Job Discussion Forums

[themanymoonsofjupiter]

i realise it's one thing for a student to be able to do a grammar exercise properly and another to apply it. however, my students are (mostly) pretty far advanced in that they have no problem in general communication, yet they still make heaps of verb tense mistakes in writings. it is not that the student is unaware of the proper tense--it is simply a general lack of attention to the problem. i know there's no quick fix, but i am looking for ideas to work on this.

[George Macartney]

well typically a lot of chinese students know the grammar receptively, but not productively. unless gaokao and CET have changed since i last checked, they haven't really had much chance to practise production, and usually aim at these fixed-expression "skeleton key" answers to english composition questions.

you can use an error code to highlight the verb tense errors (a red "v" by every verb error) and see if they can correct them themselves. if they can't, you need to teach it. if they can, they'll know to take a bit more time next time (unless their schedule's already overloaded).

[Miles Smiles]

[kev7161]

I will do a "daily edit" exercise often in my Language Arts class. I will write a sentence on the board with 4 or 5 errors and the kids are to copy that erroneous sentence in their notebook, find and correct the errors if they can, and then write the corrected sentence again. Many of my students can find most, if not all of the mistakes with ease.

However, give them a small writing assignment (3 or 4 sentences max) and their work is riddled with errors, regardless of the fact that I admonish them to go back and do their own "daily edit". It's maddening.

[Old Surrender]

It's damned maddening. My kids are worksheet warriors and can fix each others errors during peer review time, but when it comes to their own work it they just can't seem to manage it.

[Cairnsman]

[kev7161]

You could use a little more practice, quite frankly.

Don't be an asshat. The simple sentences I use in my language classes come directly from a textbook. I will never pretend to be perfect in English and I would never expect my students to be either. However, once you teach something (such as subject/verb agreement), oh I don't know, a few dozen times to students, you'd expect them to get it a bit more easily.

Now, go on being your usual, grammatically perfect self Cairnsman and leave us to our bitching!

[LarssonCrew]

Just to pick up on something from Cairnsman, you edited '...and the kids are to copy that erroneous sentence in their notebook' to '...and the kids copy that erroneous sentence in the notebooks.'

I would have personally thought that:

'...and the kids are to copy that erroneous sentence in their notebooks' sounds far better than 'the notebooks'.

Hmm.

[Cairnsman]

Hmmm, indeed!

You compared 12 words to 2.

It was unintentional mistyping. My brain thought �their� but my fingers typed �the� and Microsoft Word�s spell-check (obviously) didn�t detect the error.

So, �and the kids copy that erroneous sentence in their notebooks.�

[askiptochina]

[LongShiKong]

Do their written errors reflect spoken ones? If their errors are due to the Chenglish they've been exposed to all along, then you'll need to bombard them with textual, audio, and/or (ideally) video clips of the English equivalent.

Why not have them dictate written assignments to a partner in class or as homework? While the one doing the dictation may focus primarily on content, the transcriber will tend to (and can be tasked to) focus more on form. I commented about this in a Sept thread:

[El Chupacabra]

There are only two tenses: past and non-past. That's it, a binary choice.

When you refer to tense, do you really mean tense+aspect?

Most grammar books conflate both into one false notion of "tense". For example, "present continuous" and "past perfect" describe both parameters. These imprecise terms have made grammar incomprehensible.

Chinese are used to marking aspect, but not tense. In English, we mark both. If you study Chinese grammar, you will notice that are very precise in marking when events occur and whether they are finished or continuing.

Because most Chinese students understand precision grammar, our imprecise conflation of tense and aspect confound them. They can understand syntax, but only if their teachers understand it clearly enough to explain it.

[Randolf]

[El Chupacabra]

The proof is in the pudding.

I learned my syntax in a graduate linguistics course, using Carney as a base text. For those of us who can recall our Chomsky trees, tense is binary. That means two choices, for those of you in Rio Linda.

[Randolf]

Chomsky is a consumate sociologist and a peerless commentator on world affairs, but he has zero credibility as a linguist.

Neither you nor Chomsky has any idea about English. "trees" ye gods spare us his garbled nonsense. I've read all of Chomsky's 'linguistics' and it is nonsense from start to finish. A wonderful social commentator though and I enjoy his other work immensely.

FIRST PERSON PRESENT SIMPLE: I drink.
FIRST PERSON PAST SIMPLE: I drank.
FIRST PERSON MODAL SIMPLE: I must drink.

You can do this with each of the other 3 Aspect cases.

English has 3 tenses. The proof is in the pudding.