Blog Post #2 - Brittany Means

While reading through "Possible Transfer Based Problems You Might Observe When Working with Chinese Students," I recognized grammatical and syntactic transfer features that I have been seeing in the papers of students who I have worked with in the Writing Center this semester. It was actually super helpful to learn the technical terms for the constructs I only have only known the function of up to this point. For instance, placing adverbial expressions after the object they modify. I've had students write sentences where the adverbial expressions before the object they were modifying and all I knew to say was that the sentence needed to be rearranged. Or, another example, inverted word order and modal auxiliaries. Before, I didn’t know that Chinese questions are expressed with tone whereas English questions are structured differently to express the state of being interrogative. It was also helpful to learn in this course that in Chinese there are no articles. It makes it easier to acknowledge the issue when it arises since I have a frame of reference for where to start explaining. I also started thinking about all of these conventions and what it means to be teaching Standard English. I would be interested in reading something about teaching nonstandard English.

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