Reflection of readings for week 8

First of all, I would like to begin my reflection with a question. Is Mr. Edward Finegan serious when he is talking about a MATRIX CLAUSE!!! What is that!? If I am being completely honest with myself I was lost from page 152 when he started talking about Grammatical Relations. In particular I need clarification on

• auxiliary verbs
• COMP nodes
• subordinators and subordinate clauses
• matrix clauses

In other words I am going to be bugging Esther at her office again. I really appreciated the readings in Freeman & Freeman and the beginning part of Finegan. I did not realize how much clarification I needed when thinking about the syntax of English or any language. I think tree diagrams are a good thing and they helped me when I was thinking of the syntax of a more complicated sentence.

I finally found out exactly what a NOUN and VERB PHRASE IS!!! I had always wanted to know but no one could ever really define it for me.

Something that I found quite interesting and rather shocking was in the Freeman & Freeman there is an excerpt from two authors that did a study on the explicit teaching of grammar. The shocking part was that the quote overtly advocated that teaching grammar can be somewhat harmful to the education of students. I agree with that statement it was amazing that the book cited a quote with that strong viewpoint. I can see how grammar can be damaging to students motivation to want to learn about the English language. In fact I remember learning grammar and it was horrible! My teacher would have us take out our "I, Me, Mine" books and go through different grammar points. I can still see that book to this day. It was black and had a person fishing on the front of it. Anyway, that was the worst part of the day because the material my teacher was teaching was so dry for lack of a better word.