“What’s an adjunct?” I asked this question, like a hundred times.
My telephone line was dead and I couldn’t call my friends and ask for help. The credit in my cellphone was going in negatives and I couldn’t call them from it as well. So, I repeated the question like a thousand times in my head reading from some book and not actually understanding a bit. So today when I went to the university and saw one of my class mates, I went up to her and said,” Listen, what’s an adjunct?”
Well, she said something about some mobile element of the sentence and I just looked at her as if she was talking rocket science.
And then I went to department’s library and took out my books and started.. okay okay.. I couldn’t concentrate so I just tried to look like someone who’s very busy studying. Well, another classmate arrived aand so I thought why not ask her. So I asked, “hey, what’s an adjunct?”.Bechari forgot about her nervousness and tried really hard to explain to me what an adjunct was. So all I could remember is that an adjunct is some kind of the mobile element in a sentence, not actually understanding what it was.
Well… the exam started, I tried my best to make best guesses as to what adjunts, adverbial and adjective phrases were while doing the structures. A girl sitting next to me asked something (haaa haaaye during the exam) but agar mujhe kuch ata hota tu mein usse kuch batati naa!
After the exam, I got out, found my friend and said, “Listen, what’s an adjunct!?!”
So, yes I had a nightmare.. not exactly a nightmare because it was an afternoon nap so kind of afternoonmare (if that’s anything) that even my hubby texted me the definition of adjunct and I couldn’t make anything out of it! (lol.. seriously)
Oh! And a friend texted just now, “exam kaisa hua” (how did it go??)
Well… I texted her back, “What’s an adjunct?!”
Well.. about grammar, I know it’s cruccial even while doing literature, but what I thought in the beginining of this semester that maybe we’ll learn things about language the way we talk about it in literature- language .. something crucial, something unavoidable, something so close to you that you cannot distance it from yourself andf analyze it that way. But this semester, though, concentrated on other things (I’m not saying that I didn’t learn anything but I think importance was not given to the things that maybe I consider as important). Because I was looking forward to all Saussure, and Derrida and even when doing fairclough, I realised how important grammar is to analyze the text, to critcially analyze the text, but I think the attention was soo much on the TESL part of each subject that we have undermined the importance of language or linguistic studies to just teaching of English as a second language and nothing more.
Reflections... 