Writing Homework Help

You are a native speaker of at least one language—how do you know that a word is or isn’t acceptable for that context? Is it from school, or your parents, or both—or is it something else? In formulating your thoughts, think back to chapter 1 and our discussion about descriptive versus prescriptive grammar, as well as Universal Grammar.

Instructions

• Post your initial post by Thursday of this week. Your response should be 100-150 words in length, and you should connect the elements in the journal topic to our course in some way. You should also include your personal experiences, tying them into the course.
  • You won’t be able to see anyone else’s post before you write your own—and that’s on purpose. Use this time to reflect on your experiences. Remember that there are ‘no wrong answers’—so long as you use the information that we have learned thus far in the course to your work, then all is good!
• Between Friday and Sunday, please reply to at least two of your colleagues’ posts. Useful comments include engaging in dialogue, reflection, or suggestion. If you find that you agree with a given response and have nothing else to add, then I challenge you to reply to someone who has a different perspective than yours, and explore the differences.

  Reply:

1

Considering that my first language is Spanish and my second language is English I have a different perspective on how I learned each language. Learning Spanish was easy because it was my first language, my parents did not know how to speak English very well, or at all, so I spoke Spanish 100% of the time at home. As for when I started learning English I learned a lot from watching cartoons on television, a lot of different Disney movies, and later on I went to preschool and that helped my English speaking to get stronger. I think it would be really interesting to go back in time and see if I ever had an accent in my English as I was moving away from speaking only Spanish. Going back to chapter 1 of prescriptive and descriptive, I think a lot of my learning came from descriptive grammar, because I tend to use a lot of informal ways of learning English. For example, learning through movies, tv shows or even music, it wasn’t until I started Kindergarten that I started to learn English in a more prescriptive grammar.

Reply:

2

I grew up hearing spanish as my first language and the way I heard people pronouce words around me even if they were different words I know that there is a correct way to pronouce a word so that you can express the right meaning behind it. However I also know that there isnt a correct way to pronounce a word for the reason that peoples tongues can pronounce a letter differently causing the word to sound different.. In the first module we learned the basics on how natives have accents which makes words sound differently even though they’re the same. Going back to journal #6 Prof. Curzan was analysing language and how us humans make words for example shorter versions of words instead of saying the full word. I honestly think that school teaches you socially acceptable ways to pronounce words in society, you learn from parents at a young age your first language and along with that the accents in the culture, both can teach you what word is or isn’t acceptable however in the end its with what words you feel comftorble and confident with pronouncing and speaking to others and yourself.