Teacher Discussion Forums

I have an around 20 recordings from radio, interviews i've done with permission, recording myself at the post office, that sort of thing. does anyone else have an interest in building a library? basically, for listening to become a mainstay in my classes, i need a lot more genuine material. most of ...

hi fluffyhamster, i too have a lot of time on my hands. thank you for your input. am envious of your library and speed typing. he was not alone, but cook was the fellow who set me off on this wild goose chase. it does seem another case of - well this is obviously a jolly good idea, you should do it ...

hi jose, interesting. i am half brasilian and learnt the language in situ last year. i found the pro-drop made it all much easier. you are right, natives often drop the subject in english. 'correctly' in grammar terms (if that can be said) in imperatives for example, and in casual form - chat, postc...

that's an excellent idea. i've only done it with higher levels before but you are right, a bit of head scratching and i'll see what i can rustle up for beginners. thank you very much.

many thanks. yes, we try to model natural english. i think the special point of these writers was that second language learners may be able to switch their parameters. i found this with German. once i had the pattern of sentence construction locked in, i could focus on the details. i guess the probl...

sorry, too much time with my head in books. pro-drop languages are the majority in the world, but not english. pro-drop has, i believe, come from Chomsky's idea of parameters = that children recognise the settings of the language they are born into and once those are set, the child knows the basic r...

Various writers have proposed explicitly teaching the concept of pro-drop to learners in order to explain English as a non-pro-drop language. However on the net I can find no teaching ideas. I am loath to resort to explanation followed by gap-fill of dummies and identifying reference items in writte...