Teacher Discussion Forums

Man I'm terrible at communicating through written form only... Sorry, what I meant was that if, for example, a trainee teacher (usually no experience and no qualifications) has a lesson on Present Perfect Continuous, as part of the training we require that they produce a lesson plan with a clear ana...

Oops... progressive - that was just a slip ('passive' didn't even cross my conscious mind, so I don't know why my hands were typing that!) As for the perfect infinitive, I had never heard anything like it until I worked with a French teacher of English, so I'm only 90% sure that it was used to descr...

Take Present Perfect Continuous (aka. Present Perfect Passive) for example. Example sentences include, " He's been swimming in that dirty swamp water again " and " I've been washing his clothes all morning. " You're a teacher, and you're introducing this, and it's the first time most of your student...

I dunno... maybe 4. But I can easily imagine something along the lines of this in an informal chat between friends: (A & B went to the lake; C didn't; they're all friends) C: So, how was it? A: Not that great actually. The camp site was alright, but when we went for a swim, it turned out the lake wa...

I agree (that limiting the S is probably not the best approach; and that they might actually be trying to express something that a simpler structure doesn't quite get to). Perhaps more helpful to show the Ss how they can use each variation to express themselves more accurately, than to reduce them t...

Ah, very helpful thanks.

I see that Fluffy and Woodcutter usually spot what's going on right off the bat... but it takes Ouyang's patiently clear explanations to get the concepts into my thick skull. The contrast between 'find' and 'consider' here, is what does it for me.

"He has taken a freebie holiday at enormous expense and the jury has found it is clearly not on ." "Now she is old enough to go out for walks, we have found she is growling at other dogs ." "I used 15mm copper pipe as I have found plastic is not strong enough ." "Here, as it has turned out, was an ...

Ah, yes. I had come across coordinated pairs in one of the sources (but it was only mentioned as an aside). On thinking about it, it seems the most logical group to me, to be called compounds, but then the 'and' kind of goes and ruins things. Oh, well, terms do chop and change a bit, don't they. Tha...

Awesome, thanks Ouyang. That was exactly the kind of thing I knew I'd miss.

Anyone have any information on Compound Verbs in English? I've consulted 5 different sources and have (kind of) received 4 different answers: 1) Some teacher training materials developed by an experienced colleague: "We can also have compound verbs. An example is 'bring back'." (I assume with the me...

I don't wanna make any mistakes here, so I'll run the lot by you. Here's the text: " Ned Kelly is an Australian icon. He was the leader of a group of bank robbers known as the Kelly Gang. Kelly and his gang are probably most famous for their clever use of metal body armour. Whenever they robbed a ba...

I'm getting myself confused over something simple here... and just need to double check.

"Kelly and his gang are probably most famous for their clever use of metal body armour."

The adjective phrase here is the entire chunk from 'probably' onwards, right?

That does make it seem pretty clear Woodcutter (simply enclosing different noun phrases in brackets on either side of the verb)... But I do feel highlighting more closely similar patterns can be a great help to Ss. Yes, there are other possible verbs, but it's not that much different from teaching s...

Nicely put.

Both in summarising what the truth is more like, and in highlighting just how pedantic we can be (in expecting comments to be so precise).





btw. I mean, I understand that I was being pedantic.

In case anyone's interested. This is the article I was talking about.

Learning Processes and Teaching Strategies
Dave Willis

http://www.willis-elt.co.uk/books.html