After discussing the research available on my teaching inquiry topic with Betsy, I learned that the best thing that I could do to to help students with syntax, is to help them with second language acquisition in general. Last semester I took course in SLA in which I learned about a plethora of different theorists that contributed to the field of TESOL. In the dichotomous debate about which theorists make more sense between the cognitive theorists and the behaviorists, I discerned that the behaviorists have a much more palpable approach because a student can be drilled on grammar all day long, but if she does not study what she learns with experienced interlocutors she will never be able to put it into useful practice through collaborative dialogues. For this reason, I decided that instead of focusing on sentence structure, I should focus on semantics and reading comprehension because the more a student knows, the more she is able to write about.
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