2008 Woodie Awards
CLASS CRASH: EWRT 200 teaches diversity and English
Sarah Bogen
Issue date: 6/19/06 Section: Features
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At 2:05 p.m. on Thursday, May 18, classroom MQ-10 is busy with EWRT 200 students, learning basic English grammar. The students ranged widely in ethnicities, ages, and levels of English knowledge.
Professor Diana Fleming is talking about coordinating conjunctions and independent clauses.
On the bright whiteboard is dry erase marker reading, "My dog is hyper, yet he is patient with kids."
Fleming sits on the edge of a table, reading from the textbook along with the students. She uses popular culture topics such as the Burning Man music event in a desert in Nevada to create interest within the students.
She also cracks jokes on Chapter 13 titled "Coordinations" "But. b-u-t, not b-u-tt," she says as her students chuckle, "Make sure you know the difference."
After reading over the text from chapter 13 students take turns choosing conjunctions to put into sentences. Each student tries to make sentences using a conjunction of their choice, while their classmates listen intently.
Although the class looks at words that are used each day in the English language, the further investigation of these words produced very good tips and tricks of perfect grammar.
These tips are helpful to students of all English levels.
Fleming gives two helpful explanations of conjunctions: " 'But' and 'yet' are very similar. They almost have the same exact meaning, but they are different because one is more formal than the other," she says.
"'Or' is easy. You just give people two choices, and stick 'or' in the middle. You can give me this, 'or' you can give me that," she sings, breaking into a hip hop song. The cultural diversity among the classmates emerges in class discussions. When the name "Yuri" is used in an example sentence in the book, Fleming asks the class if they think it is a girl's name or a boy's name.
Ash, a Russian student says, "Yuri sounds like a boy's name because it is a boy's name in Russia." But his classmate, a Japanese student named Shoko, agrees with Fleming that it could be a girl's name in Japan.
Although the classroom is right next to the bustling cars and people in Parking Lot A, the students seem immersed in the day's lesson. At each of the four tables, with three to five students each, students look at Fleming intently or take notes on binder paper. EWRT 200 is an English class two levels below EWRT 1A. Roughly 80 percent of students taking the English placement test are placed within EWRT 200 or the level above it.
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