In-Class, Oct. 31st: Mini Lessons + Workshop

Today, we'll hear 3 mini lessons.

After that, read your email: it contains the newest blog article, and sample versions of our best Abstracts, Lit Reviews, and Annotated Bibs!!!

Then, we'll have a workshop, where you can do the following:

1) Repair and email out survey (last chance...)
2) Finish the other two graphs and 5-7 sentence statements
3) Repair Abstract, Lit Review, Annotated Bib
4) Develop your mini lesson, if you haven't held it yet
5) Prepare next blog summary
6) Prepare response to next blog article


The next blog summary is due on Monday, Nov. 3rd, by Heather Mormino.
The responses are due Wednesday, Nov. 5th, at class time (otherwise, you won't be able to do the in-class activity).

Next Mini Lessons

Mini Lesson Order
(that's all of them. If you weren't on this list and have NOT held one yet, please contact me as soon as possible!!!)

Friday, Oct. 31st:
1) Andre Dyson (style)
2) Leah West (dash)
3) Sharon Espina (plural and possessive "s")


Monday, Nov. 3rd:
1) Donald Dinkins (not only, but also; neither, nor; either, or)
2) Sharita Haralson (tenses)
3) Alexandra Rude (lie/lay; sit/set; rise/raise)


Friday, Nov. 7th:
1) Ken Stoner (titles, capitalization, APA and MLA)
2) Brian Harris (Clauses & Phrases)
3) Jennifer Gulley (gerund)

In-Class, Wed. 29th: Graphs

Preview: This Friday, Oct. 31st, we'll hear three mini lessons:

1) Andre Dyson (about "style")
2) Leah West (about the "dash")
3) Sharon Espina (about "plural S versus possessive S")

The presenters: Don't forget to submit your 1-page overview of the 6 E's!!!

_______________________________________________

Workshop in-class on Wednesday, Oct. 29th:

GRAPHS
(If you miss this class, do the steps at home so you won't get left behind!)


Today, we are preparing the three graphs that go in the Research Essay under the Results section.

Those will be the exact graphs we are going to use later - we will merely exchange the numbers. Today, we simply invent numbers, but the graphs will be the same - xls will update automatically when you modify the numbers in two weeks, when the survey results are in.

WHICH QUESTIONS TO PICK FOR GRAPHS:

1) pick your first matrix
2) pick your second matrix
3) pick one other very important question to your topic
4) do NOT pick a demographic question!!!

You can have more than three graphs (maximum: 6), but the minimum is three.

TASKS:

1) open your survey, and minimize it
2) open xls
3) take your first matrix, and type the headline for your graph (= your survey question) into xls
4) create a table in xls with rows and colums for your matrix question
ATTENTION: Do NOT leave any blank fields, because this will mess up your graph!!!
5) Invent numbers (how many people would have said what. We'll replace those later.)
6) Highlight your whole xls table (WITHOUT your headline! Do NOT highlight any blank fields, for this will mess up your graph!), and then click on the symbol on the top of your xls screen which looks like this:









This icon will create the graph for you.


Example:


Teachers: How often and where do dyslexic students get diagnosed?

....................................often.... sometimes..... rarely..... never
first grade.................. 10.............. 23.............. 5 .........2
second grade..............20...............44...............4..........7
third grade.................57................29...............3..........9
fourth grade...............78................9.................7..........0
middle school.............60...............20..............10.........2
early high school.......70.................8...............0...........0
late high school..........30...............40.............20..........9
college......................0.................0................70.........30






And here is the graph that goes with your table (you just need to type the title above it):















In the end, I want everybody to have three different graphs. One has to be a bar diagram (vertical), like our example here. The second one can be a horizontal bar diagram, or a pie diagram, or a line diagram, or whatever you think proper. The icon mentioned above will create any kind of graph for you. Make sure the graph you choose makes sense - webs generally don't make sense for our purpose.

7) Write a 5-7 sentences statement about the main results you can see from your graph, cumulating in a hypothesis/general statement:

Using the graph above, I would say that:

7) Write a 5-7 sentences statement about the main results you can see from your graph, cumulating in a hypothesis/general statement:

Using the graph above, I would say that:

"According to the results, teachers say that students get often diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade (78%). With regard to third grade, 57% of the teachers say that students get often diagnosed, with regard to middle school 60%, and with regard to early high school, 70%. In college, according to teachers' experience, students get rarely (70%) or never (30%) diagnosed with dyslexia. In first and second grade, very few students get diagnosed; only 10% of the teachers think that first-graders get often diagnosed, and 20% of the teachers believe that second-graders get often diagnosed.

These findings suggest that according to teachers' experience, the best time to diagnose dyslexia in students is in fourth grade, and that first through third grade is too early to diagnose a reading disability such as dyslexia. It is further suggested that by the time they enter college, students are already diagnosed."

(This is JUST an example I invented; it's not true, of course!!!)



HOMEWORK for Monday, November 3rd, by class time: Email me your three xls sheets with your three tables, three different graphs, and three 5-7 sentences statements!!!

If we have time on Friday after the mini lessons, you'll get time to work on these components some more in-class.

__________________________________________________

This is all we do about the survey components - from now on, we'll wait for our results to come in, and will spend the time with mini lessons and blog posts, and some activities.

In-Class Mon. 27: Title, Abstract, Keywords, Lit Review

today: WORKSHOP
(If you're not in class today, do these steps at home, so you're not getting left behind!)

Wednesday, 29th: 2 mini lessons

HOMEWORK for Wed., 29th, class time: email me your Word document containing title, abstract (unfinished), keywords, Lit Review

________________________________________________________

Today, we will need our Word document with the 12 headings.

Our Research Papers are growing substantially. We've finished the Annotated Bibliography, which you can copy and paste into your Word doc as soon as you got them back from me with my remarks. Note: The 10 max. points you get for your Annotated Bibliography have nothing to do with the grade you'll get for your final Research Paper. They simply mean you've done your homework. I've marked format, academic voice, and spelling errors, and whether the homework was submitted on time; I didn't check the content. We will have a peer-editing session in the end, where your peers will evaluate the content of your paper components.

We will also do a readability exercise with our finished research essays to establish our personal readability levels - at what grade level we write. For an academic paper, it should be 16+. If your readability level is lower, you need to change your sentence structure by incorporating more commas and semicolons, and elevated vocabulary. If your Annotated Bibliography in the section of "personal statement" contains a sentence such as "This article was very helpful to me because it helped me to...," this is obviously corresponding to grade level 4 or so, and needs to be reworded to "according to the results, it can be suggested that prospective teachers employ the delineated strategies to improve...."

Now, we are continuing with our Lit Reviews which are due this Wednesday, Oct. 29th, at class time.

But we will also deal with some other headings: the title, the abstract, the keywords. The more you read in your secondary sources, the more keywords will pop up, so type them directly in the space under the abstract reserved for them. It is obvious that we can merely BEGIN with these steps, and will finish them within the next four weeks, since we do not have any results yet, and do not even know the actual number of our "participants." (NOTE: We will only count as "participants of the study" the people who actually answered the survey, NOT all the people we have asked to take the survey!!!)

Today, we will

1) invent a catchy title that foreshadows your topic (keep academic voice, but still make it attention-catching). Also add your name and institution, and the two black lines above and below the abstract. NOTE: You can have a one-sentence title (like "How much Grammar do College Freshmen Know?"), or a double-sentence title with a colon or a dash in between (like "Shakespeare Turning in His Grave - The Decline of Language in High School Students"). Don't make your title too long.

2) Begin the abstract. The word limit is 175 words - no more!!! Keep the readability very high, because your abstract will decide whether or not other researchers are going to read your whole paper.

3) list some keywords (all nouns!)

4) finish up your Lit Review that we began in last Friday's workshop. The easiest way is to print out the 3 external sources (research papers), underline the important findings, and highlight the quotes you want to use with differently-colored markers. NOTE: When you submit your final Research Papers, you will submit them in a folder that also contains your 3 sources. You can give me your high-lighted, annotated sources - in fact, I'd prefer to see that you've worked with your sources, rather than receiving clean paper that looks unread.

You can also open the online source and use two windows on your screen next to one other, so you can type the quotes from the source directly into your Word document. What doesn't work is to copy and paste the quotes, since this is not possible with pdf files (unless you have special software).

NOTE: Be careful when copying your quotes! If the original quote you are using contains a SPELLING MISTAKE, you have to misspell it, too - indicate that it was the mistake of the original author by putting square brackets with the Latin word "sic" (= "so" / "thus it was said") behind the misspelled word or punctuation sign. Example:

"This tree is gorgous [sic]" (Miller 2006, 87).



Below are the guidelines for how to write an effective ABSTRACT (taken from this source). I have made some annotations in maroon.

An abstract contains the following:

• Motivation:
  Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn't obviously "interesting" it might be better to put motivation first; but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful. (This is your attention-catcher; here, you introduce your topic by mentioning why it is so important in our times. You can also mention the shortcomings of existing literature (your external sources), and the importance of your own study.)
  

• Problem statement:
  What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too much jargon. In some cases it is appropriate to put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only works if most readers already understand why the problem is important. (This is where your research question goes - what did you want to find out?)
  

• Approach:
  How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What was the extent of your work (did you look at one application program or a hundred programs in twenty different programming languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure? (This is where you briefly describe your participants and methods. Leave out the number and demographics of your participants, since we don't know yet who will actually take your surveys.)
  

• Results:
  What's the answer? Specifically, most good computer architecture papers conclude that something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or otherwise better than something else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, hand-waving results such as "very", "small", or "significant." If you must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk about orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should not provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand you don't have room for all the caveats. (This is the part you leave blank for now; we'll fill it in when we have analyzed our SurveyMonkey results.)
  

• Conclusions:
  What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant "win", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case? (This is what you are going to write in the end, when the paper is completed. Contains your implications and limitations.)
  

If there are any questions, ask during the workshop in class, or take a look at last semester's sample essays again.

In-Class, Oct. 24: Literature Review

1) Mailing Out Surveys:

Those who received their surveys back with my comments can work on repairing their surveys; and if they have also received their intro letter and both are approved, they can email out their letter with the corrected survey URL to their 20 recipients.

If my notes say, "approved after corrections," you don't need to submit again; simply make the corrections, and email your survey out. If my notes say, "submit again," you had some major errors or dysfunctional buttons, and I'm going to give it another quick check before you're emailing it out; thus, email me your corrected link when you're done changing it!

ATTENTION: Before you email out your URL, email it to yourself and click on it, to make sure you can open it and it is the RIGHT URL. Some people sent me a link to SurveyMonkey, but not to their survey, so make sure it is not corrupted.

Also, make sure you've erased all your peers' answers before you send your survey out to your real audience!!!

Put me in the cc: line, so I can see your survey is emailed out!!!

You can also finish repairing the survey at home, and email it out from home. By Monday, Oct. 27th, all graded surveys should be emailed out! The ones I haven't graded yet will be sent out in class on Monday, Oct. 27th.

______________________________________________________

2. Today, we are having a workshop about Literature Review.

Those who have already emailed out their survey can start with this new task right away. Basically, you will need the three research articles you have chosen, about which you have written your Annotated Bibliography.

The Literature Review is a major component of your research essay and talks about the status quo of current research about your topic - its achievement, and its shortcomings which you are trying to fill by adding your own research.

It is a SYNTHESIS of your 3 external sources, not a SUMMARY. Merge, contrast, and compare your sources to one another, and find their shortcomings that you are going to fill with your own research.

Read the following description of what the fourfold Literature Review is intended for. On this site, you will also find a link to the APA style manual which helps you create the citations for your Lit Review. Remember the rules: Quotes that are under 4 lines go in your text flow and have quotation marks, and you indicate your source in parentheses: (Miller 2008, 59). Quotes that are 4 lines and over are indented, have NO quotation marks, and also have the source indication in parentheses. (See example text below.)

Then, create your own Literature Review, and type it into the Word document with the 12 headlines we created together. Due date for the finished Lit Review is Wednesday, Oct. 29th, at class time.

LENGTH REQUIREMENT:

Below is a sample of a Literature Review I wrote for an education course:

(This is also the minimum length yours should be; if you have 3 external sources, write 2-3 pages (double-spaced; we'll single-space after our peer editing session to achieve the required format), and if you have 5 external sources, write 4-5 pages of Lit Review.)
_______________________________________________________

A C.A.L.L. for Fresh Wind in Grammar Teaching: Computer Assisted Language Learning as Best Practice for Literacy Education

Literature Review

Who wants to learn grammar? Let’s put it another way: who wants to teach it? Given that this highly analytical topic with its morphology, etymology, and diagramming is one of the most unpopular curriculum components in English language arts both in the conception of students and teachers, there must be a best practice to convey it in an agreeable, content-immersed manner proper for our computer age. We notice that students in middle and high schools have a more and more limited knowledge of technical terms such as genitive or accusative, but skills in information technology exceeding those of the teachers. Instead of bemoaning the status quo, we should readily address those skills, for in 2012, technological literacy will become part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or the Nation's Report Card, which means that in addition to reading, writing, math, science, history, etc., the technology literacy of students will be measured nationwide.

This important milestone in educational history justifies a more intense integration of information technology into the classrooms, exposing students and teachers alike to new software products and corresponding skills. Why not try it in grammar teaching? It can be argued that instead of drilling the technicalities of Greek and Roman grammar – a language the modern student does not understand – it might make more sense for teachers to use an alternative approach to teaching grammar, such as by imitation strategy, conveying it in the form of computer-assisted instruction in order to address the needs of the modern student.

More and more constructivist teachers change their methodologies by addressing their tech-savvy young audiences in a motivating way. According to Dexter and Anderson (1999), teachers make use of computer technology along a continuum of instructional styles ranging from instruction to construction, exposing their students to either drill and practice, with computer technology as complementation, or, respectively, to active work for knowledge-building, with computers as a tool (Dexter & Anderson 1999, 2). They purport that teachers are not only constant decision-makers, but also learners who have to go with the change in the “nowness” of instruction, and reflect upon their own effectiveness to make their teaching fit modern standards (Dexter & Anderson 1999, 2). In their study about teachers’ use of computers in their instruction, and their perception of the changes thus introduced in existent classroom practices, Dexter and Anderson quote one teacher who exemplifies the general attitude of all teachers interviewed by stating that computers are not driving, but facilitating the changes she makes: “It is not like there is a written curriculum for the computer. We kind of put it together as we go along based on the needs of the students. Like I said, we try and connect it as much as possible to what is happening in the classroom.” (Dexter & Anderson 1999, 9)

Putting it together according to the needs of the students is also the aim of the present study about teaching grammar courses by using computer-assisted language learning (C.A.L.L.) in the form of WebQuests, blogs, online survey builders, etc. There are, however, characteristics of C.A.L.L. that Dexter and colleague do not mention – the immanent dangers, such as limited on-task supervision, the proneness to use Internet lingo in academic settings, plagiarism, and the leaving-behind of students who are less fortunate than the excelling tech geeks, such as the case study of an Amish student who had just learned what a computer was, but not yet how to use its higher functions. Kuang-wu Lee (2000) analyzes in detail the barriers of C.A.L.L., namely the financial obstacles, the availability of soft- and hardware, the technical and theoretical knowledge, and the acceptance of the technology. Despite all those adversaries, Lee concludes that what matters is not the technology, but how we use it, and states that

[c]omputers can/will never substitute teachers but they offer new opportunities for better language practice. They may actually make the process of language learning significantly richer and play a key role in the reform of a country's educational system. The next generation of students will feel a lot more confident with information technology than we do. As a result, they will also be able to use the Internet to communicate more effectively, practice language skills more thoroughly and solve language learning problems more easily. (Lee 2000, n.p.)

While Lee – who tackles the subject from the point of view of foreign language learning – discusses computer technology in general, Zheng and colleagues (2004) go more into detail by describing the perceptions of WebQuests by higher-education learners. After a definition of the role of WebQuests and quotes of what they ought not to be, such as “a panacea for all manner of educational ills,” and “merely worksheets with URLs” (quoted in Zheng et al. 2004, 41), the researchers mention the key features of WebQuests: a) critical thinking, b) knowledge application,c) social skills, d) scaffolded learning. Their survey of the perceptions of males and females of their WebQuest learning led to the results that males and females both have equal opportunities to learn from scaffolding (including the components of content comprehension, learning, and goal attainment) as embedded in WebQuests without any gender preferences, and can perform equally well in cooperative learning. Although the researchers stress the difference between the old construct of WebQuests focusing on knowledge application and critical thinking versus the new one of constructivist problem solving, they underline that there cannot be uniform standards for WebQuests established, since they display a wide range of quality and design (Zheng et al. 2004, 48). The present study is going to analyze university students’ perception of their grammar learning through WebQuests and other computer-assisted functionalities, hopefully coming to some general statements where this C.A.L.L. in literacy will lead us in the future.

In-Class, Wed., Oct. 22nd: Hints for Research Essay

Today, we are having a WORKSHOP to google two more research essays, and create the other two entries for our Annotated Bibliography which are due this Friday, Oct. 24th, at class time.

I will email you when your entries are correct and approved, and this means you can copy and paste them in your Word document under "Annotated Bibliography" that we created this Monday (the one with the 12 headlines for the research essay components).

Remember to always have your Word document accessible (in an email to yourself), so we can continue to work on our research essays during the following two weeks!

We are not emailing out our surveys yet, since I haven't finished grading all of them yet. Only when I have returned and approved both your letter of introduction AND your graded survey, you can go ahead and email it out to the 20 emails of your audience that you should have collected by now. Put me in the cc: line, so I know your survey has been emailed out!!! I hope to have them all graded by this Friday, Oct. 24th.

_________________________________________________

Here are a few HINTS about your Research Essays:

What I don't want to see in your papers: don't use the words

1) fact
2) truth
3) proof

!!!!!

This means, never say, "It is a fact that.... (AAE should be taught in high school, all college freshmen are bad at grammar, etc.)." Nothing ever is a fact; there are always different opinions, numbers, and debates; it might be a hypothesis, a perception, an observation, an appearance, etc.

Never say, "it is true that," "in truth,..." - we are in no position to decide what the higher truth is!

Never say "proof," such as "my results proved." We are not famous researchers who create proof that can overrule existing research - we are just a class gathering data from a limited pool and writing a paper about that. Our reliability/validity is not very high due to our limitations. You can say, "the outcome of this study was," "the results show that," "according to the results," "the findings were that," "It can be suggested that." But we are not going to prove anything to the world.

Also, never use personifications, such as "the research says" - the research cannot say anything; it is the author of a research paper who purports / claims / argues / maintains / states something. (!!!) Make sure you vary your verbs accordingly.

Further, remember to use academic voice, which means you have to write in passive. ("This study was conducted at.... participants were chosen among.... a survey was emailed to..... the following methods were applied... the results were compared to...."). Don't use the personal pronoun "I."

__________________________________________________

Oct. 20th: Research Essay - 12 Components

What we are doing today, Monday, Oct. 20th (if you miss this class, do these steps at home. IMPORTANT! You'll get left behind if you don't.):

1) find the 12 components of a Research Essay, and create a Word document with these headlines. Email it to yourself.

2) download the 3 sample essays from last semester, and email them to yourself.

3) read 1 of the 3 sample essays together in class, and look at the corresponding survey and report sheet to see how the student from last semester has integrated his/her data. HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 22: Read the other two, so you get a good idea of what you are expected to do!

4) Find 3 research articles (or 4, for the 400 level) that deal with your topic and contain information you want to either confirm or contradict with your own survey results. NOTE: You are ONLY allowed to use published research essays from JSTOR, ERIC, or Google Scholar. No others are accepted; especially not websites and Wikipedia (those are not scientific and can contain many errors).

5) Create an Annotated Bibliography of these 3 or 4 articles.

HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 22: Email me ONE entry for your Annotated Bibliography.
HOMEWORK for Friday, Oct. 24th: Email me the TWO (or three) other entries for your Annotated Bibliography.

When I have graded and approved your entries for your Annotated Bibliography, copy and paste them into your Word document that is going to be your research essay under the corresponding heading.
___________________________________________________


A research essay has 12 main components which are easy to detect: look at the headlines!

TASK 1:
Take 5 min. to briefly look over the following three sample research essays from the Internet (all are a little different, but their main components are always the same), and let's find out in class discussion what the components are (in the right order!!!).
1. article: Genetic Determinants of Bone Mass in Adults
2. article: Exploring the Role of Distance Education....
3. article: about Decision Making Styles

Tell me the components, so I can put them on the blog. You are going to open a Word document, and type those 12 headings in there. This is the beginning of your research essay. Save it on your desktop, and email it to yourself, so you always have access to it, since we are going to work on it in class during the following four weeks.

12 components of Research Essay:

1. title
2. your name + institution
3. abstract (goes in between two black lines)
4. keywords (under the lower black line)
5. introduction (contains status quo of your topic, and debate about your topic)
6. literature review (a review of 3 research articles you've read about your topic)
7. purpose (of your research)
8. participants
9. methods (online survey created by www.surveymonkey.com; emailed out)
10. results (your 3 xls graphs)
11 (a). discussion (or: conclusion)
11 (b). limitations (this point is voluntary; here, you can discuss the validity of your research, for example that it would have shed a better light on the topic if you had interviewed more than 20 people, or people outside Illinois, or other limitations)
12. Annotated Bibliography (normally: references; but we do a bit more than that)

As 13., you are going to attach your annex (pdf file of your SurveyMonkey result sheet. If you had open-ended text box questions on your survey, you need to attach the separate Word doc. sheets for the text answers of your subjects, too, since those won't print on your pdf report sheet. You have to click on VIEW on your SurveyMonkey results page, and print them out separately for each question where you had an open-ended text box!)


TASK 2:
Go to the website linked below, and save the three sample essays on your desktop as Word documents. Email them to yourself, so you will always have access to them. They show what last semester's students have done with their survey - they've created a research essay using their own data pool, creating graphs from their results using their SurveyMonkey Report Sheet, and integrating current research about their topic in their literature review, analyzing it in their Annotated Bibliography. The latter will be done in APA format. Use this link to see what your Annotated Bibliography has to look like.

NOTE: If you take this course at a 300 level, you need 3 published and peer-reviewed research essay from scientific journals for your Annotated Bibliography.

If you take this course at a 400 level, you need 5 published and peer-reviewed research essays from scientific journals for your Annotated Bibliography.

NOTE: While all three essays were A's, the students have made some minor mistakes, for example with citing correctly in the text in APA style, or regarding the academic format, etc. Do not take over uncritically everything they did, but use their papers as examples only.

Here are three sample Research Essays that some of my ENGL300 students wrote this Spring.
The first one deals with autism (Report Sheet included). Here's the corresponding survey.
The second one deals with AAE (Report Sheet included). Here's the corresponding survey.
The third one deals with Twins. (Report Sheet included.) Here's the corresponding survey.

In-Class Task:

Browse the Internet for 3 (respectively, 4) research articles about your topic. Use the links on top of this blog to search in the ERIC and JSTOR databases, and Google Scholar. No unscientific essays, please!!!

When you've found a title that sounds like it might be usable for your paper, read over it; and if you find good quotations you want to use (either confirming or contradicting what you want to find out with your own survey), create an Annotated Bibliography entry for it, and type it into your Word document. Your homework for Wednesday is to email me one annotation. An annotation in APA consists of the citation line, a very brief and concise summary of 2-3 sentences, and a personal statement of 2-3 sentences. See example of an annotation as linked at the top of this blog. See also this example I wrote for another class:

Hudson, R. F., Lane, H. B., & Pullen, P.C. (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? The reading teacher, 58 (8), 702-714.

After defining fluency as accurate oral rendering of connected text at conversational rate with suitable prosody, and its importance with regard to the automaticity needed for textual comprehension, Hudson et al. explain different correlations, such as between reading accuracy and proficiency, reading rate and reading proficiency, and prosody and reading proficiency. They provide research-based information on the assessment of reading fluency and accuracy, explaining different measuring instruments for contextual oral reading, e.g. time readings, AIMSweb, DIBELS, GORT-4, NEEP, Reading Fluency Monitor, as well as observations and Zutell & Rasinski’s scale for prosody. Finally, they list evidence-based instructional fluency-development methods, such as (timed) repeated readings, and connected programs (Carbo Recorded Books, Great Leaps Reading, etc.), and answer some common instructional questions.

As a future reading specialist, I want to get to know as many fluency-development methods and forms of assessment as possible (including the “fads”), to find out which practices work best in my classrooms or tutoring sessions, always keeping in mind that a fast reading pace is NOT always a signal for textual comprehension: some children are good at sounding out words fast and show phonemic awareness without understanding what they read, because they are “glued to the print” focusing on the letters instead of prior knowledge, content, context, and inferences. Those children are also in danger of not being able to “read between the lines” and understand what is not explicit, for example humor / sarcasm / irony. To detect the problems of such students (which often go unnoticed due to said fluency) is a major challenge for reading teachers.

In-Class, Oct. 17th: How to Edit AFTER Publishing

How to go back to EDIT what you've typed into your survey AFTER you have received your peer feedback:

Go to our LABEL, find your survey, click on COLLECT RESPONSES, and click on the little parcel symbol which says

"OPEN,"

and say "CLOSED."

When you've CLOSED your survey, that means nobody can type in any answers while you are changing your wording. When you've finished repairing your survey, OPEN it again for your audience to answer!

Homework for Monday, Oct. 20th:

1. Finish survey, repair it according to peer feedback (IF our gmail accounts work again; if not, you'll get more time for the final proofreading),

2. Finish your letter of introduction (with a nice attention catcher, and a link to your final survey. Don't put the whole long URL in there, that doesn't look good; instead, hyperlink the word "survey" or "link" in your sentence, "Please click on the following LINK to take my survey."

3. Comment on Donald's blog summary, "Grammar Without Grammar."

4. Email me the pdf file of the REPORT SHEET you created with some peer answers. In case nobody answered to your survey because it wasn't finished or for some other reason, take your survey yourself (or have some friends take it), so you can create and email me the REPORT SHEET. The answers are all fake, anyway. However, you will need some feedback and GRADING SHEETS from your peers; if you didn't get any by Monday, Oct. 20th, let me know, and I'll assign someone for extra credit to take your survey.

You can email me your pdf file (and email your peer feedback and grading sheets) from any private or siu email account you have, in case our gmail class accounts still don't work!!!

How to find Results, and create Report Sheet

1. Today, Friday 17th, we are test-taking 5 (or more, if you want extra credit) surveys in class, if you haven't done so yet although it was homework. Email the Survey Grading Sheet to the authors of the surveys, and to me in copy, and include some comment sentences.


2. Then, we're going to look at our RESULTS. Go to www.surveymonkey.com

For that, open the LABEL of our class, find your survey, but don't open it - just click on the button "ANALYZE," and it will give you a data sheet with blue bars on which you can see the answers of your test takers.

If you want to see what EACH SURVEY TAKER has answered, click on the left menu button "BROWSE RESPONSES," and it will show you a forward and a backward button that leads you to survey taker no. 1, no. 2., no. 5 - whichever you want to see. This might be important for your evaluation. This way, you can also see that the first survey taker was male and African American, the second one female and Caucasian, etc.....

P.S. I am taking your surveys, too, and I am typing my comments into your text boxes, so if you want to see what I had to say read your RESULTS ;-) If there are no comments, I didn't find any big mistakes. I didn't comment on missing parts, like your introductions, just on some very obvious spelling mistakes and/or malfunctioning matrices/buttons. I didn't correct everything; that's your peers' work. I will fill in your Survey Grading Sheet after you've incorporated your peer feedback, so you'll get a better grade.


3. We will practice to create the pdf file (= REPORT SHEET) that has to be attached as an annex to your research essay later, when you got the real answers from your audience.

To create the REPORT SHEET, click on the left menu button "DOWNLOAD RESPONSES," choose "SUMMARY REPORT," and put the little black dot in the circle for "PDF FORMAT." Then, it will create one for you, and you just need to open it and save it, so you can email it to yourself and print it out.

Only AFTER you've created your pdf REPORT SHEET and have emailed it to yourself for printing, you can proceed with clearing out your responses account, so it will be fresh and empty when your real audience takes your survey.

To CLEAR out your peers' responses, go to the LABEL of our class, find your survey, don't open it, but click on the symbol of the little eraser that says CLEAR, and all your answers will be gone!


4. Create LETTER OF INTRODUCTION (basically the same as the intro on your survey, just a bit more elaborate, with a nice attention catcher in the beginning, such as: Do you believe that twins have language learning development as compared to singletons??? Some current research purports this. In the following survey (LINK) I want to find out whether this is really true. I am a student of...... bla bla bla.)


HOMEWORK for Monday, Oct. 20th, will be to print out your peers' feedback on your REPORT SHEET so I know you all know where to find it, and how to print it. If you don't want to waste paper, you can also email me your report sheet as a pdf file (you don't need to hand in a paper copy).

Homework is also to repair your survey AND finish up the LETTER OF INTRODUCTION we will begin in class today, and to email it to me by midnight on Friday, Oct. 17th, so I can grade it for Monday and give you the permission to email it out.

Also, you need to comment on the new blog summary done by Donald.

Grammar Without Grammar

Responses are due on Monday, October 20th


This article tells the story of how a writing teacher faced with the knowledge that the common way of teaching grammar is boring and ineffective, found a new way to teach the fundamentals of grammar without the students even realizing it.

Deborah Dean never looked forward to teaching the district required grammar section of her class. The students were always lulled to sleep by all of the technical jargon that comes with correct sentence structure, dangling participles and prepositional phrases. She tried to make the lesson interesting by using cartoons and more student friendly approaches, only to be scolded by angry letters from parents claiming that she was just wasting time.

When the state dropped the mandate for teaching the grammar section of the class, she stopped teaching it for a few years. Over time she found that when the students needed help with the grammar within their writing, they had no common language to address the problems, so she had to rethink the problem and come up with a new approach.

She started to bring interesting sentences to class for the students to mimic. She would write long complicated sentences that expresses multiple ideas on the board, and ask the students to recreate the sentences using their own words. There was no pressure for the students at all because she always told them it was just for practice. After a while she realized that the students were following the structures with amazing accuracy without even knowing the names of them. This was a way for them to work with language, consider different ways to express an idea, and realize that they had the ability to work to find better ones.

Here is an example of one of the excercises:

"The alley ended at an empty, padlocked garage."

She would then have them write small sentences representing all of the different kinds of ideas in the sentence

"The alley ended."
"It ended in a garage."
"The garage was empty."
"The garage was padlocked."

The students saw this as a game and competed with one another to see who could bring in to the classroom the sentence that had the most ideas within it.

She found a way to teach grammar without having to use the boring terminology that would have put them to sleep. She also found that this excercise gave an opportunity to talk about how we innatly know how to embed in certain ways, so much that we don't even realize we are doing it. The students don't know the names for all of the things that they are doing in their writing, but they are finding new ways to combine their own ideas because they see how it is done in other complicated sentences that they like.

What do you think about teaching grammar without the terminology, and what kinds of ways would you make teaching grammar to students less boring?

The link for this article can be found here.

How to Create URL

To create a URL for your finished survey,

log into http://www.surveymonkey.com/, find your survey under the label "grammarians300-1,Fall2008," and open your survey.

Then, click on the button "collect responses" on the horizontal menu list on top of your screen.

Then, put the little black bullet in the circle where it says, "create a link to send in your own email message..."

Copy the http://...... link that you get by right-clicking on it, open an email, paste this link with a right-click, and send it to me!

I will put your URL out on the blog on Thursday, Oct. 17th, 10:00 a.m. (deadline), so that everybody can access your survey on Friday morning at class time.

In case you don't manage to create the URL for whatever technological reason, just have your survey completely finished, and we'll create the link in class on Friday, Oct. 17th, really quickly. This means some people have to test-take your survey then.

If your survey is not finished on Friday at class time, your grade for the survey will be lowered by one grade.

Oct. 15th: Survey Links

On Wednesday, Oct. 15th, we will have a workshop to finish up our surveys.

At first, we will agree on a deadline for your audience to submit answers to your surveys: Wednesday, November 5th, 2008. Put this in the Intro part on top of your survey (where you have the other infos, about not taking blood samples, etc.).

Then, we'll finish the surveys. Since it is a WORKSHOP, you will be required to figure the technology out through "learning by doing," and you are also welcome to discuss with your peers and exchange ideas. Remember that there are sample surveys out there, if you don't know how a matrix has to look like, for example.

Each person needs 20 questions, at least 2 of which must be matrices, and the rest varied (single choice answers, multiple answers possible, open-ended text line, open-ended text box, etc.). 4 questions must be demographic (data about subjects, such as age, gender, years of experience, income, years of study, place of living (important if you survey about dialects and slang), etc.). 16 questions are content-based (e.g., "How many minutes of grammar do you teach per lesson?")

When you make up a Likert scale (such as: strongly disagree - disagree - neutral - agree - strongly agree), remember that it is always of advantage to have five items, not four, because some people tend to choose the middle.

Make sure all your button choices make sense, and that there are few spelling mistakes in your survey.

Also, make certain that all your survey questions lead to your purpose (your research question; what you want to find out in your essay, e.g. whether Ebonics should be considered a foreign language or not. For example, to find this out, you probably won't need to ask in the demographics, "what is your monthly income" - unless you want to prove that lower income families would support/reject instruction in Ebonics. Thus, work towards your goal, and avoid useless questions. If, on the other hand, you want to find out whether female high school teachers teach more grammar in English classes than male high school teachers, you MUST ask for their gender, and analyze their answers accordingly.)

However, you WON'T USE all of your questions in your final research essay, in which you analyze the results -- you'll pick the most important ones, or the ones that had the best results. (In case you made a button mistake, your result for this question will be screwed up since the interviewees answered wrongly; DON'T USE screwed-up questions, just forget about them. You will have to make THREE GRAPHS in the end; they will focus on three specific questions important to your research purpose. You won't make a graph out of EVERY question. Some questions are just for your background knowledge, not for graphs, such as the demographics, which you will use in the part of your research essay that deals with PARTICIPANTS. This is what the section PARTICIPANTS might look like: "The participants of this study were 20 elementary school teachers, 12 females, and 8 males, ranging in age from 25-59 years. 15 were English teachers, 1 was a biology teacher, 3 were social studies teachers, and 1 was a history teacher. 80% had more than 5 years of teaching experience, 10% had 2-5 years of teaching experience, and 10% less than one year.... bla bla bla.")

TASK 1: Email me your survey URL
When you've finished your survey, create a hyperlink for it (I will model this), and email me your URL and your topic, so I can put it out on this blog. In case you don't finish your survey in class today, email it to me after class (deadline: Thursday, Oct. 16th, 10 a.m.), so that I can put it out. It does not need to be perfect yet, because we will test your survey and give you feedback on it.

TASK 2: Testing 5 peer surveys, using this Survey Grading Sheet.
Each student needs to take at least five surveys of his/her peers for testing. You can do more if you wish. Try to spread it evenly; don't all test the first five surveys that are published, but also the last ones that come in at the deadline (Thursday, 10 a.m.). Everybody needs feedback! I will take some randomly, too. Just go to the links that will be published here, and take the surveys. Fill in the Survey Grading Sheet for the survey you test-take, and email it together with some comments to the author of the survey, and to me in copy to get your points for it.

EXTRA CREDIT opportunity: Some of you might have missed a homework (blog entry) after the mid-term grade has been announced. If you want to make up for something missed, let me know and take an additional survey - when you email me the copy of your feedback for this survey, write in it "make up for: ______ (topic of missed blog)," so that I can give you a grade for this instead.) You cannot make up for assignments missed BEFORE the mid-term grade, because those grades are submitted and won't change any more.

If you've missed a day unexcused AFTER the announcing of the mid-term grades, you can make up for that by taking 5 extra test surveys, and emailing the corresponding feedback comments to me, stating "make up for: _________ (day)."

TASK 3: Feedback email to 5 peers
As soon as you notice that something does not work, there is a spelling error, something is missing, the order of the question could be better, or you have a good question he/she could add, etc., email the person whose survey you took (you know the name; it's on the survey) and tell him/her what you noticed! In the end, you need to have sent FIVE EMAILS to the authors of the FIVE surveys you had to take. EMAIL ME A COPY of your feedback comments - even if you did not find any mistake - in this case, you tell the person what you liked about his/her survey. Deadline for emailing the feedback to your peers (with a copy to me) is Friday at class time. If you haven't done your 5 feedback emails by then, you will miss points.

P.S. For those of you who abbreviate your first name - don't do it on the survey, or your peers won't be able to email you any feedback, since I created all grammar300.com emails with your long first name!!!



Preview of TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (might be subject to change, depending on how good/fast we are/I can grade ;-) ):

On Friday, Oct. 17th, we will

1. repair our surveys according to our peer/teacher feedback. We do this by going back to "EDIT," and retyping the missing/wrong places. Then, you will create a new URL, and email it to me in or right after class. Deadline for submitting the repaired URL to me by email is Friday, Oct. 17th, 8 p.m. I will grade your final surveys on paper, and will give you the graded surveys back on Monday. Some of you might still need to make changes then, and submit them again. I will TAKE ALL SURVEY URL's off the blog when they are good to go, so that no strange people from the Internet are looking on our blog and taking your surveys, messing up the validity of your data!!! You alone will keep your real URL, and email it out as soon as I give permission.).

2. empty our "results" in http://www.surveymonkey.com/, because your peers' feedback is not from your intended audience; thus, we will delete it after having repaired/improved our surveys, to make the results account empty for the new answers of our real audience. (I will model it.)

3. cope with the letter of introduction. Your homework will be to email me your finished letter of introduction either in class, or right after class - deadline Saturday, 10 p.m.. Only if I have graded and accepted it you have the permission to use it later when you send out your survey!!!

On Monday, Oct. 20th, we will relax from the survey, and hear the next two mini lessons:

1) Ashley Epps: Pronoun - Antecedent Agreement
2) Sarah Klingler: That/Which

I will hand back the graded letters of introduction, and the surveys, which you will modify accordingly.

On Wednesday, Oct. 22nd, we will email out all graded introductory letters with the URL to our audiences. Thus, on Wednesday you need to bring the 20 required emails of your study subjects!!! You can get them from focus groups or self-help groups/parents' groups on the Internet (about twins, autistic children, DS children, children with Tourette, etc.), from the autism center at SIU if you ask them politely, from high school/middle school/elementary school teachers anywhere in the U.S., from people you know, from fellow students, etc. You're not allowed to ask SIU faculty!!!

Then, we'll wait for 1-2 weeks for our results to come in (depending on the deadline we agreed upon). In the meantime, we'll do mini lessons, learn about how to do the statistics for the research essay (xls graphs), learn about the components of the research essay and its required format, and evaluate some sample research essays we created in grammar300 last year. If you're willing to let me use YOUR RESEARCH ESSAY for next year's grammar300 students, please let me know in an email!!! (You can do it after you've received your research essay back in December, and know your grade, or you can do it in general. If you want, I'll take out your name (indicate that!). Your collaboration would be greatly appreciated - you are allowed to see last year's examples throughout this course, too! ;-))

Links to our PRELIMINARY SURVEYS for testing:

Thanks for all who posted their URL's! If you were not able to do so for technological reasons, I've done it for you after submission deadline, Thursday 16th, 10:00 a.m. It won't result in a point loss for you, as long as the survey was complete, because it is not your fault that I didn't model last time how to create the URL's.

What Teachers Say

This is my extra credit assignment.

Comments are due by Friday, October 16. This article can be found here.

What Teachers Say
This article overviews the differences between what college courses teach prospective teachers, and what is actually taught at the high school level. The article specifically refers to grammar instruction.

Attitudes Toward Teaching Grammar

• The findings of this article is that attitudes towards learning grammar was both difficult and dull; therefore, it was abandoned by most teachers. They believed it had no reflection on their writing. The author discusses his own opinion based upon his own classes. She found that children had creative ideas, but that their attitude toward grammar was lacking. However, she feels that teaching grammar is necessary in writing. She discusses several attempts she took, as well as trying to adjust to diverse environments. Since teacher's often abandoned grammar instruction, student teacher's were pushed into teaching a curriculum that they knew little about themselves.

Researchers vs. Classroom Teachers

• The author of this article found that student teachers have very similar opinions about teaching grammar; they all say that it is necessary in some form and for the same reasons. The difference found between reasearchers and classroom teachers is their definition of "formal grammar instruction." Researchers define it as a combination of technology, memorization, and a lot of drill and practice. Teachers, however, define it in mechanics. They only teach it in the context of their writing.

What Teachers Say

• The research conducted by the author was by formulating opinions of a few student teachers she knows and was acquainted with. One student teacher stated that the controversy of grammar instruction is irrelevant and simply exists for the purpose of discussion. He says that the curriculum is more revolved around writing, and thus he teaches it in the context of writing, and using the grammar to help get the writer's point across. Another teacher in a similar school environment agreed, but emphasized the need of teaching grammar slightly more. He stated that grammar is necessary, but easier taught after writing is developed. Other opinions from teachers is that they care more about the final product, or the final draft, as opposed to the journey through grammar that got them there. As long as they know how to produce a well-written paper, the teachers do not seem to care if they know how to diagram a sentence or how to develop an adverbial clause. An experienced teacher says that she has the students fill in worksheets during class that requires them to develop sentences on their own, and also assists in individual help. Teachers today think students need to read more as well- they must know how something is supposed to look in order to produce.

Discussion

• The author finds that it is upsetting that researchers cannot distinguish the formal teaching-learning process of grammar instruction. They teach the application over the process. Outside of the application, most teachers do not find the point in simply teaching the grammar aspect. Teachers in modern day environments graduate with a teaching certificate without a solid background in grammar, although common opinions are that it is essential. One teacher noted that, "The professors tell you not to teach grammar, but if you make a mistake on one of your papers, they sure do mark it!"

Conclusion

• Conclusions of this article is that grammar is necessary, but is mostly helpful in reflecting upon writing. Teachers and students together are generally not interested in grammar by itself because they have to find the need for it, which is in the application. The author also notes that possibly downsizing classes might help so that individual conferences could take place.
  

In-Class Monday, Oct. 13, and homework for 15th

Today, we created our survey templates.

I have labeled them, so that we can find them easily - you are not my only class that is taking surveys right now, so there will soon be lots of other surveys out there.

If you're looking for your survey, open www.surveymonkey.com with the login and password I have given you in class, go to "Current Folder," click on the black arrow for the labels, and select the label "grammarians300-1,Fall2008." This will take you to the surveys of our class (and nobody else's).

There are TWO (identical) surveys under our label that are not named correctly. They are called "CDS" and "Student Survey." I am going to delete those shortly. You HAVE TO name your survey lastname_topic; otherwise, they are void, since I can't verify whose they are. The responsible person, please repair this! Otherwise, you'll lose them on Wednesday, Oct. 15th, and have to start anew.


HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 15th:

Bring the 16 other questions (we finished the 4 items for demographics in class) you want to ask about your topic (either on paper, or in an email), so that all you have to do is to type them into the online builder, and figure out the technical components, such as matrices. Make sure you have some one-choice-only items, some multiple-answers-possible items, some matrices, some open-answer text fields, etc. If you don't vary your items, your survey will appear boring.

If you haven't done so yet, copy the word document we created together in class (the introduction to your survey), and paste it with "Edit" in the header of your surveymonkey.com survey. Make sure you did change the date, your name, and the grammatical errors!!!

For those who missed class today - this is what your intro should contain:


INTRO
1. identify your teacher, course, and university
2. mention whom you are going to interview (your audience)
3. state your research purpose (what you want to find out)
4. mention that you don't need consent of IRB and HSC, because...
5. mention that your survey is anonymous, for in-class use only, and not for publication
6. mention deadline for data submission (how long they can answer before you need the results. ATTENTION: we didn't agree on a date yet, so you can leave the date blank for now!)
7. mention that interviewees can receive the survey results by emailing you at your @grammar300.com email
8. mention that taking this survey does not take longer than 10 min.
9. thank the interviewees for their time/cooperation.


EXAMPLE:


I, first name last name, am a student from Dr. Christina Voss' English 300-1 Language Analysis class at SIUC. For my Fall 2008 project I am exploring the opinions of foreign language instructors to ascertain whether African American English (AAE) is worthy of foreign language status. This survey does not need the consent of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Human Subject Committee (HSC), because I am using this information as an in-class activity only; it is anonymous, and not for publication; I am not taking any blood samples; and I am not surveying minors. The deadline for taking this survey is November 10th, 2008. If you would like to receive the results of this survey, please feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@grammar300.com. This survey will take you about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you very much for your time.

Twins and Language Development

RESPONSES are due by Wednesday, Oct. 15th.
Here's the link to the original article.
________________________________________________________





Research on twins and delays in language development dates back to 1930. Researchers Day and Davis wrote 2 papers on their studies between twins and singletons. They took 80 pairs of twins and 140 singletons, between the ages of 1.5 and 5.5, any 50 random utterances were recorded. Twins were found to be as far as 2 years behind non-twins on many on aspects of language development. Davis performed this same study for the age group 5-9 year olds, and found that on average, twins caught up to the singletons.

Many have pointed out various flaws in this study, such as: not excluding twins who have language, speech, and hearing pathology, no acknowledgment of results for twins who had low birth-weight, acknowledgment of birth-order, twins were not always observed separately from each other, and that twins were averaged together, not scored separately.

More exploration of twins and language was done in the 1970's and 1980's. Lytton and Conway, Lytton, and Pysh did an experiment similar to Day and Davis's, but separated groups of twins in categories including by birth-weight and time of gestation. These two studies found that environmental variables, such as speech directed at mother, had more influence than biological variables, such as birth-weight.

Other studies were done that looked at more details other than just twinness. the factor most frequently studied was low birth-weight; in general, low birth-weight tends to lead to delays in language development more than only the fact of being a twin.

There have been other researches that only studied non-biological factors. J. Steven Reznic, a psychology professor at Yale, concluded that twin language development is similar to a general sibling situation. Being a twin is the most extreme case of being a sibling, and the more siblings one has, their IQ scores tend to be lower. Twins tend to learn how to use the pronoun "I" more quickly than non-twins, but also misuse plurals and other pronouns. This lead Reznick to believe that being a twin alters the linguistic environment, but does not make it abnormal.


-Do you think this research gives enough evidence to make the claim that twins suffer in language development? Almost all studies found that twins catch up to singletons by early elementary school. If you were teaching young twins (ages 3-9), would you do something to accommodate for them?

Friday, Oct. 10th: Intro to Research Project

HOMEWORK for Monday, Oct. 13^th:

Read this introduction to our research project, and also look at the links I provided!

Make up your mind about your topic, and sign up for it on my list on Monday, Oct. 13^th. Multiple entries for the same topic are possible.

_______________________________________________________________________

Today after the movie, we're going to start our big semester project: the research essay. This will take about a month altogether to complete.

At first, we will discuss the difference between

REVIEW ESSAY (a collage of different research articles that are compared, contrasted, and evaluated. No self-collected data.)

and

RESEARCH ESSAY (self-collected data that verifies or contradicts existing research which is previously discussed in the literature review of this paper).

The project of your RESEARCH essay consists of three parts:

1. an online survey you will create with SurveyMonkey.com using an account for which I will provide you a with password (don’t sign up for the free trial; its functions are limited. I’ll give you the paid for version with more features).

2. a report sheet this online survey builder will build for you. It will contain all the data you need taken out of the answers from your survey.

3. a research article of about 8-10 pages you will write about your results in a given format. You will attach your report sheet to it as an annex, and you will create three xls graphs for your data statistics. You will cite 3 published and peer-reviewed research articles from a scientific journal in your Literature Review, and add an Annotated Bibliography in APA for these three articles.

NOTE: if you take this course at a 400-level, you will write 12-15 pages, and you will cite 5 published and peer-reviewed research articles from a scientific journal.

Today, we'll only deal with step 1, how to create online surveys with SurveyMonkey.com

First, we are going to look at a few sample surveys we’ve created in ENGL 300-1 last semester:

A. Understanding Autism Through Supervision

B. What Second Language Teachers Think About AAE/Ebonics as Second Language

C. a) Language Acquisition Among Twins
b) It's Cause We Is Twins?

D. Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL)

E. Learning a Foreign Language

I am going to model how to create the template. You all have to name your surveys the following way:

Lastname_topic

For example:

Voss_grammar

If your topic name is really long, abbreviate it. For example, don’t write “apraxia in children with Down’s syndrome,” but call it “DS apraxia.”

You have to save your online survey under the correct label for your class I’ve created (either 300-1Fall 08, or 300-2 Fall 08).

Your further TASKS will be:

1) to pick a topic that in some way deals with "language acquisition" (not confined to pure grammar). You can take any topic we’ve talked about before, such as ESL, AAVE, Asian ESL learners, slang, dialect, accent, autism, twins, Tourette, Down’s syndrome, grammar teaching, grammar learning, dyslexia, apraxia, or invent your own topic. You can also make up a survey consisting entirely of grammar quizzes, to find out how much your interviewees know about grammar, and what types of grammar they know least about.

2) to figure out who your audience is going to be (will your questionnaire be for students, parents, teachers, education majors, or guardians; or relatives/parents of autistic or disabled children? We have an autism center in WHAM downstairs, in case you want to find contact persons there.) NOTE: You are NOT allowed to do the survey with any faculty members of SIU!!!

3) to assemble questions on paper about your topic that you might ask in the survey

4) to note down emails of 20 (no more and no less!) persons you are going to interview. Take into consideration that many people don't answer email surveys. So, if you address 20 people, count on it that 50% won't respond, anyway. If you have less than 10 interviewees, that won't give you a valuable research basis, and your survey will be void.

We will do these preliminary tasks on Monday 13^th, Wednesday 15^th, and Friday 17^th next week in class. If you miss a class session, you have to do them at home; otherwise, you’ll get left behind and won’t be able to use the software simultaneously with the others.

We will create a URL for our online survey and email it out to our interviewees (AFTER I have given my consent in written form that your letter and survey are ready for publication!). Accompanying this URL will be a friendly letter of introduction no longer than one page. Here’s the prompt (we will do this on Wednesday, Oct. 15^th, together in class):

1) Write a letter of introduction to the persons you will interview. State

- your name;

- class;

- instructor;

- why you do this survey;

- that you don't need consent by the Human Subjects Committee (HSC)/ Institutional Review Board (IRB) of SIU to conduct this survey, because it doesn't involve minors, or take blood samples, and is not for publication but for in-class practice only;

- that the survey is anonymous

- what the aim of your survey is

- how long it will take (not longer than 10 minutes)

- what the deadline is for taking the surveys, before you close them for data analysis

- that your subjects can have the results of your survey from you, when it is finished

- how you will compensate them for taking the survey, if you do that

- say THANK YOU for taking the survey.

Language Development in Down's Syndrome

Down's Syndrome is quickly becoming a more common disorder in America. I'm sure we have all heard the radio commercials about the statistics. How does a child with Down's Syndrome develop his or her language though? It is crucial that a person with Down's Syndrome learn how to communicate so he or she can function in society.

First of all, to understand a Down's Syndrome child, you must know that their chronological age does not match their mental age. This means that a child could be six or seven years old, but have the mind of a three year old. For example, at five years old, they begin to have two word utterances and have a vocabulary of about twenty words.

Research has mostly been done on young DS (Down's Syndrome) children. Studies have found that parental speech plays an integral part in language development. Language intervention for a DS child should preferably begin at a young age, because as a DS person becomes older, teaching language becomes even more difficult. Studies have also found that simple sentence structure is used throughout a DS person's lifetime. Usually a DS person uses more stereotypical expressions and responses. In addition, DS people use fewer secondary verbs and indefinite pronouns.

What is your opinion on Down's Syndrome? How can schools better prepare people who have the disorder to function in society?

Nex Blog Summary Text: Down's Syndrome

Under this link, you can find our new blog summary text about Down's Syndrome by J.A. Rondal.

The summary is due on Friday, Oct. 10th, by Jacob Talbert.
The responses are due next Monday, Oct. 13th.

I will distribute the movie guide for the Down's syndrome movie we are going to watch in class today (and probably finish up this Friday).

The movie guide won't be collected for a grade, but you should take notes under the corresponding headings while watching it, because five of these might be on the final exam.

If you miss class today or Friday, it is your responsibility to copy a peer's movie guide so you have something to learn from for your final exam in December.

midterm grades in your emails

Hi all,

I emailed you your midterm grades, since we were interrupted by the fire alarm.

If you have any questions of how your midterm grades were calculated, have a look at my grade book on Wednesday at the end of class, but they should be pretty self-explanatory.

If you missed more than 9 classes (even if excused), you need to contact me for talking about an incomplete, or another solution of how to make up for the missed work!

In-Class Monday, Oct. 6th

HOMEWORK for Wednesday, Oct. 8th: Answer to the blog about Tourette's syndrome and Speed Processing.

In-Class work on Monday, Oct. 6th:

1) mini lesson
2) mini lesson (diagramming sentences)

3) group work:

Get together in four groups. Each group picks up three posters.
TASK:

A. Using your black grammar book for help, create a sentence, diagram it on your poster, and explain it in front of your class.

B. Invent a similar sentence using what you have explained, write this sentence on your second poster, pick a partner group, and let them diagram it on your sheet.

C. Diagram a sentence, but leave out the words!! Note them down on a separate sheet of paper. Let your partner group use your poster with the diagram to fill it with meaningful words!


Mid-Term Grades:
10 minutes before the lesson ends, come up to the front and look at my grade book for your mid-term grade. Some students have more than 3 allowed absences and might qualify for a make-up assignment.


Preview of the week:

On Wednesday, Oct. 8th, we are going to watch a movie about Down's syndrome.

On Friday, Oct. 10th, we are starting with our new unit, the research essay. Attendance is very important! If you miss any class during this unit, you must contact your peers to get copies of what we have done; otherwise you probably won't be able to conduct the survey (electronically) and write your research paper.

Monday, Oct. 13th, we'll hear the next two mini lessons:
1. Melisa Ogle: Pronoun Cases
2. Raquel Maxey: Semi-Colon, and Colon

Speeded Processing of Grammar and Tool Knowledge in Tourette's Syndrome

Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder characterized by motor and verbal tics.

Recently, the three authors of the article, Walenski, Mostofsky, and Ullman performed a series of tests on TS children. During these experiments, they paid close attention to the response time of TS children against a control group of typically developing children in a series of verb conjugation problems and picture recognition exercises.

TS children were significantly faster in:
- producing past tenses of consistent regular verbs (slip-slipped)
- producing past tenses of regularized past tenses of novel verbs (splim-splimmed)
- naming manipulated items (a hammer)

TS children were slower in:
- producing the past tenses of irregular and inconsistent regular verbs (bring-brought)
- producing irregularized past tenses of novel verbs (splim-splam)
- naming non-manipulated items (an elephant)

Also, the accuracy level of the TS children decreased as their processing became faster, specifically when dealing with the -ed suffix. Often, an extra suffix was added such as in slippeded.

The TS children seem to perform better when the process depends on the procedural system and worse when the process depends on memorization. These findings gave way to their hypothesis that abnormalities in the frontal/basal-ganglia (specifically the portions that subserve motor function and procedural memory) may lead not only to tics (rapid, involuntary, unsuppressed behaviors) but also to a wider range of rapid behaviors which may actually give them the upper-hand over typically developing control children. Of course, faster is not always better as evidenced by the drop in the accuracy of their responses.

As teachers, we will probably have the opportunity to teach students with TS. Would you attempt to craft any of your grammar lessons in such a way as to give those students a chance to shine? If so, what type of problems or exercises would you use? If not, please explain why. Also, would the possible drop in the accuracy of their answers keep you from trying?