Job Discussion Forums

[Gordon]

[Sherri]

I was just reading about pronunciation and spelling. It seems that often is one of many words in the English language whose pronunciation followed the spelling (but just for some people!). Husband used to be pronounced "husban" and pavement was "payment", swore used to have a silent w (as sword still does). There are many examples like this. It's interesting!

Regards
Sherri

[abufletcher]

[Nismo]

In regards to the "often" debate going on here: You're polishing the brass on the Titanic. Regardless of the way any dictionary tells you it ought to be pronounced, in the end colloquial usage dictates proper use and pronunciation. Did you know 'nice' was originally a derogatory word coined by Shakespeare?

(Taken from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=nice)
nice
adj. nic�er, nic�est
(Obsolete.)
Wanton; profligate: �For when mine hours/Were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives/Of me for jests� (Shakespeare).

When was the last time you used, "Damn, she's got a nice body," with the intention of the meaning of your sentence to be, "Damn, she has a wanton body," or, "Her profligate body did cause pain unto mine eye"?

[canuck]

I don't think that example has anything to do with the discussion.
coc`kril (word gets *beeped*) was changed to rooster because Americans didn't approve on how appropriate the c-word was.

et is in the Scrabble dictionary as the past tense to the word eat in old English.

My point...I haven't decided on what it is yet...other than often should be with a silent "t" and the Australian 6-7-aight-9 should be outlawed.

[fluffyhamster]

[abufletcher]

[Perpetual Traveller]

[fluffyhamster]

Thanks for expanding, abufletcher! I've also never been convinced of the value of performing explicit transformation-type exercises: I myself prefer to look at Discourse or Text Analysis and, to a certain extent, Cognitive Linguistics (with a big c), "construal" etc in my efforts to provide better functional explanations for the preferred use of a certain form in a certain context (over any other form).

I'm not sure that I'd be using your "directionality" arrows, though: basic linear word order in (spoken) text would seem sufficient, and below (in written form, obviously!) the text shows the redundancy almost of the arrows/"bullets" (and if students aren't at the age where they can process such simple written sentences, perhaps as preparation for your type of activity, then they probably shouldn't be practising the passive in any explicit or more ambitious form).

He shot (-->) a/the bird.

A/the bird has been/was/got etc shot ("bird...shot" } There's a shot bird/bird that...here etc) ((<--) by ?) (the arrow/bullet doesn't appear in conventional text, and an absence of an agent phrase - the "short passive" is more common than the longer in conversation at least - means that neither will be of much assistance really in helping the student process real speech. All that students can really do is listen to or read examples in context, process and appreciate the word order, predicate, what is and isn't stated etc. An awareness of which verbs are 'commonly used in the passive' will obviously come in very useful here).

I know it sounds a bit boring and unexciting, but I'm basically content to just let ongoing linear word order and context suffice as the self-explanatory mechanisms they in fact are. The key I think is finding very useful examples, with the odd super-exciting one thrown in for good measure (I like "adversative" passives for this - I'm using the term loosely, they don't always need to use 'get' as opposed to 'be' do they, I mean you can't get much more adversative than e.g. 'The President's been shot!').

I must admit that if I were one of your students I might be at a bit of a loss as to which way to draw the arrow if you gave me only the two words 'boy' and 'eat'* to play with (I can't tell from your description if you explicitly introduce or implicitly allow a third). I'd likely be thinking, 'Ok, the boy ate something, but I don't know what', although I suppose I could equally arrange them 'Something ate the boy'...that is, it wouldn't be certain whether I would/should be formulating the "knowledge gap" as a subject/active word order or as an agent/passive word order (that 'Something ate the boy' just then, versus 'The boy was eaten by something').

I'd submit that given just the two cards and with no instructions to explicitly form passives, most people would presume an active sentence about the boy's eating habits was what was expected. The upshot of all this is that there is still no obvious functional/discoursal/contextual reason yet for deciding one way or the other whether to use the passive or not. And even given a bit of context (Ben went to Africa on a Safari), would we be saying 'He ate exotic things' or 'He got eaten by lions' (or even 'Lions, not hyenas, ate him')? Who knows! It's fun for those who "know" and are willing to be creative, but many students (especially in Asia) aren't like that - they seem to feel that the teacher's guess is as good as if not always better than theirs!

So, until "we" ARE TOLD what happened by somebody who knows, these kind of things are a bit up in the air, but as soon as we hear 'ate' versus 'was' after 'He', then 'exotic' versus 'eaten' after ''ate' and 'was' etc, then things become clear. Students will be better able to invent examples (especially passive ones) probably only after they have had exposure to enough passives beforehand.

But then, you do at the end of your post say that 'I suggest (to the students) using either active or passive as appropriate to the underlying meaning (of the likely arrangement of the supplied words)' (my additions in brackets), so the students won't be struggling or uncertain for too long LOL.

I don't want to give you the impression that I don't believe your activity works, Abu - you say it does (for you), and I believe you. It's just, not being able to see it in practise for real, not being able to hear the instructions and general patter, obviously makes it hard for me to see how you get the students tuned into the same wavelength as you and doing what you want them to do without fatal confusion or hesitation (actually, I suppose I've more or less said that your activity is implicitly "transformational", in its own unique way, at least in its initial stages).

Anyway, I reckon you must be a pretty brill teacher all in all, and I look forward to whenever and wherever you make a more formal/lenghty presentation of your ideas (with fuller instructions/guidelines/"patter", hint hint!)!

*Regarding 'chicken' and 'eat', we could have 'Chickens eat corn' "versus" 'We had chicken for dinner'; and 'Scientists discover something important! screamed the headline' versus 'The scientists were discovered to have not in fact discovered anything important, in fact it was all faked data' versus 'Penicillin was discovered in 1492 by Columbus' versus...heh you got me started just as I am finishing...see, a full stop here>.

[abufletcher]

Well, first I should admit that I haven't taught anything akin to a formal grammar lesson in a LONG LONG time. Like you I've come to present passives as bits of embedded grammar in certain discourse environments and genres (for example the lab report writing I taught in Oman). Most of my EFL teaching nowadays is centered around making students more aware of chunks of used language -- and some of those chunks happen to contain a passive structure (i.e. Where were you born?).

Obviously, I've given the "short course" on my Active Passives lesson and you do need to proceed carefully in a step by step manner with unambigous examples first. It's really very easy for them to get what's happening with the arrows. One of the underlying ideas in coming up with this approach was to maintain a linear ("realtime") process for turn-contruction. For the most part we tend to take a "topic/comment" approach to turn construction, that is, we come up with was seems to be the salient focal point (typically a nominal) and then "say something about it." This means of course that sometimes you're going to have a passive type relationship between the predicate and the topic. Of course as you say that relationship doesn't necessarily get expressed in a prototypical passive verb. BTW to really blow your mind check out some of Sandy Thompson's work on "transitivity" where she demonstrates that transitivity "in an utterance" need not be confirned to the verbal elements.

But again this activity comes from a previous incarnation of myself. I don't "do" grammar anymore -- and least not the sort of thing most people would readily recognize as grammar. In terms of general English I'd describe my approach as largely "lexical" and my views on formal grammar are best reflected in the work on emergent grammar -- and of course my own field of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Why just this morning I was working with my students on the structure of pre-invitation sequences and the dispreferred turn shapes of rejections.

The title of my recently completed dissertation gives an indication of where my head's at nowadays:

Co-constructing competence: Turn construction and repair in novice-to-novice second language interaction.

[fluffyhamster]

Heh, I might just use the arrows, Abu, no reason really why I shouldn't, eh!

Hmm, Sandra Thompson, I only really know her from her being the co-author of Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (along with Charles N. Li), but that was an excellent book so I'll sure try to check out what she has to say about "transitivity" (might be able to find something using Google Scholar).

Hope we can have further interesting discussions at some point!

FH

[abufletcher]

Lots of good (if somewhat heavy) stuff here:

http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/sathomps/bibliographies/bibliog-interactional-linguistics.htm

Most of her work nowadays falls into the category of "interactional linguistics" which is the branch of linguistics most sympathetic to my own field of conversation analysis.