Finegan, Ch. 5; Freeman and Freeman, Ch. 9

Chapter 5 in Finegan was very informative, but admittedly a little dry.  It's weird that I think that, because I really enjoyed talking about grammar in my Grammar I (or II?) class with Pat Peterson when I used to live in Minnesota.  I guess what I really liked was the discussion and trying to figure out the sentence components together.  It was more fun that way.  :)

Anyway, Ch. 5 basically explains sentence structures, starting with the most basic (SV) and building up to very complicated "trees" that include noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP).

Like Leping, I found the concept of COMP nodes to be challenging.  I had to reread it a few times to grasp the idea.  Even though I understand it better now, I'm not sure I could explain it very well.  :)  The sentence examples in the book helped me to get it.

Freeman and Freeman focused less on the grammar structures and more on the teaching applications.  I was very interested in how they would apply their sociopsycholinguistic perspective of reading to grammar teaching.  Four years ago when I started the MA-TESL program I developed a descriptivist view of language and grammar, which now seems to mesh well with the Freemans' approaches to language acquisition, etc.  It made me think about how when my students write something strange in their journals or other writing, I ask them "Decimos 'el montaña'?"  ("Do we say the [masculine direct article] mountain [feminine noun]) or "Does that sound right?" and wait for them to reconsider their word choices, rather than telling them the rule (feminine nouns must take the feminine direct article 'la').  I guess my approach might stem from that descriptivist, psychosociolinguistic way of thinking....