Basically, I signed up for English Grammar because it was a requirement of the English Education program.  Prior to the course, there were rumors among English majors that English Grammar was a difficult class because of diagraming, and my previous experience with diagraming in elementary school was one of continuous struggle.  Additionally, the grammatical terms that many of the students used were intimidating since I had never heard them used before.  For example, the words determiner and auxiliary meant absolutely nothing to me.  Regardless of these warnings, I felt that since I was going to teach English in the public schools, and because it had been twenty years since I had studied grammar, I needed a refresher course to hone my grammatical skills.

    The first thing I learned in this course was that English Grammar was very much like a chameleon as it had changed dramatically and continues to change.  The eight parts of speech I expected to encounter were  "alive and well," but boy what an entourage it had acquired.  I was pleasantly surprised that I could still identify the eight parts of speech, yet the expanded meanings of these parts, the unrecognizable vocabulary, and the form and structure classes were enough to keep me in a fog almost the entire semester.  Nevertheless, I learned an array of grammatical terms and acquired the ability to identify many grammatical concepts that I had not previously known.  For example, I learned that there were differences among verbs such as auxiliary verbs, Be verbs, linking verbs, intransitive verbs and transitive verbs.  I learned that there are ten sentence patterns which are important in English Grammar.  I also learned new grammatical terms such as nominal, noun phrase, and verb phrase as well as what an appositive was and how to identify it.  Additionally, I immensely enjoyed doing the Editing Project.  I  and felt as if that out of all the things I learned.

    To be completely honest in this reflection, I have to admit that although I enjoyed completing the in-class grammatical exercises as well as discussing any misunderstandings or problems with those topics, I constantly felt as if I had missed something along the way.  In turn, this lack of information seemed to keep me from grasping the grammatical concepts as well as I should have been.  I spent much of my semester researching my grammatical topic and trying to learn how to put together a web site.  While I believe that technology is an excellent communication and teaching tool and research is an important concept to learn, I felt overwhelmed and frustrated by the amount of time that I spent looking for information and attempting to get this information onto the web.  I felt that my greatest concern should have been English Grammar.  I believe that if I could have spent more of my time studying grammar than researching and putting together a web site, I would feel more confident in grammatically decoding words and sentences.  Finally, in order to perform adequately well on the final oral examination, I will have to review extensively every grammatical concept that we have discussed especially infinitives, gerunds, participles, the various verbs, and sentence patterns.