Job Discussion Forums

[SeasonedVet]

Glenski she was quite interested in your reply and asked if I could give her a copy.
She agreed with your answers.
I asked another teacher to have a look at the test and tell me the answers and then explain how she went about answering the questions and how she would explain to students. And sure enough she started with the same :Taberu tame and kau koto etc.
But what I wanted to know was if when they do this if they are thinking about the particular parts of speech and what modifies what and I asked her. Apparently they do and even if they do it on a subconscious level it seems to actually work out to be the same as your explanations Glenski.
The second teacher looked at yours and said atteru. Which means that she understood your answers but the explanation for her and Japanese students would be in the Taberu tame and kau koto.

[Mapleblondie]

Glenski, isn't "hearing" in 64 actually a gerund rather than a noun? It's a verb that ACTS as a noun, thus would be a gerund, right?

[Glenski]

Just curious about 2 things:

Did they want a copy of my explanations because they didn't know how to do it in English?

How would they have explained the Japanese grammar to a non-Japanese person (preferably a native English speaker)?

[SeasonedVet]

Glenski: the first teacher who actually gave me the test to check the answers;-well I had told her that I usually come to this site to throw out questions here and she said it sounded quite interesting and that she wanted to see the results of my doing so and what answers the guys here come up with.

I have no doubt thaty she is capable of doing it in English but they are hampered by not being able to produce the words as fast as they do in Japanese and to explain nuances in the sentences etc. Sometimes can't remember the worrd adjective or noun or noun phrase. It's all usually done in Japanese.

I often hear them saying things like "noun desho" "sore wa verb desho"
So they can manage to throw in the English word for some of the parts of speech but to say something like " the word nani nani is an adjective working to modify the word nani nani" I think they have no little practice doing such and no real reason to anyway.

The second teacher however almost completely ignored your version of it (she glanced at it; not in depth) until she could wrap her mind around the taberu tame and kau koto and only then did she seem to check what you wrote and then she said atteru.

[fluffyhamster]

[Glenski]

fluffy,
Metalanguage or just correct grammatical terminology? Heck, when I was in high school (just after the Bronze Age), we never used the term auxiliary verb. We just said "helping verb". Perhaps our teacher Mrs. Davis just didn't want to confuse us poor kids.

SeasonedVet,
Thanks for the reply. I'm not surprised at either teacher's response, although I would like to know their answer to my second question:
How would they have explained the Japanese grammar to a non-Japanese person (preferably a native English speaker)?

[fluffyhamster]

Well, if you think I'm a bit off base for arguing that there are several ways to dice an onion (with some of those ways potentially resulting in less tears), that there will sometimes (often?) be no one "correct" way of analyzing grammar, you should see what an organization called ETAQ came up with grammar-wise, to help its English teachers!
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=8970

It's often better to "help yourself" (but obviously not in Dr Lenore Ferguson's case. She just couldn't help herself!).

BTW Glenski, I've posted a link to this thread over on the AL forum (in a new thread entitled 'EXCLUSIVE: Fluffyhamster declared grammar dunce!'). Hope you don't mind - I can assure you that it is in the interests of my wider potential edification (spanking?), if not other people's too.

[Stephen Jones]

I got the same answers as Glenski, though I was puzzled by 64.

It seems pretty pointless to me. I never use 'gerund' or 'present participle'. I believe the correct technical term is '-ing form'. That way I avoid all those nasty sentences where you could argue for it being either.

[ouyang]

Isn't it curious that verbal phrases are considered to be "doing the same work" when they can function as either an object or a subject in question 64, but only one of the phrases in question 62 can function as a subject.

We can say, "The money to buy the furniture is in her purse.", but we cannot say "The people to eat the different kind of foods have arrived." These infinitive phrases have the most similar kind of function relative to the other phrases in question 62, but they form different grammatical relationships with the nouns that they follow. The example verbal phrase doesn't modify the noun; it complements it. The phrase in the answer limits the noun.

This is the sort of flawed exam question that Chinese bureaucrats use to thin the ranks of applicants for the best universities there. It tests the thinking skills of students, but not their knowledge of English. Most public school teachers wouldn't be very interested in an explanation about why these questions are flawed. Their job is to train students to score well on the exam, so the principles behind the sample questions become more important than the actual grammatical principles on which the language is based.

[Andru]

The creators of this silly test seem to be splitting very thin hairs, trying to show off their mastery of the English language, yet write a sentence like this?

"a) Mary had no friends to talk about the matter with. "

Shouldn't it be: "Mary had no friends with whom to talk about the matter"?
or: "....with whom she could talk to about the matter"?

[Stephen Jones]