Job Discussion Forums

[ClanDestine]

hey am busy with a project. am i correct in saying that for the following: (or are there specific TEFL terms that should be related to these sets)

1. Italy - Italian.
Germany - German. - this is all nationality.

2. Knife - Knives.
Loaf - Loaves. - this is all plurals. 1 loaf many loaves.

3. friend - friendship. ?
loyal - loyalty. ?
neighbour - neighbourhood. ?

4. put out. - all are commands?
light up.
come in.

5. more interesting. ?
more complicated. ?
most useful. ?

6. it's
goin'
Boy's clothes.
(all make use of the apostrophe, one showing possesion)

7. sleep - slept
go - went (all indicating past tense)

8. silly - sillier.
fat - fatter.
bright - brighter.
(all are adjectives?)

9.his - his.
my - mine.
her - hers.
(all are pronouns?)

10. eight. plate. gait. play. grey. reign. rain.
(all share the same phonic)


thx guys!

[fluffyhamster]

'Project' sounds a bit grandiose LOL. Is this some pre- or in-training task dreamt up by some (half-demented) trainers? If so, you seem to be being asked to become aware of morphological processes and how parts of speech can change in form if not function.

4. Examples of phrasal verbs. Not necessarily commands by any means (It's hard to imagine a command for 'light up' - 'lighten up' maybe...and 'put out' might be more common as part of a question e.g. 'Can/Have you put out the garbage?'); 'come in' could be considered a friendly invitation rather than a cold command. So, getting the functional label right is never easy, especially given so little context!

5, 8. Equitive, comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (not all adjectives have such forms, though); the longer generally form comparative and superlative with 'more' and 'the most', but some adjectives can go either way.

6. Boy's clothes? > (the two+) boys' clothes; the (one, single) boy's clothes (unless 'Boy' is a name/wierd title/vocative of some sort).

9. 'My...' = '(possessive) determiner (can't stand alone)'; 'mine' = '(possessive) pronoun'.

10. All examples of the same sound (phoneme, not phonic, I reckon) yet spelt in different ways.

BTW, if you don't have any grammar books yet and/or are unsure of which ones to buy, the COBUILD Grammar, or Swan's Practical English Usage (now in a 3rd edition), are both good, and very affordable.

[ClanDestine]

heck, this aint as easy as it looks.
this project is a pain in the rectum thats what it is.

le sigh.

thx fluffyhamster, will check up on the book.

[Iam]

I reckon 6 may actually be a pronounciation exercise.

It's goin'
Boy's clothes

First line's appostrophe shows the non-pronounciation of the "g", second line is a comparision between the /z & /s pron of the "s".

Eyam.

[Justin Trullinger]

All of these sets of words describe concepts that my students find difficult to grasp?

Okay, for me:


Number one shows the difference between countries (Germany), which are nouns, and nationalities (German), which are adjectives.

Number two- Irregular plurals of nouns ending in "f" sounds. (If they were regular, it would be "loafs" and "knifes," wouldn't it.)


Number three- Suffixes used to change word forms and meanings. (From loyal, an adjective, to loyalty, a noun. And from friend, the person, to friendship, the relationship.)

Number four- As mentioned, all are phrasal verbs. All may be commands, in some contexts, but "I came in and put out the light" demonstrates that they don't have to be.

5- Comparatives and superlatives using more and most. As distinguished from regular "er" comparatives and "est" superlatives. I say "taller" as the comparative of "tall," but "more useful" as the comparative of "useful." Why is that? I think your trainers want to know if you know.

6- Different uses of the apostrophe would be my guess. Well done.

7- Irregular pasts

8- and all are comparatives. How do you determine how to spell "er" comparatives?

9- But which are used as adjectives (modifying a noun, "my book") and which are used as nouns themselves. (That is mine!)

10- Exactly. Same phoneme, different spelling. English has a lot of those. Many languages have less. Some don't have any. How would you explain that to students, many of whom will find it inconsistent and counter-intuitive for words to be written one way and pronounced another? (I've had many students try to pronounce both the "g" and the "h" in "eight," for example. Not easy to say or understand.)

Hang in there, and definitely pick up the Swan book.

Justin

[sonya]

This is my first post here.. sorry if it's super long :P I don't know how TEFL would go about explaining these things.. but..maybe this will be useful for your project anyway? Hope it helps. I'll try not to be redundant and repeat what others have said..

2. Knife - Knives.
Loaf - Loaves. - this is all plurals. 1 loaf many loaves.
-- this is an example of one of the three ways the plural -s is realized in English.. I think these plurals are irregular and optional though; I hear people say knifes and loafs too, maybe it's a California thing. Generally, you have s after voiceless consonants (ie: p, t, k, f, ch, etc.), and z after voiced consonants (ie: b, d, g, v, m, etc.). Another is where a vowel is inserted right before z, to avoid having two sibilants, like sh and s, s and z right next to each other

4. put out. - all are commands?
light up.
come in.
--These are really context based.. You can say the above as commands, but there are at least several more interpretations I can think of that don't fit into an imperative form.. This is really tricky.. There must be a good explanation for how this patterns out somewhere..

(So, I think the pattern is like this: the present second person form of the verb is the imperative form (like, read, listen). Some verbs take prepositions to form an idiomatic meaning, (like, shut up, lighten up). If you have a strictly transitive verb, it requires some sort of object (like put 'it' out). Germanic-based English verbs often seperate path and motion, two meanings that are tied into one verb in some other languages, and so in these instances you would have to keep the preposition showing motion (like come in). Like, in French, you would just say entrez (the English enter comes from here). But in Chinese they seperate path and motion too, and you would include the preposition too for come in, jing (come) lai (twd's the speaker).)

6. it's
goin'
Boy's clothes.
(all make use of the apostrophe, one showing possesion)

The apostrophe is mainly a stylistic writing form...

It's is the spoken, informal form of "it is", used in specific instances. For example, there must be a object.. you can't say, "Is it John?" "It's." Goin.. it's.. This dropping of sounds, called elision, is really common in a lot of languages. It's mainly an ease of pronunciation thing. The possessive s has some variations..

10. eight. plate. gait. play. grey. reign. rain.
(all share the same phonic)

hm.. all these words share the phonemic representation /e/, however, they are phonetically realized (in pronunciation) as a dipthong [ej]..

heh..you would never guess these are all the same. I once read a quote by Bernard Shaw, who proposed creating a new spelling system for English because the one we have is too ridiculous. For example, he said, fish could just as rationally be spelled "ghoti", the gh from rough, the o from women, the ti from nation.

[Cdaniels]

Thanks Sonya, I've been telling the ghoti story, but didn't realize it was GB Shaw! Clever guy.
I think "Is it John?" is grammatically correct. There is not one but two objects in that sentence! "It" is the direct object and "John" is an indirect object. Maybe another implied "It" is the subject. ? This is from the top of my head.

My advice is, whatever you do, keep the answers simple and direct. It's when you elaborate uneccessarily that problems are likely to come up.

[sonya]

ack, double post..

[sonya]

yeah, Shaw's a really clever guy. He wrote it in the intro to Pygmalion (reeeaaally funny play about a couple of linguists who transform a woman by changing her accent).

You're right, is it John is correct. Elision (turning it is to it's) however, needs "John" to be there..

Indirect objects follow intransitive verbs -- the key thing to remember is there's a preposition seperating them from the verb that assigns them their meaning. Hope this makes sense.

"It" is actually a dummy subject in these examples.. heh, it's sometimes called the "pleonastic it," or "expletive it." Pleonastic is such a funny sounding word. "It" is just a meaningless syntactic subject that a lot of indo-european languages require, and many other languages don't. There's an Alice in Wonderland tea party anecdote to this.. but for fear of sounding too nerdy, I won't get into it..

[wildchild]

[sonya]

[valley_girl]

My interpretation:

1. Noun and adjective forms for nationality

2. Irregular plurals

3. Suffixes (thought this was countable and uncountable nouns at first, until I realized "loyal" is not a noun... )

4. Phrasal verbs

5. Comparative and superlative forms of adjectives with 2 or more syllables

6. Uses for apostrophes (contraction, reduction, possession)

7. Irregular past tense forms

8. Comparative adjectives with one syllable or with two syllables and ending in "y"

9. Subject and object pronouns

10. Different spellings for long "a" sound

[Cdaniels]

[wildchild]

[sonya]

For the purposes of teaching or learning English as a foreign language, any patterns or rules possible would be exceedingly helpful. This book must be a valuable resource.

You have a good point. Nobody would pronounce gh at the beginning of a word as f, and nobody would pronounce ghoti as fish. His example was exaggerated (and amusing, so I dig it). But, to show how counter-intuitive the spelling system is, it's probably also true that, at the end of words, beginners to English often forget to pronounce gh as f, or they forget to not pronounce it before t, or that [f] is something spelled as ph no matter where it falls in a word, etc.

Shaw's point that the letters don't consistently correspond to the same sounds, when they ideally should, is true, and a more exhaustive list would show the numerous exceptions to these patterns. The examples with the dipthong in an earlier post come to mind. Continuing with its idea, eight prounounced the same as ate, yet, how does one rationally explain why eight changes from [ej] to [aj] in height, yet ate doesn't change in hate? (The one explanation I can think of no longer holds true in modern English.. so, possibly, there are others?). I think all one can now say is, it is what it is, and the differences in spelling serve only to help us differentiate one from the other in writing.

It can be argued that we're able to read the posts in this thread with ease not because the writing system has regular patterns and is predictable, but because of constant exposure from a young age, and because we're fluent in the language. For example, we cuold raed tehse psots eevn if teh wrods wree msispleled, or ddn't hv vwls..