Teacher Discussion Forums

Oh, of course. All of the sentences contain some infraction of the textbook rules of English grammar. But what's interesting is how different people see that.

Larry Latham

I suspect all 15 sentences are natural (actually used outside an English class) were spoken, rather than written, and uttered by educated native speakers. The so-called "errors" are not hard for any of us to spot, but I personally am bothered only by number 11, and then only fleetingly. If someone e...

Totally agree!

Larry Latham

The point is that it has 255 compared to 600,000 for the alternative "falling prices". When the more normal collocation is 2,500 times more common than the alternative then I have no compunction in saying the alternative is wrong. I guess the difference between you and me, Stephen , is that you wou...

Fluff wrote:Larry, have you been painstakingly "mistyping" 'clarity' as 'clearity' every time...

Oops! Just never thought about it. Thanks for pointing it out, Fluffy.

Larry Latham

Now that the issue of "hits" has been clarified. There remains the philosophical discussion of the role of ESL and grammar teachers. Our students need langage that is widely used and accepted. They do not have the time for esoteric, exotic or controversial usages. They rely on their teachers to giv...

Stephen , you are correct about my forgetting to add the quote marks around "lessening prices" on my last Google search here. Moreover, I simply looked at the total number and came to a conclusion from that. (Very bad form, as Stephen is also correct to say that one should look through the actual r...

I'm afraid that I would have to mark both the BBC and the World Bank with big red markers. Both are incorrect. Someone might have "less" money than you. One price could be "less" than another. But, you cannot "lessen" a price. (Unless you are intending to insult someone's prices and theirby diminis...

lolwhites wrote:Great examples

It remains, I think, an unlikely example. though the point is that there is no grammar "rule" explicitly ruling the sentence out. We have to look to semantics to make sense of it.

We have to look to context to make sense of it.

Larry Latham

I'd personally never say this, and I suppose that while we should rely on our instincts as teachers, it shows that we're not infallible even in matters of grammatical correctness. I believe this is a point that cannot be stressed too strongly or too often. Indeed, we should be very careful about re...

Hi again, Thank you all for your valuable and insightful feedback. NowI see that some of the first ten items are problomatic. But what about the rest of the items? Are they ok? Please comment. May May , you're really asking too much here. We've identified a problem in your work, and hopefully you c...

Lorikeet wrote: I will regard it as a personal failing!

Oh, my, Lorikeet. Let's not beat you up that bad. I promise not to tell anybody if you don't.

Larry Latham

To be fair (and to be clear to other readers) the reason you say your ears hurt is that you are accustomed to thinking of "The (city) Police..." as a plural construction, and so requiring a plural verb. You would be happier, for example, with: " The San Diego Police are looking into ..." if I unders...

Gee! I'm a NS too, but my stomach is feeling fine.

Larry Latham

Hi everybody: Recently, I've prepared three tests to examine my students' competence of lexical collocations. These tests also have to do with a research paper I am recently writing. Since I am not a native speaker, I am not totally sure that the collocation tests are completely accurate. So I thou...