Discourse

Mondays are when I have my practicum so needless to say being in any environment with adolescents you’re going to have discourse. Today I notice Relevance in the classroom. Today the class worked on a worksheet on Participial and Gerund phrases, the students were supposed to underline the phrase and label whether or not it was a participial phrase or a gerund phrase during this exercise one of the students asked the teacher what ignorance meant, the teacher answered simply that, that question wasn’t relevant to the topic of the assignment and that at the end of class he could look it up in the dictionary. This was interesting because this student normally doesn’t ask questions but is often a disturbance in the class room. He will just randomly start talking to other students from across the room. He was not only asking irrelevant questions but he wasn’t participating in working on his worksheet. Every Monday in Mrs. D’s class she has the students BEST which is a grammar note book, she puts 3 sentences on the board and calls on students to come up and make the corrections, after the student makes the corrections she asks the students why they made the corrections they did, they then try to explain why they corrected what they did.
Ex: The Baseball team (one, won) the trophy (to, too, two) years in a row.
The students would use Discourse Markers when trying to explain why they chose what they did. This is a great way to show and explain to the other students how and why the student chose the words they did. Every student gets a chance at coming up to the board to correct and explain why throughout the year.
Turn- Taking is something that didn’t work well in class today. After the students finished their worksheet individually they then worked with the other students at their table as a group to discuses and go over their answers, then the Mrs. D handed out small whiteboards to each group to play a game. Mrs. D then read the sentences out lout one at a time and each group had to put down what type of phrase was in each sentence, then she would have the groups write down if the phrase was a participial phrase what was the phrase describing in the sentence and if it was a gerund phrase what was the phrase being used as the subject, direct object, indirect object, predicate nominative, ex.…this was hard for the 3rd period class to do. There were out bursts along with inappropriate language being used if their group didn’t get the question right.
I haven’t really noticed a pattern when it come to discourse in the class room, there are few students who ask questions, but when questions are asked Mrs. D does her best to explain to the student. After she explains to the student she then asks if she answered the question and if not will try her best to put it into language that the student will understand then will ask the entire class if they have any questions about what she just explained. In 3rd period more than half of the class is on IEP’s and I have noticed that not many students in there ask questions at all, a lot of students don’t even participate in their work. Mrs. D isn’t going to give the students the answers, but she does her best to get those students involved in what is going on in the class room or she will have the resource teacher pull them out for more one on one time.
I have noticed how hard it is to try and give each student independent one on one time, but Mrs. D tries her best to accommodate each student.

As far as gender is concerned I would think that females would ask more questions, but I have noticed that when questions are being asked they are mostly from boys, boys. But when it comes to answering questions it is a mixture between girls and boys. I have also noticed the some of the students that other students pick on are more hesitant to answer questions. But for the most part a lot of the IEP students which seem to be a majority of males do not participate at all and are less likely to ask questions.

Writing

Yay another blog down! Well so far in my practicum I haven’t yet got my hands on some of the student’s writings. They are currently working on story/ heroic tales which are due Wednesday, so I am going to go in again to hopefully get a look at what they have been creatively working on and if what Mrs. D has been working on with them in class has actually work/ improved their writing skills. What they have been working on for the last couple of weeks which I am sure has been a lot longer is parts of a sentence and parts of speech, they are being tested on this tomorrow so maybe I will be able to look at their tests and see what the most common error that was made. Mrs. D told me on my first day that the students didn’t know the subject, verb, adjectives, est. so she was working with them to build their knowledge on these things, she said that if the students didn’t know these things how can she expect them to write proper sentence with proper word order. She is also having the students explain why the subject is the subject why it’s a predicate nominative and not a predicate adjective…. This has falls right into the section in class of sentence structure. I have a feeling that there writing isn’t going to be much different from their speech. But because my practicum day is on Monday which is their grammar day like I mentioned before I am going to go in on Wednesday so I can take a look at their writing and hopefully be able to finish this blog entry.