Article Accepted!

It's time to toot my own horn:

I submitted an article abstract to the the Claflin University Conference on Contemporary English and Language Arts Pedagogy entitled “Regional Dialect and Homophones: Teaching Standard English Composition to Thomian-Dialect Speakers.”

I received an email this morning informing me that my article has been accepted!

I'm honored and excited to be able to contribute.

(I'm also doing a happy dance in my office...with the door closed, so my students don't think I'm even weirder than they already think I am!)

Homo-whats?

After finally grading all my ENG 120 students' first essay revisions (that was a mouthful!), I have a better idea of what their grammatical and structural struggles are. All of them struggle with homophones, just like every other batch of students I've had. They also can't seem to let go of "you" or contractions.

(I do not allow students to use contractions in their academic writing, no do I allow them to write in anything but the third person, except for certain assignments).

On Monday I handed out a contractions practice sheet and had the students pair up. I gave them five minutes and they went through about 20 sentences, finding the contraction, putting the apostrophe in the proper place, and then writing out the long-hand of the contraction.

Ex: Shell make a great wife someday, Id wager. She'll, I'd = she will and I would

They had read Chapter 3: Improving Your Paragraph Skills in The Confident Writer, so we also focused on creating topic sentences.

Using the example topic of "College Students on Spring Break," I showed the class how to narrow the topic.

In this case, I narrowed the topic to: College Students Drinking Excessively on Spring Break.

I then created a thesis statement: College students who drink excessively on Spring Break are put themselves in danger of health problems, physical harm, and risky sexual behavior.

As my students already know, the three main points in a thesis statement translate to the topics for the three body paragraphs; in this case:

1. Excessive drinking can cause health problems such as alcohol poisoning in college students.
2. When a person is drunk, his reasoning faculties are impaired and he is more likely to cause physical harm to himself through thoughtless action.
3. Impaired decision-making capability is another side effect of excessive drinking, making students more likely to engage in unprotected or risky sex.

I then split the class into little groups of three people. The groups chose from 6 broad topics (cell phones, reality tv, roommates, addictive behavior, etc.), narrow the topics, create a thesis statement, and at least one topic sentence. Each group then shared what it thought was its best topic/narrow topic/TS/topic sentence set.

This morning in my 10:00am class, instead of a quiz, I handed out a sheet with 18 sentences. Each sentence needed a word that is a homophone and the students had to choose which homophone was correct (Ex: Can you ____ that carrot for me? Pare / Pair / Pear). I allowed the students to work in pairs (no pun intended!) and asked them to come up with 10 'sets' of homophones when they finished the sentences. We then wrote the most unique of the sets of homophones on the board and discussed them.

Ex:
die and dye
cent, scent and sent
way and weight
threw and through
lye and lie
light versus lite (I explained that "lite" is a pop word, as in Miller Lite (c), but that "light" is actually the correct homonym for a light-bulb or something that does not weigh much).
rain and reign
lane and lain
heir and air
boy and buoy (and boi)

and oodles more.

Dazed and Confused

In the midst of all the Republican presidential candidate candidates (yup, they are candidates to be the presidential candidate), SOPA, PIPA, Anonymous hackers group taking down the DOJ and a few other sites in response to the crackdown on MegaUpload, the Virgin Islands suffered a major economic blow on Wednesday. HOVENSA, a major oil refinery located on St. Croix, employs about 2,000 employees and offers a number of scholarships to students both for private high schools and college, announced that after a loss of over $1.3 billion over the last three years, it will be closing. It will retain 100 employees to run the former refinery as a glorified oil tank.

Why am I telling you this? Because this means not only loss of students to the University, but also of our basic fuel source here on island. Frightening.

In other news, all three sections of ENG 120 made it through their second week of me. They will spend the weekend revising their Diagnostic essays and turn them in to me either Monday or Tuesday, depending on when each section meets.

The Homophone activity was a definite success. Students came up with more homophones in small groups than they would have simply shouting them en masse as they came to each student's mind. We also had a chance to talk about the effect of the regional dialects on homophones in each section. I very, very nerdily announced that this is one of the aspects on which I'd like to focus my doctoral research (they were oh-so unimpressed...sighs).

Two weeks down, thirteen to go! Over the weekend I'll write more about what I'm planning via Blackboard Learn (bblearn) for the ENG 120 classes this semester.

Vote for Stephen Colbert!

Where did the time go?

Today felt like a constant rush and I'm not sure why; however, classes went well. After the reading quiz in the 10:00am ENG 120 class, I handed out my "Proofreading Notation" sheet and we quickly breezed through the notation and its corresponding errors. I answered any questions students had about specific points (ex: a student asked if I could give an example of a problem with parallelism).

I then handed back the students' corrected, 'graded,' Diagnostic essays. I reminded them that this was a first draft that they wrote in class, in 50 minutes, and after a break of at least a month from school, so their grades were not going to be stellar. (Truthfully, I think only one student eeked out a first draft over 70%.)

After the initial shock, head-shaking and nervous laughter, I opened the floor up to questions. As I expected, only a couple students were brave enough to ask specific questions about errors in their essays, so I changed the the "Scavenger Hunt" tactic: I chose an error off the Proofreading sheet and everyone had to find an instance of it in his essay. I had the class look for fused sentences, comma splices, run-ons, verb tense shifts, and other errors, then asked for volunteers to share an instance from their papers. After initial shyness, students started to volunteer their errors so they could ask more specific questions. Success!

In my 1:00pm class, we finished the last two types of Prewriting and covered START. I then had the students get into groups of 5--I wanted less groups for this exercise. I wrote "Homophones" on the board and asked someone to define the word for me. The agreed-on definition was "words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings." I gave the groups 10 minutes and asked them to come with as many homophones as they could.

Each group came up with bundles of examples:

where, wear, ware, weir and were (as in werewolf)
two, too, to
dear, deer
flower, flour
four, for, fore

And then we came to the examples I was hoping I'd hear: the homophones that only work in an Anglo-Caribbean dialect.

team, teem and theme -- many English-speaking Caribbean natives do not pronounce th sounds, so "three" sounds like "tree" and "thought" like "taught."

See the issue here? Suddenly pair, pear and peer are homophones, even if they are not for a more Midwestern U.S. accent. We talked and laughed about it--I believe that if students can recognize and laugh at their own idiosyncrasies, errors and differences, they will better recognize and be able to correct them. We will spend more time, in all the ENG 120 sections, on homophones and on 'regionally-specific' homophones.

More tomorrow!

On an unrelated note, I am personally against both PIPA and SOPA. You may have already noticed that Wikipedia blacked its site out today, and even Google blacked out its logo in solidarity. If you are also against PIPA and SOPA, be sure to reach out to your local and state political representatives and make yourself heard!