21st class
meeting, Spring 2005
Class activities: The class spent roughly 30 minutes preparing for their midterm on Friday (clustering and outlining). They spent the rest of class discussing “Hidden Dependent Word Fragments”: that, which, who, when, and where. Chris began by presenting complete sentences that he then turned into fragments by adding a dependent word before the verb. He moved on to presenting already-fragmented word groups that were fragments because of the above-mentioned words and locating, on the screen, the specific words that made them fragments. He then had students underline the dependent words in other sentences and then finish those sentences. Finally, Chris had the students do sentence combining. He showed on the screen two short sentences with a common item (e.g. “The car crashed” and “The car caught on fire”) and had students decide whether the common item (car) was a who, which, that, when, or where situation. Then he had them combine the sentences (“The car [that crashed] caught on fire”).
In presenting all the variations (first CREATING the fragment and raising their awareness of what made it a fragment, then recognizing why another sentence was a fragment, then correcting fragments, then COMBINING the sentences—rather advanced work if presented by itself), I believe students were drilled in this very specific kind of fragment. I think his having broken up the TYPES of fragments into different lessons was smart. They practice (and, it is hoped) master one piece at a time, rather than being exposed to all the types of fragments at once and working with what could be too much information for them (since what makes a fragment a fragment is pretty technical). That they see all these examples on the screen and then immediately practice this on the WebCT is, I think, strongly reinforcing and keeps the confusion at a minimum.