Week 5, Post 2: Serving My Sentence

This is a summary of salient point from Sharon Myers' "Remembering the Sentence":

1. Her paper was written because of a renewed interest in "sentence combining and imitation."  The uptick in interest was due to a) the interest in information processing, which paralleled studies of artificial intelligence and b) a reaction to pedagogical rejection of emphasis on syntax, principally by linguists.

2. Myers feels sentence combining (building) is a useful tool for both L1 and L2 students because many such students struggle in writing academic discourse; sentence combining, says Myers, helps them learn the conventions of this process.

3. It's not enough to learn vocabulary; this, alone, is useless, if students are ill-equipped with relating or collocation phrases that are associated with those words.

4. A key justification for the utility of this method is that English is very idiosyncratic.  Thus, it's not enough to learn the rules, since there are so many exceptions to the rules. 

5. What's needed is exposure to academic vocabulary in context of other useful phrases.  The model of proof for the need for exposure is the computer, specifically "neural networks," which developed a kind of awareness of many words and their collocations by way of high usage.  The proclivity to associate these collocations in humans is called "structural disposition."

6. Formal grammar instruction is seen as less useful than sentence combining; in fact, it's been been proven to be "useless" for both L1 and L2 students. 

7. Rather, grammar must be integrated with lexis, or vocabulary studies.

8. Myers' method is as follows: a) teacher models a sentence, b) teacher erases unimportant words, leaving only a template of key words, b) students write sentences following the template, d) student sentences are presented on the board and "worked out," their work thus becoming the "text."

9. The author tauts the use of "concordancing," that is, having students use "collocation dictionaries," which present academic-level vocabulary in context. 

10. Using these texts gives students ample examples and saves the teacher having to invent them.