Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Qinella]

In almost two years of teaching elementary to middle school, I have never encountered this: a low-advanced middle school student cannot identify a pronoun's antecedent with any confidence.

At first, I thought to explain to her that the pronoun should refer to the closest logical noun, but that doesn't quite work. Then I thought, maybe it's the closest logical subject noun. I'm still not sure about this..

Any ideas?


Thanks,
Q.



edit: some of you are fast.. if you quoted my poor example, please ignore!

[English_Ocean]

http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/pronref.html

This is a great site. Hope it helps.

[kimchi story]

Hey, I just went through this with my winter class. I found that starting with an SVO sentence structure review and then going into the categories of subject/object/possessive pronouns helped them grapple with identifying antecedents. Some discussion of context is valuable at this time - I teach most of my grammar around the idea of the 'complete thought' and the 'main idea', using the default 'does it make sense?'. Getting those across takes a little time and work - but really the only result of a pronoun/antecedent error is that things stop making sense .

I made the mistake of starting with 'the antecedent is usually the closest noun to the pronoun' - that one falls apart pretty quickly in the face of actual examples.

Hope that helps...

[EFLtrainer]

Yup. Context and co-text. Use other words, etc. and have them figure out the connections. Try to get them to realize which words provide a clue. Using nonsense words in sentences and passages and having them figure what type of word it is sometimes help them start to understand the use of context and co-text.

[Universalis]

I might encourage your student to know that in a badly written sentence or paragraph, even native speakers can get lost under an avalanche of poorly-used pronouns.

Brian

[Qinella]

Thanks for trying to help guys, but I do not feel like my question is answered.

I'm not trying to teach the student how to use pronouns. Basically, I'm trying to show her how to answer questions on a TOEFL test that ask, "In the passage, what does "it" refer to?"

I wish I had a book on me to give an example. I can type one up on Monday if I remember.

EFLtrainer, you said to have them figure out connections and realize which words provide a clue. Is there any consistent method to doing that, that you know of?

Thanks,
Q.

[Ryst Helmut]

[the saint]

so I follow English_Ocean's link and find this example

[kimchi story]

Yeah I see what's wrong, saint. The reader needs more information for the sentence to make sense. It should be:

"Jerry found a gun in the knickers which he wore every day. It was a really big gun and that's how Jerry got away with wearing knickers every day. With a gun as big as Jerry's, he could wear stillettos and hotpants if he wanted to. Sometimes he did and he still got more than Tom, who only had a little pistol in his slacks and never wore stillettos and hotpants."