A True Story: Read over and over and over again.

I must admit:  reading that Mark Twain excerpt was a bit of a struggle. It took my undivided attention and I had to think about what was being said. I was not surprised by the linguistic features and differences among the reading. The biggest one was the pronunciation. I began to read it out loud because it was so hard for me to "interpret" what was being said. I started to talk like Aunt Rachel. My voice had a bit of a twang in it and my pronunciation was way off. I believe that pronunciation was the big problem. Aunt Rachel did not pronunciate very many of her words, leaving a lot of them "half said", like "an'"and "de". The syntax of her English is totally different. If you were to classify her language (as we did in class on wednesday) Aunt Rachel would be in the lower class portion, uneducated, speaking "uneducated" english. Aside from the "proper" use, it sounds the same. I could gather what was being said and could easily figure out what she meant because of the way it sounded. That is one pro to the English language. It is easy to determine what one is trying to say...even though it took me a few times to read it.

English Education: My Thoughts

Ahhh the world of English and language...if only we were able to have a step-by-step guide telling us everything we needed to know and teach about the language in general. I suppose since that is not possible (at least for the time being) I could give my input on what I think should be taught in the classrooms about the essence of language. Looking back on my own personal experience as a student in an English class setting, I see the ways in which we did not look at the English language very closely. Rather, it consisted of reading and writing...strange, right? That's not what I mean though. I am implying that my classes lacked reading and writing. The only thing teachers were concerned with was whether or not we knew who the characters were.
 If it were my own classroom, I would want to start off with an activity similar to the one we did yesterday in class and really analyze the differences between the languages we encounter. I've always known that we all speak in various ways but I've never looked at how. Ever since that class, I think about all the ways in which someone else talks differently than me and want to figure out why. I want to open my student's eyes to that as well. I want them to question, ponder, and find out why someone else talks differently in the very same language they speak. I think that students should be taught to analyze and think critically about the English language. I fear that we have become lazy when it comes to our language. It comes too easy to us and we constantly try to water it down and make it less intelligible. Like texting for example, need I say more? I think it would be fun to challenge students to write in a "different" kind of English and look at why that may be. For instance, one could look at and see all the ways a boy from Brooklyn would write differently than a woman in upstate New York. (just an example off the top of my head). Language is not merely writing and reading. Language is the dig-deep-find-out-the-deeper-meaning. It is thinking critically and analyzing English itself. One more issue that should be taught about the English language would be the origin...I'm a senior in college and I have yet to figure that out. With that said, I'm going to go do some research right now.