All this time we were reading and learning materials concerning second language acquisition. And now is the time to go deeper to the first language acquisition and to investigate the perspectives in which all we learn our mother tongue. First language acquisition can be accomplished with difficulties and if you want your child to acquire it successfully you should put great efforts. Also schools have a crucial role in developing children’s ability to express words and to create meaningful sentences. Knowing your mother tongue and developing it during years means to be literate. It is obvious that well-organized educational system contributes to the creation of healthy environment of certain country. Of course education has a great impact on ones level of literacy; however, I believe that a person could become literal without attending any educational institution. I’m saying this because unfortunately I know many people who have a diploma even a masters’ degree, but aren’t able to produce a single meaningful sentence.
The dialogue between little Susie and her baby-sitter was very fun to read. It is really wonderful to see how such a little girl could produce so many meaningful and grammatically correct sentences.
It is really very interesting to observe the grammatical stages when children develop their grammatical understandings. When I red in this chapter that it is easy to see how their grammar grows by making a regular tape –recordings I immediately called one of my friends who has a little one-year-old boy and asked her to record her son speech every six months. It would be interesting to see his speech development.
Overall, this chapter was a joy to read as it is related to something that not all of us know. How children start to produce speech, write and read is very important to know not only because we are about to become teachers, but also for the future moms it is also important.

It was a joy for me to read these two blog posts one of which is entitled as “Suggested Activities to Improve Speaking” and the second one is “Discussion Activities: The Buzz Group”. I chose these particular posts to read about as everything related to speaking activities and tips to improve the speech interests me. I have mentioned several times that the main weak point of our department is that we speak in English very little and even when we speak we don’t do that  spontaneously as we do prepare for our presentations day before. I think that this is different from supplying a person with the ability to tell their feelings and thoughts to others easily sometimes without preparation, and sometimes by being prepared. Each of the language skills should be considered as a part of a whole, and studies should be carried out for balanced development of all of them. I often come to points where I really have difficulties determining how to say things correctly. So, these are the reasons of my choosing these very posts.

The reason that I really enjoyed the posts is that in both of them the authors were talking from my point of view. I agree with every stated opinion. Especially when the author states that one cannot claim knowing a language perfectly unless he/she has the command of all of the language skills at a certain level. I’m sure that all will agree with this. I also share the authors’ opinion that the speaking is one of the most significant indicators of knowing a language. That’s why when my friends ask me whether I know the language completely, I always answer NO, as I don’t stop repeating that I am very worried about my spoken English. According to the author learning ability of individuals is mostly related to how effective they use the oral communication skills. One’s being unable to state his thoughts and opinions, in a way not thinking, and as a result of this not taking part in classroom activities means being unable to learn. This is also very close to me as I have faced this problem as well. Sometimes I do know the answers or even worse want to arise some important questions during the class, but cannot express my thoughts clearly. It is obvious that the speaking ability takes more place in our lives than writing. Moreover, in the case of teachers it has a crucial importance to speak in English fluently. Otherwise how can I as a future teacher explain a simple grammatical rule without having a confidence to speak?

Another thing that is discussed in this post and also very important from my point of view is the students’ retaining accent characteristics. As the author states the reason of this is that psychology states that training on accent correction is effective in childhood or adolescence because one’s vocabulary is formed at these ages. This fact also makes me return to AUA. It seems that here we are taught to memorize some rules. But it is just impossible to develop the speaking skill by memorizing some rules and making them be memorized. In order to achieve this development in speaking, we should have plenty and various practices, to listen to people who speak well and effectively and to take them as models. However, I think that even this isn’t enough. Of course it is beneficial to have native-speaker professors and every day listening to them talking trains our listening skills, but still don’t train our tongues to speak with confidence and with a good pronunciation.

This piece of writing is very informative not only for the learners, but also for the future teachers. So I decided to copy the most important points concerning speaking education.

* During the activities about speaking education, teachers should provide the
students with examples about how to ask for permission to speak, when and how to
ask questions, which expressions to start and end a speech, and how to get ready for
prepared speeches.
* The activities should attract the attention of students, should be enriched by
considering the other fields of curriculum, and should be applied to daily speeches.
* Students should be warned about the importance of vocabulary and general
knowledge in giving good and effective speeches. The importance of being a good
reader and listener should be emphasized.
* The fact that students are more active than the teacher in a classroom is an
often emphasized point in getting productivity in educational studies. Teachers
should provide students with a classroom environment where they can present
themselves freely. Every chance to make students speak should be used to achieve
this.

So how can we achieve all this? The second blog post discusses one way to encourage students to speak. As the title suggests it is called The Buzz Group. This is a discussion activity in which students are put into groups of three or four and asked to think of topic. Teacher might ask students to think about as many examples as possible. I find this activity very useful. After some discussion within the groups students have opportunity to speak in front of the other groups and have a little debate on the topic. Buzz groups can form the prelude to a larger discussion.

The acquisition of the written language is something that can be achieved with difficulties especially in the case of children. I’m saying this as all of my nephews and nieces were struggling while storing all the alphabetical letters in their minds. I found this chapter very interesting and informative to read. Especially it was interesting to read about the letterland where sound-letter relationships are presented in the forms of animal-people characters. Since language lessons at times can be difficult for children our job is to make them interesting, lively and fun. So, when it comes to teach children the letters, visual aids could be very helpful. As we all see from the example provided in this chapter colorful picture of animals started with letters that children should remember is both effective and enjoyable. In this case children learn both the certain names of animals and the letters of their names (such as Elephant-E, Bear-B). I have read in Douglas Browns’ book in which the author talks about the attention spans. The author gives an example saying that if you put children in front of a TV showing a favorite cartoon then they will stay riveted for the duration. So, we cannot claim that children have short attention spans. But short attention spans do come into play when children have to deal with the material that to them is too difficult, boring or useless. Because children are focused on the immediate here and now, activities should be designed to capture their immediate interest.

I enjoyed reading about the ambiguity related to the term writing. I especially liked the part when it is written that all literate people can write; but only tiny minorities are ‘writers’.

It is interesting to mention that in every chapter of Crystals’ book I always find something new or something that I have heard about, but still couldn’t understand properly. So, in this chapter the terms Graphs, Diagraphs and Trigraphs were new to me. Each person has its own unique handwriting styles. So graphemes are abstract units that appear in a variety of forms. As about diagraphs and trigraphs; the first one is a combination when two letters represents a single sound and the second one is a combination when tree letters represents a single sound.

As a conclusion, I want to mention that I myself found a justification to above stated fact that visual aids help to perceive the information more easily. When I was reading about the typographic terms I had difficulties in imagining them. But when I looked at the picture at the top of the page showing what is a serif and ascender I understood them clearly.

When I saw this topic for the next blog post I was so happy that finally there is a chance to express my own thoughts. I love this topic. It seems that I can talk about it for hours as I really have heaps to tell you. I’m very glad that some professors indicated that they noticed improvement in most of the first year students’ English. I’m sure that this is encouraging news for all of us. As about my personal opinion I notice a change not only in my English, but also in other students as well. When at the beginning most of us were admitted conditionally we were attending a remedial course in order to improve our knowledge of English. So, when I look back at our passed way I realize that though it is only 3 months that we are engaged in a learning process but I notice and feel a huge difference. The vivid example is that at the beginning I had a fear to go and ask some questions to my professors. I was feeling shyness and diffidence to speak in English. To be more honest I was thinking that my English was awful and if I speak in English I would appear foolish. Another thing is that sometimes I knew the answer to a question given by the professor, but I couldn’t express it properly (this problem occurs even now). Sometimes I talk to myself saying that “Ani, you knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to study here, but it was your choice and nobody had forced you to apply for the AUA. I’m happy to say that as days are passing I’m feeling more self-confident when I speak in a target language.

I have so many things to say, so I’ve decided to divide this part of my blog post into 4 sections which include my reflections about my improvement in 4 language skills that is to say Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing.

Reading

The previous year seems to be the year of exploring the English language for me. I was attending several private classes to enrich my knowledge of English. One of those classes was designed to prepare students for the TOEFL test. Frankly saying I disliked this test from the very start as I’m sure that this test has nothing to do with the knowledge of English. The most complex section for me was the reading section. At that time reading the academic texts including topics on Biology, Astronomy, and Physics was my first practice. I was struggling with perceiving that academic vocabulary, because my stock of English words was limited. Now that I do a lot of readings daily I see a huge improvement in my reading skills. Although it is sometimes unbearable to read approximately 50 pages about the Phonology; this is still something similar to Chinese for me. Nevertheless, I do realize that these readings help me a lot to enrich my mental vocabulary of English as I keep a special notebook where I immediately write down the unfamiliar words for me. Also day by day I’m becoming more fluent in reading and the most important change is that I perceive the reading materials easily.

Listening

My Armenian friends used to ask me “Ani, how do you understand the lectures in English? Isn’t it difficult to listen to a lecture in a foreign language and get the meaning properly? At first it was a little bit difficult for me to understand everything said by the lecturers. However, I think that now I perceive the lectures more easily without the need to be concentrated. Moreover, I think that it is beneficial to have professors who are all native speakers. Listening to a lectures given by the native speakers is advantageous as you both practicing your listening skills and listening to a right pronunciations after which you are trying to adopt them in your own speech.

Speaking

Speaking in English is my weakness. I do notice some advancement in my speech as I was able to overcome my fear to speak as now when I need to say something I just say it without any hesitation. However the question arises “How correctly have I said that?” I know that this question worried not only me, but also other students. I want to be honest I think that our Department should undertake a responsibility to provide opportunities for the students to speak as much as possible. We do a lot of reading, write essays, papers, write blog posts but we don’t actually speak. It is important not to forget that we live in a country where only a little minority of people knows English and when we are out of the classroom we don’t have somebody to talk to in English. When we are trying to ask for additional class for the speaking we get the answer that we need to pay additional money for that. This is sad because some of us cannot afford to pay additional money. The reason that I’m too worried is that I don’t get the purpose of studying for example Syntax if I won’t be able to explain the rules of the Syntax to our students in the nearest future. Don’t you think that it is very important? I have some ideas and suggestions that will talk about in my next post.

Writing

Another change that I notice is that I’m starting to like writing in English. I think this improvement is due to the large number of readings that we do every day. At the beginning writing an essay gets on my nerves as I was sitting with the paper and pencil in my hand for hours and couldn’t start writing. Now I feel that day by day it is becoming easier to express my thoughts in a written form as I enrich my mental vocabulary every day.

You know what is interesting? Even while writing this post I feel the improvement as previously I needed few hours to complete such task. Now I am able to finish it in 30 minutes. Everything I need is to take a good chance and sink in the process of absorbing knowledge. My choice is AUA and I’m sure to do everything possible to improve my knowledge in every possible and impossible ways.

Firstly I would like to ask to give more such topics for our blog posts. It’s very interesting to read David Crystals’ book and then write a blog post including our reflections and opinions. However for me writing my own thoughts is much more enjoyable. This course is the most enjoyable one for me. Maybe the reason is that we work and learn the language through computer-assisted web tools such as moodle, edublogs. These are something new for me and as we know everything new is attractive.

I’m going to be very honest while writing this post. It is a great pleasure to have a professor who is doing everything possible to make the learning process easier, who is always ready to explain the same thing several times and answer to the same question as many times as it is needed. When you see that the professor is not only a lecturer, but also a facilitator who really cares of each student, you feel responsible to study harder to meet the professors’ expectations. When we were just starting this course using this web tools in our study process was a little bit unusual.  Nevertheless as time passed I realized that this course is really useful. Previously I was familiar with different computer programs but I was using the Internet only for communicative purposes. I didn’t know how and where to find reliable articles, what blogs are and how to use them. Now that I’ve come to some awareness of what all these are I realize that I’m on my way to succeed.

One thing that I would like to change or better say suggest is to organize activities which will improve our speaking skills. We do a lot of readings, we write essays, papers and blog posts, but we don’t actually speak. Maybe I’m mistaken but I think if we want to teach English as a foreign language and become good teachers we should speak fluently without any fears or worries. Now I feel that my speech needs to be improved but I don’t know how to do that.  It would be nice to organize topic discussions, debates or have more presentations. I’m sure that such activities would be useful for all of us. Also I think that bookmark presentations take a lot of time so we can have some discussions or debates instead of the bookmark presentations. I suggest continuing putting bookmarks and then sending emails to all students about the topics of their bookmarks, so that the students would be able to visit the moodle and find the links that they interested in. In my point of view having discussions and debates would be beneficial also because we would start to learn to listen to each other which isn’t common nowadays in our society. Overall, in my opinion this course is designed perfectly and I really enjoy it. Thank you very much.

In one of my posts I’ve mentioned that Phonology for me is something similar to Chinese. After reading this chapter nothing has changed.  From Dr. Agajeenians’ class I’m more or less familiar with the sound system of a language. However it is still very difficult for me to store all these terms (diphthongs, monophtongs, triphtongs, etc) in my memory. Even if I could do so I would probably confuse their definitions.  I’m kind of embarrassed and the reason is that I’m sure that for those students who don’t have a linguistic background perceiving all these information is very complex. In my point of view one week isn’t enough for understanding and perceiving this staff properly. In order to understand them completely we need to provide at least a month for the Phonology and Phonetics. In this case we would be able to get acquainted with the sound system of the English language and keep this important part of a language in our brains.

As I’m still struggling with Phonology I’m not going to summarize this chapter. Instead I’m going to talk about some aspects which are extremely hard for me to understand. This is first of all the transcription of vowels. I wonder who had invented all that symbols. I wish there would be another way of transcribing vowels in a more simple way. It’s really unbearable for me to keep all those symbols in my mind. To be honest while reading this chapter I was very nervous especially when I reached the part where the vowel locations and variations are discussed. I’ve read the same thing several times and still no results. I need to discuss this question with other students to find out whether I’m the only one who struggles so much. Another thing that I want to mention is that this is the first time that the visual materials in form of pictures and diagrams don’t make any sense in David Crystals’ book. So I guess I need to finish my blog post and go find some books for beginners and maybe then I would be able to get the study of sound system properly.

It is an astonishing fact that any speaker of any human language can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences. According to Victoria Fromkin the part of a grammar that represents a speakers’ knowledge of sentences and their structures is called syntax.

What I really like in this book is that if author gives two different matters than he explains the main differences by providing examples, visual materials, and comparison so that nothing is left unclear.

In this way author talks about spoken and written sentences. And in order to be clearer he provides an example of speech transcripts and the transcripts of a written form. However sometimes in some chapters there are too many page references which make the process of reading unenjoyable

I’m more or less familiar with the structure of a sentence from Dr. Agajeenians’ class and that’s why most of the information given in this chapter wasn’t new for me. However, I think that this book goes through the syntax a little bit vaguely and the reason maybe is that this is an encyclopedia rather than a textbook.

The two types of a sentence which are the major sentence and the minor sentence are described very comprehensibly. Though I’ve already known what the two types of sentence are it was interesting for me to read about it one more time.

I especially enjoyed reading the part where the levels of sentence structures are discussed. It seems that author wanted to do everything possible to make this chapter easier to perceive . The manner in which clause level, phrase level and word level is described make the distinction more comprehensible.

Whenever I see pictures or diagrams in Cryctal’s book I immediately realize that nothing unclear would be left. The same thing I felt when I saw the boxes, in each of which different functions of sentences are discussed and described such as questions (exclamatory, rhetorical, tag question), directives, exclamations, etc.

When at the beginning of Dr. Agajeenians class we started to draw trees I was shocked as I couldn’t draw all that diagrams and identify which one is a Noun Phrase or a Complementizer, etc. In comparison with other textbooks that talk about the syntactic structures of sentences this book really explain everything in an obvious manner. So I wish I would have been able to read this chapter before writing the synthesis of syntax in Dr. Agajeenians class.

Have you ever thought that words live and die as we do? There is a poem written by Emily Dickenson which says “A word is dead when it is said”. I’ve read this poem in Victoria’s Fromkins’ book and it made me sink deeper to the meaning of that saying. I have never thought that words live as long as humans use them and words are changed as long as people make them change. The vivid examples of this are various ways of word-formation such as blending, compounding, clipping, backformation, etc. We invent new words derived from the initials of several words this is known as Acronyms. Vocabulary of a language expands in various of other ways.

Words are important parts of a linguistic knowledge and without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts through language or understand the thought of others. The study of the structure of words and of the rules that by which words are formed is morphology.  From Dr. Agajeenians’ class I have learnt the main aspects of morphological knowledge. That’s the reason that I would only talk about some new information that I came across to in this chapter.

I really took joy in reading this chapter as I was familiar with the information given in it and was just repeating what I have read from Dr. Agajeenians’ class which is beneficial because we jump from one chapter to another very fast and to read the  Crystals’ chapter related to structures of words is helpful in the sense that it helps to keep all that stuff in our memory. I find this chapter very informative as it clearly describes in which cases the adding an S is necessary(sometimes I confuse them). Also the exceptional plurals that are stated in the chapter are very important, so I wrote down all these exceptions. The term invariable nouns (these are nouns that do not show a contrast between singular and plural) was also new for me.

As about word classes I really enjoy reading this chapter as it supplies a huge amount of useful information not only for us as a learners, but also for us as a future teachers. In this chapter D. Crystal thoroughly explains every detail related to words in general their traditional and modern definitions, deeply goes in defining classes of nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, verbs and prepositions. I especially like the diagram in which the main subclasses of nouns  are drawn.

Due to this chapter I finally understood what grammatical gender in language is. The distinction between abstract and concrete nouns was also interesting to read about.

Maybe it will sound a little bit weird to hear from a graduate student, but I myself sometimes confuse the meanings of prepositions and the visual description of prepositional meanings are clearly explaining which prepositions are required in certain situations.

As to conclude, I’m really glad to enjoy the privilege of studying by this book as it is really a great one and provides an enormous amount of useful information and knowledge. Thank you.

Without knowing a grammar there can be no effective communication. When I’ve read this sentence in this chapter first thing that I thought was the experience that I had few years ago. When I was talking to one of my non-Armenian friends I was struggling when I was trying to express any of my thoughts as at that time my knowledge of English language was in a beginner level.  However, the interesting thing was that my friend understood almost everything that I was saying. When I was talking to him it was obvious that he understood me even if I didn’t express my thoughts in grammatically correct sentences. He used to tell me that the most important thing is to be understood by the foreigners in every possible ways without trying to use grammatically correct structures. That’s why I disagree with the author that one need to know grammar in order to communicate. Even now I have friends who live in USA. They are fluent speakers, but they don’t study a grammar and even aren’t students. They just live in a country were they interact with people, talk in a foreign language and some kind of imitate the people surrounding them. So I think that knowing a grammar isn’t obligatory for communication. As I found out later in this chapter even most of native speakers used to say that they don’t know any grammar and sometimes non-native speakers know a lot more than they do.

I was really surprised when I’ve read that most of native speakers don’t know grammar as they haven’t ever studied it. If we compare the American educational system with Armenian educational system we can conclude that in this particular aspect Armenian education is much more reliable as we study grammar every year while studying at high schools and even in universities grammar is one of the important and obligatory courses. Maybe this is the reason that we learn new languages very quickly as in order to learn a foreign language we must know our native language perfectly.

Also the part that discusses the confusion between ‘knowing grammar’ and ‘knowing about grammar’ seems very informative to me. While we grow we unconsciously acquire grammar and we get to know grammar. In contrast, when we describe this or that rules of a grammar or try to define an article we consciously know about grammar.

I was surprised when I reached the part where there were stated top ten of grammatical complaints. I dislike the same grammar usage as it was mentioned in the chapter. Sometimes it really sounds weird to me when the sentence  ends with a preposition or when people use I between you and I.

As a conclusion I want to talk about something that really worries me. When I was preparing for a TOEFL test I used to do very well the section that checks the knowledge of a grammar. I could choose the right answers from multiple choices and could identify the wrong choices. However I couldn’t explain why this or that error isn’t correct or why we can’t use the certain word in a sentence. I just felt the incorrectness in a sentence and I’m worried that I just did that automatically and unconsciously. It would be nice to receive some ideas from you concerning this situation. Thank you.

Before reading this chapter which is called Varieties of Discourse I liked almost everything in David Crystal’s book. However, while reading this chapter I found some disadvantages of this book which make the chapter more difficult to perceive and understand. I am not trying to criticize the author as I’m sure I’m not the one to do so. In this chapter there are a lot of useful and interesting information which I’m interested in, but on the other hand there are too much page references. I mean when I read about Varieties of Discourse I expect to be informed about it within this chapter, but for doing so I need to go to other chapters, read them and try to find specific information given in this chapter. For instance, I read about ‘fuzzy meanings’, or about ‘lexical phrases’, but there were no explanation of these terms. Instead there were page references. In the first sight you may think that this girl is some kind of lazy to open the other chapter and find the information which she is interested in. But, believe me, if I read this book for my personal interest and pleasure I will definitely do so. Being a gradate student I have to manage to do lots of other staff and it is becoming a little bit difficult to get effective results of studying. As I strive for perfection in everything I do this aspect is very important for me because otherwise my learning process is incomplete.

As about the information given in this chapter I got lot of new things. First thing that was very interesting to read about was the fact that even a simple greeting or leave-taking can present much more profound meaning than they seem to have in general. I myself have never thought about the greeting as very important thing I just greet people because in Armenian you can only say Բարև Ձեզ at every time of the day and it will be formal and informal at the same time. However at the beginning at AUA I faced this problem with English as I didn’t know how to greet the dean of our department. Maybe it will seem funny but every time I saw the dean I felt uncomfortable as I didn’t know is it polite to say Hello! Or maybe I need to say Good Morning, Good Afternoon, etc. And once when I said Hello and the dean replied Hii with the smile I realized that it wasn’t that hard J

Also I found very useful the part in which it was listed the most common phrases to say NO. I am a kind of person for whom saying No is very hard in general, so I guess I need to adopt some of these phrases for the future. I especially liked these two “I’d rather die” and “See in hell first”. I’m sure that all of these phrases and also phrases of expressing disbelief in each other stated in this chapter are great sources to enhance our spoken language and mental vocabulary.