Hello-hello!

Have stayed idle for more than two weeks now but had a good excuse! Assignment submission deadline is quickly approaching but I had to submit mine today because I'm leaving Thursday for the Hornby Trust Conference in Oxford.   I can't yet believe that I have done it because it has been something I have been almost exclusively preoccupied with for the last two weeks. For some reason just as I was writing the previous sentence I remembered an episode from My Fair Lady where Elisa is receiving her first lessons of phonetics and is spending sleepless nights trying to repeat the exercises Prof Higgins has given her. Remember? "Poor Professor Higgins, does not eat, does not sleep..." Well, I was not teaching anybody, but learning myself. Still...

I think completing these assignments let me enrich my knowledge of different aspects of the language and has given me new tools to analyse it for myself and, of course, with the students. To complete the assignment about the language (Investigating the Language for TESOL) I had to dive into the world of spoken discourse analysis, traditional and pattern grammar, register and genre analysis as well as corpus linguistics. It has been a challenging journey with quite a few discoveries, which, I'm sure, will enlighten my teaching in the future. Some of the authors I read for the assignment  are Bhatia, V. K. (about genre analysis and world of written discourse), Burns, A. (spoken discourse), Cornbleet, S. and R. Carter (speech and writing), Hunston, S. (pattern grammar), Labov, W. (narrative syntax), and Sinclair, J. (concordances). This reading was then applied to the analysis of the materials which made the assignment. I do not know how well I have completed it and would not know for at leat 4 weeks but can see how the knowledge I acquired while completing it will affect my teaching.

The same goes with the assignment on Writing. I have chosen to investigate the features of teaher and peer commentary on students' writing as one of the forms of feedback they receive in the course of the writing instruction. Having looked at the features of teacher and peer commentary, I now understand much better than before their advantages and disadvantages as well as how to make them work better in my classroom, with one supplemeting the other. Working on this assignment also exposed me to my own writing process and showed me the ways to improve it. Never could I imagine when I started that it would be so challenging to narrow down the topic of the discussion to make it manegeable and then write a well-argumented and coherent analysis of my teaching  situation and ways of improving it. Again, I will have to wait and see for the results of its assessment but at the moment I am quite satisfied with the result.:)