Teacher Discussion Forums

I don't disagree when I say that it seems pretty clear cut when somebody else is doing it or you are. You hear in your mind's eye (ouch) something like "them" or "it when you are". To your friend who goes to the ballet: Do you like( them) dancing? To your dancer friend: "Do you like (it when you are...

Said on the last day of summer?

"This has been the hottest summer in/for the last ten years"

So that everybody can follow my burblings it's worth pointing out that "nadar" means to swim/swimming/ swim depending on context. Although I don't think there's an easy answer to this, if you must go down the translation route then three things occur to me: I'm fairly sure that " verbo + haber hecho...

I nearly died on my birthday. Who honestly thinks that I'm including the day of my birth?

I nearly died on my first birthday. Now does anyone, anyone at all, think that I was nought years old at the time?

Revel. Yes, I have. But I've found electrodes attached to their chairs and a discrete button to be a most effective way of overcoming that little problem in 9 out of 10 cases. Every 10th student is a gibbering wreck but it's a small price to pay. You certainly don't need to know who or what Pinker i...

Oh, testing understanding with nonsense words is called a wug-test, according to Pinker. If you can believe anything he says.

Thanks for the advice about stressing the need for two word verb tenses (most of them) as against one word verb tenses (two simple affirmatives) but you're preaching to the converted. We just have different ways of doing it. It was a good guess Stephen but my students are Spanish, making questions a...

You are all absolutely right. More terms would confuse things still further and I take the point that their being different from L1 to English may not be such a bad thing. And I'm relieved to hear that I'm not the only teacher with idiosyncratic private terminology. In fact I suspect that acceptable...

Roger, look at it from the students' point of view. It's very likely that in their language the normal contrast is between simple tenses, one word tenses in other words, and compound tenses, aux. plus verb in whatever form, of which perfect tenses are examples. It's confusing, for them, to talk abou...

This is as good a place as any to let off steam about accepted terminology. I don't like Present Simple because in many other languages Simple is contrasted with Compound, making Present Simple Negative a contradiction. Infinitive is daft, there's no evidence that such a thing exists in English. Wri...

Hang on Harzer, that last one could be perfectly ok, if "camouflaging relationships" are "relationships which camouflage".

"We must steer land ho" "Westward Ho" "Well, I must be work ho". Could ho be a postposition preposition?

No jokes about Bertie Wooster in a brothel, please.

Change may well be initiated by "the lower classes" but their voice is not heard unless the particular usage is reluctantly adopted by the middle. If we were completely democratic, we'd accept double negatives as used by millions of people. Just counting heads would make "I didn't do nothing" more r...

I made it go away, and things look better again.

But Woodcutter, someone transcribes such uses or comments on them, or complains about them. "he were" -if - unless -lest gives 20,000 examples of folk-songs and dialects plus the odd subjunctive. "we be" - shall -should -can -could -may - must gives 50,000 examples of rap lyrics, folk songs, dialect...