time on? Is even possible to determine what we think is more important to teach students? I've had teachers who focused solely on grammar without any mention of pragmatics or semantics. I learned to "plug" in parts of a sentence based on the worksheets that my teacher gave me, but I never learned to use the grammar rules effectively because I did not learn to apply it within semantics or pragmatics. I wonder how much more effective it would have been for the teacher to incorporate semantics and pragmatics into her grammar lesson. Would I have had a better grasp on grammar? I'm not sure, because I did not have that experience, but I'm guessing that the answers would be yes. It's important to teach grammar, but isn't it just as important to teach students how language actually works? Do we choose to acknowledge only standard English as the only acceptable English? Or do we let "other Englishes" have space in our classrooms? I think idealistically, I would like to introduce all these different dialects of English, but I wonder how practical this goal would be. Despite all the best intentions I may have, I don't really know how or what I will teach.

Not only is learning grammar, pragmatics, and semantics an important part of language learning, but understanding how the language is formed and its history is just as important. When I took class that focused on the history and growth of English, I had so many lightbulb moments. Everything that I learned in high school would have made more sense. Not only is this language awareness important for ELLs, but it's also just as important to native language speakers.