Pronoun -Antecedent Agreement

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreements

Audience: Ninth Grade Students

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreements are similar to subject-verb agreements, but with different rules and/or principles. Pronoun-Antecedent agreements consists of both a pronoun and antecedent agreeing with rules (defined later within context).

Pronoun

A pronoun is a substitute for a noun. It refers to a person, place, thing, or feeling.

Example: The boy hesitantly ran across the street.

Pronoun usage: He hesitantly ran across the street.

Antecedent

An antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers to.

Example: Children get nervous when teachers use spiders for experiments.

Antecedent usage: Children get nervous when their teachers use spider for experiements.

The antecedent is the noun before the pronoun. In this case, the noun being children and pronoun their.

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement consists of three principles.

1. Gender: est. difference between male/female.
2. Number: est. difference between singular and plural.
3. Person: est. difference between quality of being. (1st, 2nd & 3rd person)

*All principles further explained within today's mini lesson.

1. Engage: Students will be engaged by Powerpoint demonstration and visuals of the subject.
2. Explore: I will provide students with an introduction for both pronouns and antecedents. Including, their purpose within agreeance.
3. Explain: By futhering students comprehension more in-depth, I'll provide the three vital principles for creating pronoun-antecedent agreements. Examples will be available.
4. Evaluate: I will evaluate their understanding by going over some in-class examples.
5. Expand: I will evalute the students understanding of the topic by an attachment of "Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement Quiz" within www.partnerpage.google.grammar300.com
6. Esearch: Students will further their knowledge by completing "Big Dog's Grammar Self-Test" on website: http://aliscot.com/bigdog/agrpa_exercise.html

Pronoun Cases

Audience- 8th graders

Types of Pronouns

Personal Pronouns- used as substitutes for proper or common nouns.

Reflexive Pronouns- a personal pronoun compounded with –self to
show the agent's action affects the agent
Examples: I hurt myself.
That man is talking to himself.
They ate all the food themselves.

Reciprocal Pronouns- express mutual action or relationship.
Example: Jane and Helen greeted each other.

Demonstrative Pronouns- identifies and specifies a noun or pronoun.
Examples: This ham is good, but that chicken tastes spoiled.
It was stupid of you to do that.
I wouldn’t recommend those books; these articles contain more
up-to-date information

Indefinite Pronouns- a group of words that generally indicate
quantity or amount
Examples: Each of the members has one vote.
All of the people clapped their hands.
Are all the people happy with their gifts?


3 cases of Pronouns:
Subjective: pronouns used as subject
Objective: Pronouns used as objects of verbs or prepositions
Possessive: Pronouns which express ownership


1) Explore- Introduction of a pronoun and what case means.

2) Explain- I will explain the different types of pronoun cases
and how they are used.

3) Evaluate- We will do some practice sentences together for
practice so I am able to see if they are understanding how to
know which pronouns to use.

4) Expand- We will do an online quiz together in class. Here’s
the link to the quiz: http://itech.pjc.edu/writinglab/case.htm

5) E-search- For homework: Look online and pick out any 10
sentences. Then you must circle the pronouns and tell me which
kind category they fall into.

Access/Excess, Affect/Effect, Except/Accept

Accept and except are homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, but have different meanings. Some of these homophones are accept/except, access/excess, effect/affect. Today I will give the students the definitions of the words and show them how they are used. They will be shown two sentences. The students will then choose which homophone is used correctly. In class the students will make a sentence for effect and affect, using the words properly. For homework students will take an online quiz and print their results and bring them to the next class period. For homework students are to also bring back to class a list of 25 homophones.


Audience- 7th grade

1) Engage- The students will be visually engaged with the power point and be answering questions.

2) Explore- Students will explore how to use homophones properly by writing their own sentences.

3) Explain- I will explain what the words are and give their definitions. I will also give the meaning of a homophone.

4) Evaluate- The students ill take an online quiz for homework and they will give sentences at the end of the presentation.

5) Expand- Students are to take an online quiz which will include more homophones than those explained in class.

6) E-search- Students will search the web for lists of 25 homophones and bring them back to class.

SLI

In Formal Features in Impaired Grammars: A Comparison of English and German SLI Children, by Harald Clahsen, Susanne Bartke, and Sandra Göllner, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is discussed. SLI or developmental dysphasia is a language disorder which can affect expressive and receptive language. In 1901 Albrecht Liebmann discovered this condition in which the subjects’ general intelligence fell within normal range, and they did not have any hearing deficits or emotional or behavioral disturbances. There was no clear non-linguistic cause for their difficulty in acquiring grammar. There are several grammatical theories regarding SLI. One theory we will explore is the grammatical agreement deficit, according to which SLI children are said to have problems establishing grammatical relationships such as case and agreement between different elements of a phrase or clause. For example, in subject-verb agreement, person and number are not primary features of verbs. They are only realized on finite verbs, but provide information about the subject and, in this way, can be said to be controlled by the subject. It is this kind of feature control that is said to be impaired in SLI.

In this article, data from nine English and six German SLI subjects with respect to tense and agreement marking, the feature specifications of DP-subjects, and verb raising were compared. English and German SLI subjects achieve significantly lower scores for subject-verb agreement marking than for past tense or preterit tense marking. English SLI children do not produce any non-NOM subjects, even in sentences with bare
(uninflected) stems. Two kinds of structures which have been reported to be absent from the speech of unimpaired German-speaking children are productively used by SLI children: non-finite verbs raised to second position and root infinitives with fully-specified and case-marked DP subjects.

Before reading this article were you familiar with SLI? If you are familiar with it, have you had any experience with SLI students? As a teacher, what would you do to help SLI students? Do you think it would be a challenge to have SLI students in your class?

ASL and Grammar

Responses are due Friday, February 13th, at class time

People who communicate through the use of American Sign Language face many of the same dilemmas in learning SWE (Standard Written English) that other ESL students face. ASL is considered to be a foreign language, just like Japanese, Spanish, or French. ASL “speakers” follow a much different set of guidelines in their language than English speakers. For example, when they are communicating they only use the major words in the sentence – leaving out the articles English speakers are accustomed to. For example, instead of saying “I sit in the chair”, the ASL “speaker” might say “I sit chair”.
This is not the only difference in the two languages. Those you communicate through the use of ASL construct sentences different from what would normally be expected in SWE. When asking somebody a question the ASL “speaker” will typically put the question part of the sentence (such as who, what, when, or where) at the end of the sentence much the way SWE uses a question mark. When stating that something happened in the past ASL “speakers” do not simply change the tense of the verb; they place the word finish before the action. For example:

SWE: I wrote this blog post.
ASL: I finish write this blog post.

When citing a specific time, ASL “speakers” place the time at the beginning. To take the last example a step further:

SWE: I wrote this blog post last night.
ASL: Last night I finish write this blog post.

To take it a step further, ASL requires that the “speaker” perform movements to help the “listener” understand the message. These movements include head movements, holding signs longer, or even raising/lowering their eye brows.

It is nice to know this information but unless it is applied it is only information. It is important to know this because ASL ‘speakers” are required to write in SWE when they write. This means that they are required to take their own words and translate those words into a different language (SWE) every time they must write. To best help the ASL “speaking” student a teacher must understand the dilemmas faced by the student as well as what kind of errors to expect and how to help them fix those mistakes and become better writers.

Sentence Diagramming Mini Lesson

Mini Lesson


Fri February 13, 2009.


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Sentence Diagramming is a complex concept that deserves much practise. Today I will be explaining the basic rules of sentence diagramming. The audience will be 9th graders. The class will only go over the basic principles of sentence diagramming so that they will have time to learn the process. The 9th graders will begin the class by watching a short instructional video on sentence diagramming. As a class we will go further into sentence diagramming by adding more parts of the sentence. The power point will explain the rules of sentence diagramming and will show examples of completed diagrammed sentences. The class will then take a short quiz over the video. The class will be assigned to find 5 sentences online or in a book. The students will diagram these sentences and will bring them to class the following day.


Audience- 9th graders



1) Engage- The students will be engaged by watching a short video on sentence diagramming.

2) Explore- The class will further explore the rules on diagramming more sentence parts.


3)Explain- Within the power point I will explain the rules of sentence diagramming.

4)Evaluate- The students will take a short quiz over sentence diagramming and the video.

5) Expand- The students will expand their knowledge on sentence diagramming by completing their homework on their own. Many will have to refer to notes or online resources to diagram parts of their chosen sentences.

6)E-search-The students will look for 5 sentences on-line and will diagram their chose sentences. The students will be asked to continue researching sentence diagramming on-line to learn more about it.


Video link: http://www.brainpop.com/english/grammar/diagrammingsentences/

Are twins delayed in language development?

Responses are due on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at class time.

There is a pervasive assumption in the twin and language development literature that twins are somewhat delayed in language development and more prone to language disabilities.

In the assigned article, the author summarizes several different case studies performed with the intention of discerning whether or not there was a language delay in twins. One early study in particular found that twins usually either spoke in shorter sentences or not very much at all compared to a person of single birth. There was also a slight difference in a twin's vocabulary than that of a singleton.

Also it was not just biological factors, low birth weight and birth order, that separated the twin case studies but that of maternal speech to the child that added into the resulting language delays. So both biological and environmental factors effect the speech of twins. Even with these factors, most twins don't suffer from any sort of language impairment once they've reached early childhood.

The author does state however that there are several flaws in these case studies. One study described that the researchers did not find it necessary to separate the twins with actual learning impairments from the other twins which lowered the overall results of the study. The researchers also did not record birth weight and birth order of the twins, which has been learned to factor in to language delay. The twins also were not observed independently from one another which might have skewed the results as well.

Most research though has come to the conclusion that it is not biological but social factors that leads twins to having more of a language delay than singletons. They believe this is because as a twin you tend to receive less direct parental speech.

The article also concludes with the idea that the more older siblings you have, the lower your IQ. The general sibling situation states that the lower a child's birth position the lower his or her IQ will be. Even more so when it comes to twins because having a twin is the most extreme case possible of having a sibling.

I felt that the article showed so much fault in the studies that I could not really believe in the results. And since the author said no language delays exist after early childhood, that it really is not fair to single out twins as having language development issues.