Blog 6, Writing

The article that was written by Will Baker is about ELF which is English as Lingua Franca. Baker argued that ELF doesn’t have its own culture. The ability to negotiate and adapt communication changes are the least important for the learners of ELF. It was very interesting to read this article. Before reading this article, I didn’t know what the English as Lingua Franca was. It is very interesting to read the article. I always make mistakes when I talk with someone else. Not a lot of people correct my mistakes. Some of my friends who are English native speakers, instead of correcting my grammatical mistakes, they make the same mistakes that I make when they talk. For example, I always get mixed up with pronouns of ‘he’ and ‘she’ when I have a conversation. Some of my friends were starting to make same mistakes that I did after they met me. When I talk to people that their native language is not English, we make grammatical mistakes when we make conversation. However, we understand each other. While I was reading this article, it made me wonder, is it okay to leave my ESL students to use ELF language? Can we tell ELL students to which conversation is grammatically right or wrong when many English native speakers make grammatical mistakes in their own conversation?

The second article that I read was written by Meredith Marra. This article is about the research that how Maori communicate in their workplace. The researchers needed to train themselves order to analyze Maori’s community. The researchers had to be respectful and behave to make Maori subjects comfortable.  

The video that we watched in our class was about the roles of writing in different countries. It was very interesting to see how many countries have different forms of writing. I agreed that for many ELL students, rather than understanding the format of English grammar, it is easier for them to memorize them. I am taking English 243 which is an English grammar course. In that class, many people know grammatical rules. Therefore, when the professor teaches new rules, they struggle with it. However, it is easier for me to understand the new grammatical rules because English grammatical rules are not similar with Korean grammatical rules. Therefore, I just memorize them. Also, in the video, one of the students stated that when teachers make correction in grammar rather than the concept of the essay, he gets discouraged. When the teachers make corrections on grammatical mistakes rather than the concept of the essay, I feel discouraged also. When I was in high school, I was struggling with grammar. I asked my ESL teacher to help. She gave me a book and I needed to write a summary of every chapter in the book. Until my paper had no grammatical mistakes, I had to keep revising. At first, I felt discouraged. I kept making same mistakes over and over. However, I started to realize the grammatical mistakes and didn’t make it. So, my writings got better. It wasn’t perfect; however, it got much better than it used to be. As a future teacher, is it right to grade the ELL students’ essays based on the grammatical mistakes? Or based on the concept of the essay? What if ELL students’ writing will not improve if we just look at the concept of the essay? How can we make ELL students to feel not discouraged when they see grammatical mistakes on their essays?