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vallillo1983 · Joined: 07 Apr 2005 Posts: 194

HEY guys! I am coming to Japan to Teach, I have a degree in ESL teaching and a CELTA. The trouble is, I do not know the English tense system off by heart and when they're used with out conslting a text book 1st! Is this a problem? I feel like It will affect my teaching!! Is there anyway of learing them off by heart or does this come with experience?

Cheers

angrysoba · Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 446 Location: Kansai, Japan

The English 'tense system' is as follows:

I be
You be
They be
We be
He be
She be

Memorise that and you'll be fine

shuize · Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 1270

You joke, yes?

If no, here's my advice:

http://www.uhv.edu/ac/student/writing/grammartip030905.htm

angrysoba · Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 446 Location: Kansai, Japan

Me tinking you be joker

abufletcher · Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 4:45 pm Post subject:

With experience what you learn is that knowledge of the verb tense system is largely irrelevant to the teaching/learning of English -- as is 90% of the grammatical "knowledge" we waste 99% of our teaching time on.

It's unfortunate that it takes most EFL teachers the first 10 years or so of their teaching lives to figure this out and most leave the profession before they do.

angrysoba · Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 446 Location: Kansai, Japan

Abu:

I have found alot of your previous posts to be quite instructive but how do you justify this?

abufletcher · Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 5:58 pm Post subject:

Over the years I've come to believe, as many others do, that language is not so much a rule-governed autonomous system as it is a loose amalgam of a great number of interwoven lexical chunks of one sort of another. In this sense grammar doesn't exist as a stand alone object worthy of attention but rather is learned, understood, and used by native speakers primarily within the intricate patchwork of lexicalizations.

I believe that the primarily reason EFL teachers traditionally spend the lion's share (is that better than bogus percentages?) of their teaching efforts on a very narrow range of grammatical points -- typically centered on word order and verb tenses -- is because these are the parts of language which appear to best conform to the image of language as a rule-governed system. I do not believe that these elements of language merit anywhere near the attention they get.

Pedagogic grammar has it's place and uses but we should think of these sorts of rules as the being akin to the scaffolding that is erected while a building is being constructed rather than as part of the building itself.

Anyway, that's the position I've arrived at after 25 years teaching EFL.

angrysoba · Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 446 Location: Kansai, Japan

Abu:

If I understand you correctly then you are advocating the lexical approach to language learning. This approach does make alot of sense as 'chunks of language' very often do have their own meanings independent of the grammar or the vocabulary used within those chunks.

An example would be the expression 'How's it going?'. It is almost impossible to grasp the meaning of the sentence simply from an understanding of its composite words.

But I think it is incorrect to say that teaching grammatical rules to students is a waste of time as it often helps students to see some general rules to a language when they actually exist.

Of course you can argue that "language is not so much a rule-governed autonomous system as it is a loose amalgam of a great number of interwoven lexical chunks of one sort of another." but I have seen students learn and improve in their understanding of the English language by learning certain rules of grammar. The important thing for me is to make sure my students don't become overly-analytical in their study of the language.

abufletcher · Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 9:14 pm Post subject:

I think trying to sum up one's fundamental views of the nature of language and human social interaction as "the lexical approach" is way too much of a simplification. Yes, I have moved my own EFL teaching more in a lexical direction but that's only because what I have been seeing from the fields of corpus linguistics and conversation analysis have convinced me of the primacy of "used language" (vs. the "novel/generative" views typical of EFL). Philosophically, I'd lean towards Wittgensteinian or Bakhtinian views of the essentially social nature of language and towards Connectionist views on how language is learned (and then subsequently stored) in the brain.

Most teachers accept that there is a certain amount of "idiomatic" language but still believe in their heart of hearts that language is dominantly a rule-governed generative system. Over the years I guess I've come to believe the opposite, namely, that language and language use is overwhelmingly a matter of creative cut and paste and that islands of apparent grammatical order are relatively few and far between in an enormous and dynamic lexically ordered ocean.

Can students benefit from the occasional pedagogic grammar rule? Sure. Is grammar teaching (as currently conceived) central to language learning? I'd say no. Is teaching chunked language teaching grammar? Absolutely.

BTW, I'd add that the so-called Lexical Approach should not properly be viewed as a "methodology" but rather a view on language with powerful implications for language teaching/learning. For example, within a lexical view on language we're not talking about teaching some 2000 basic vocabularly items but somehow helping students gain awareness of perhaps 20,000 common lexicalizations and collocations.

The reason that EFL student writing looks and sounds so odd is not a lack of grammar but rather unfamiliarity with a vast range of situated and socially-constituted chunked language.

abufletcher · Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 12:50 am Post subject:

BTW, within the current culture of EFL this view is probably equivalent to claiming that the earth is not the center of the universe back in the middle ages.

JimDunlop2 · Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Posts: 2286 Location: Japan

angrysoba: You be trippin' man! There be only good English in Japan. I be thinking that the "done gone" construction be more useful.

Eg. He done gone home.

abufletcher · Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 2:42 am Post subject:

I've always been partial to the "usta could" construction myself, e.g. "You could get some right good bargains on Saturday, or at least you used to could."

Then of course there are those bains of existence for freshman comp teachers: "could of gone" and "more better."

Cdaniels · Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2006 4:04 pm Post subject: Statistics

sallycat · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 303 Location: behind you. BOO!

abufletcher, i'm with you on this one, as it fits with my experience both as a language teacher and a language learner.

abufletcher · Posted: Tue Mar 21, 2006 2:55 pm Post subject:

I studied and to various degrees learned a lot of languages over the years. I spent years and years in German language classes before spending a year in Germany living the language. I've studied Russian and Arabic in a strict grammar-translation classrooms, as well as hung out with the locals in Kamchatka and Yemen. I've become casually fluent in Spanish over 24 years of marriage with a wonderful Mexican woman and managed to acquire a fair bit of passive understanding of Japanese (with steadily growing active abilities).

All this language learning experience has reinforced the primacy of CHUNKED LANGUAGE and made me strive to think of ways to guide my students in this direction.