Progress Report

     The blog posts this semester have been an amazing learning experience. Writing about what I read is very useful in terms of making the ideas concrete in my mind. After talking a little bit more about expectations for the blog, I came to understand it better. At first, I was just summarizing each chapter, instead of synthesizing. Now I get more out of the blogs through picking out main ideas and synthesizing them.
   
     Concerning the research project, I have started a little bit of research. Mostly I have simply been investigating my topic more, trying to learn more about its intricacies. The main question of my research paper is, "How should grammar be taught?" I want to explore the different ways, positive and negative, of teaching grammar. Explicit vs. implicit teaching, methods for grammar teaching, and how culture influences grammar are some of the subtopics that I hope to explore. I also plan to focus on high school ESL students in this realm.

     The first source that I found was a book called "Teaching Readers of English" by John Hedgcock and Dana Ferris. This text discusses the challenges faced by teachers who are teaching ELL's. It talks about different methods and approaches that can be used when teaching reading and grammar. It specifically focuses on theories for L2 teaching of reading and grammar.

     The second source was called, "Teacher's Perceptions about Grammar Teaching" by Tran Hoang Thu. This piece focuses on teacher's beliefs about grammar teaching in an ESL setting. It also talks a lot about the effects of implicit vs. explicit grammar teaching, something very controversial. Grammar correction is discussed as well, having to do with how much to correct students or not correct them.

     The third source is entitled, "The Grammar Correction Debate in L2 Writing" by Dana Ferris. This article discusses the pros and cons of Grammar correction in the classroom. There are some negative and some positive effects of this and there are many different ways to do it. The author also says that this is an issue we have hardly touched on in the language field, there is much left to research about it.