Category: Waleed

Dashes example:

• “My cow turned out to be a very large one. The first time I led her out I felt the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theater—embarrassed but elated.”
  (E.B. White, “A Week in November”)

-The grammatical purpose of dash usage is to connect indirectly the adjectives that work are subject modifiers but there is a necessity to emphasize the object more that mentioning the subject modification.

parenthesis example:

• “Humanist scribes had introduced parentheses to isolate interpolated expressions which were grammatically independent of their immediate contexts, but in the 16th and 17th centuries they were employed (especially in England) much more freely than at any other time. Any expression which might be regarded as parenthetical was enclosed within the two marks.”
  (M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation. Univ. of California Press, 1993)

-The grammatical purpose of using parentheses is to show that what is between parenthesis is explanatory but deleting it does not change the balance of the whole structure of sentence. Therefore, writers use this grammatical feature of parenthesis to add more information to the reader to help her/him overcome some ambiguity in the flow of the sentence.

Nordquist, R. (n.d.). www.about.com. Retrieved from http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/parenthterm.htm

I got 7. I am satisfied at least for the time being.

The following is a paragraph from my paper.

To determine whether exposure to the spoken English influences reading skills of English, the researchers added a variable of the composite scores of time the readers spent in reading and the comprehension accuracy. Each of these scores was standardized by means of (z-score). The (z-score) standardization was required because the percentage of comprehension accuracy varied with the reading time. Each one of the 18 ESL students was matched with a peer from the 18 EFL students. Both of these groups showed the same level of proficiency in reading when the researchers set the p value at 0.05. The difference was that ESL group studied in Vancouver-Canada and EFL did not go abroad. The ESL group had more exposure to the language that the EFL group.

The study collects the results of the ESL and EFL in reading comprehension, reading duration, reading composite score and the relationship between listening ability and reading improvement. A group of multiple regression analysis, t-tests and correlational analysis were applied to specify reading ability and level of variability between EFL and ESL groups.

My international school visit story

So, as a part of the TESOL program at Monterey Institute of International Studies, we had to visit the international school in Seaside. We had to deliver two classes in Arabic. Before we start the trip, I was watching the program of “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” This TV. show presents talented students in the fifth grade and they compete with adults on various questions range from geography to chemistry and physics. I was hesitated to teach them MSA (Modern Standard Arabic).  I had to stay with more than 20 pupils for more than one hour to teach them their names and the alphabet. In fact, I was so impressed by how much knowledge they have regarding my culture and country. One of the attending students asked me “Where are you from?” I said, “ I am from Iraq.” He said “So, why are we here?” I was mesmerized at that moment as I thought that they would not think about some political issues.  I thought for a while that this type of information in Politics is beyond their mental comprehension. I was mistaken. We started the lesson in the early morning and we had two teachers who assisted us to organize the class and introduce us to them and them to us. We (TESOL graduate students) had to carry some trophies from home to present them to learners to add more reality to Arabic class.  What surprises me the most is the dedication of those learners and their ability to devour Arabic letters. Soon as we started teaching them phonetics (the art of how to pronounce words) of Arabic language, we could hear most of them repeat the words and interact with his or her peers. I won’t forget that experience!

Words count:300

My views of the Grammar

I believe that all grammar structures whether active voice, passive voice or subjunctive clauses are equal. There is no structure that is superior and another that is inferior. But, from my understanding of the concept of grammar that professor Geoffrey Pullum, from the University of Pennsylvania has touched upon when he said ”The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.)”, I can say that grammar errors are avoidable by practice. I also like to mention another quote for this professor “No force on earth can prevent an undergraduate from injecting opinion”.

My take is that there should be moderation in the usage of grammatical structure. I can say that the moderation of using structures such as passive and active sentences moderately spice the text and they are the right indicator of writing improvement. The concept of good writing has drastically changed since the invention of Internet. Hundreds of writing programs have been injected with recommendations to use particular grammatical structure such as that in Word. In Word documents, for instance, the concept of passivity or activeness is vague. Whenever you write a sentence in passive, it will be underlined with a green line to indicate that it is preferable to replace it with an active one. Why? Computers do not control our ideas in language. Who said that the digitalized software know the language better than us?

The accomplishments for this week

‘ The connotational and pragmatic implicature may exist as a result of the paradigmal intricacy between decontextualized context and lack of pedagogic background’

Running after graduate students to collect answers’ sample, I could finish the biggest part of the project I am working to finish regarding ‘register. I have conducted some interviews with TESOL students.  But as TESOLers are the busy-bees of the institute. It was a painstaking job for me to get the three interviews with Patrick, Mikka, and Andrew. I working along to finish the first part of the project by merging these interviews into one video project. Zay, an MBA prospective student volunteered to help me conduct these interviews about the ‘Register’ and the ‘register samples’ that I could collect some answers from my friends in TESOL, MBA, MPA, and NPTS programs. Ia m very thankful for you Zay.

The interviews are divided into two parts. The first part is the interviews with TESOL graduate students. The second part is the random interviews with students in Monterey Institute of International Studies. I wanted to discover if this random sample of students could recognize the meaning of the word ‘register’ or not. Most of them had an idea about when to switch to high formal language and when to the informal. Some of the replies did not reflect the exact ideas of the students as they did not expect the sentence I came up with to the survey in the introduction of this blog.

The basic Sentence

An overview

The author discusses four importance-writing flaws that lots of writer whether native speakers or non-native speakers encounter when writing. These four issues are “Fragments, run-on sentences, subject-verb agreement, and problems with verb form and tense. The writer offers insightful ideas to practice in order to avoid or reduce these four cases in writing. Some of the critical ideas that the author indicates such as whether the writer runs on sentences or whether there is more than one subject in the sentence are very important for writers in the various fields of study.

The interesting part of this analytic article of English grammar is that it gives a clear description of the fundamentals of English grammar and how each sentence is formulated. In addition to its simplicity, this article works as a supplementary information guide to professional writers in the graduate study. The structuring of syntactic items such as ‘subject, verb, object and subject complement and object complement in this article serves its purpose to train writers how to be more adaptable to various structural styles.

There are more details about the ing-verb fragments. I usually entrap myself in complicated ing structures or to-infinitival structures such as this example: I was reading some articles from the Economist. Realizing that I am not a specialist, I couldn’t understand a lot of concepts. The other example has ‘to-fragment: The American Today magazine published new articles about TESOL. To research the topic of bilingual education in the Western coast of the United States.

The last point is the run-on sentences. In fact, my culture influences the way I write in English. We use ‘and’ a lot in Arabic when we connect sentences. Thus, I might flout from the main goal of each sentence when I link that sentence to another one.

Register can be defined as the level of formality that the user determined during communication that is characterized by pronunciational, syntactic and semantic features. It shows the person background and level of education in certain field. One of the best ways to secure smooth communication in the society is by determining the level of register that you speak in. The level of language formality vary when a person communicates with his wife, children, father, mother, and his or her friends.

Because of these detrimental factors that shape communication level, I chose to present about “register”. I think that a lot of people in the academia life or in the market or even within the family use various vocabulary registers to signal miscellaneous points of view such as their opinion about some political issues or their preferences of certain food.

Anyhow, if you are still reading my blog, you would realize that I am writing in a high register. My register contains advanced vocabulary that you might not encounter in your daily life. I am concocting this story for you because you are my cohort and I need your assistance in proofreading and editing my register in writing.

Primal brain in the modern classroom

David C. Geary

The recent scientific finding proves that children at schools attain more knowledge from what they want to learn and from their peers than from the assignments of teachers. The writer mentions that the social and religious affiliation of learners and their intimate relation with their folk history contribute to reshaping learners’ comprehension and input channels. Learners are becoming selective more and more despite the strictness of physics or chemistry lessons for example. The conducted study by the author indicated that learners have shown great rise in their motivation when they communicate with their peers and shallow motivation when the start working on assigned homework. (104 words).

-The recent study in cognitive science showed that human affiliation with their folk history, peers, and family relations. These intricate relations exercise a great impact on learners’ interaction and response to class assignments and duties by teachers.  Learners tend to understand better something relating to folk knowledge that something abstracts such as the concept of motion in physics. (58 words).

-The modern scientific and educational research shows that human prefer to communicate and learn from the knowledge that is based and ancestors knowledge than that is based on science. (29 words).

Reference

Geary, D. C. (September/October 2011). Primal brain in the modern classroom. Scientific American Mind, 22, 44-49. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nature.com/scientificamericanmind/journal/v22/n4/full/scientificamericanmind0911-44.html