Well, I have to admit that my blog has been less than super successful, though I did all the required work. I like the idea of using blogs, and I have gained useful information from the work my classmates have been doing (much more than from my own blog, I’m afraid).
I think the trouble all stems from an poor topic. I am still enthusiastically interested in linguistics and language and grammar, but I had all kinds of trouble finding articles that matched my topic, especially when I was tying in the things we were learning about literature in class. I must have read three dozen articles and blog posts that I didn’t use, (although they were interesting) but very few talked about grammar. Would the simple answer have been to change my topic? Maybe, but I liked the things I was finding, when I was finding them, and I wanted to find more. I was partially successful.
As can be seen by my posts that my classmates did not get to comment on because I wrote them so close to the deadline, I was holding off for finding better articles. Sometimes I didn’t. This made some of my posts more relevent that others, but maybe it is still apparent that I attacked the topics with gusto.
As for my topic (defined in my first post), I still feel that grammar should be taught in school. Much of the research I did seemed to indicate that (effective) grammar instruction is very helpful in increasing mastery of the English language through writing. The question that is not so easy to answer is what KIND of grammar to teach, although that was indirectly answered as well. Most, if not all, of the relevant material I found on grammar instruction dealt with teaching English as a second language. This seems to be the place for grammar now, which does make sense in a way… native speakers do not need to be taught “rules” like subject-verb agreement and word order. However EVERYONE needs to be taught h0w to talk about language. Even ENG 261, which teaches that prescriptive grammar should be rejected in favor of descriptive grammar, we diagrammed sentences. Why? Because this is a way to describe language. I want to keep diagramming sentences. It’s kind of fun.
Quite separate from the content of the blog is the technological aspect and educational potential. I have used livejournal in the past for a personal blog and for communicating with friends, but I like wordpress for the more professional feel. It’s also easy to use, and I like the feature that allows drafts to be saved. I want to use blogs in my hypothetical future classroom, (more on that when I hand in my pedagogy project!) but I don’t know what methods or assignments I would like the best. I think that we had a lot of freedom with this blog regarding topic choice and what sources we used, and in a middle school or high school classroom I anticipate using a journal in other ways. This has been a good way to both organize my work and interact with the work other students are doing.
Yay blogs!
This blog is gay.