Class Language

1. I think the result I found most surprising was the fill-in, “And he gave ___ written word ‘skunk’…” The correct answer was “the.” Even though 77 students gave the correct response, there were still several who used random words such as “garbage,” “things,” and “fishy.” These words do not even come close to fitting the sentence being that they are all form class words. A second point of interest is the fact that no one was able to come up with the correct word for “prolific.” That is the only entry that no one was able to correctly identify.
2. There is more agreement among the structure class words such as “to,” “of,” “that,” and “and.” These are words that helped keep the flow of the sentence. I feel that I had an easier time picking out these words because there are no variations. Form class words have so many synonyms, whereas structure words like “to,” have one, identifiable meaning.
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Most of the blanks containing form class words would be difficult for nonnative speakers. I say this with certainty because I am a fluent English speaker and I had trouble filling some of the blanks. Parts of the word guess game like, “…changing the spelling of ‘[tongue]’ to ‘tung’ and…” would be especially hard for nonnative speakers. Because spellings found in English can be particularly tricky, the speaker might not understand how to fill in the blank. These form class words also can undergo changes in form and are open-ended. Because of the ambiguity of a lot of form class words, the true meaning could prove difficult to