The Routine On Yesterday

[revel]

Good morning all.

I'm with Stephen, I teach the present perfect when it shows up in the book, I can't be bothered with keeping track of things when things are presented out of the order presented by the text I am required to use. My students come to me linear-minded, get all flustered if I skip an exercise in the plodding ahead through the text, so if I were to skip ahead to chapter seven even though we have just only finished chapter three, they would go batty. And most chapter sevens need the preceding six to be comprehensible in most texts.

Grant Taylor's order is "simple present, present continous, simple past, future (which he calls a tense, silly Grant, didn't he know back in 1956 that there is no future tense in English?) and then the present perfect. He does go on with other themes, but since the perfect is the subject here....

Since I have followed Mr Taylors patterns for over twenty years, I guess the above paragraph is my answer to when to present the present perfect among the other verb forms/tenses/modes.

peace,
revel.

[metal56]

My students come to me linear-minded,

revel.

How unfortunate for you. Mine come to me asking questions like "How I may say, "si", (the conditional) in Englis?"

Should I tell them to wait until unit 7?

[fluffyhamster]

Hiya revel, metal, Stephen, and whoever else is following this little subthread I helped kick off!

I'm with Stephen, I teach the present perfect when it shows up in the book, I can't be bothered with keeping track of things when things are presented out of the order presented by the text I am required to use. My students come to me linear-minded, get all flustered if I skip an exercise in the plodding ahead through the text, so if I were to skip ahead to chapter seven even though we have just only finished chapter three, they would go batty. And most chapter sevens need the preceding six to be comprehensible in most texts.

Fair enough, but note that I asked "if you were writing a course, where would you deal with Present Perfect?"

I take most SLA research with a large pinch of salt; I don't think a great amount of thought goes into the sequencing of items anymore anyhow; and the methods of presenting and contrasting structures (i.e. Present Perfect "versus" Simple Past) that they model in training always seemed to raise more questions to me than they might answer. I think in just "following the book", we could end up with learners like "Agnes in Budapest", if not Xui himself!

To avoid frustrating learners by giving them either too little ("the drip-feeding, down a tight and narrow tube, approach") or too much ("the order what you like and make yourself as sick as a dog, whilst driving the chef crazy" appraoch), or even (as with CELTA approaches) something half-*ssed, I really think books have got to take much greater account of how people develop socially from strangers to friends (from zero to shared background knowledge and assumptions), and the linguistic means that need to be at their disposal for these processes to proceed smoothly; certainly, the teacher-led, patronizing approach drives me crazy (both as a teacher and a "student". Vive la L1!!).

For example, where and when do you think conditionals would be needed? Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that we decide that the "first" is going to be used for "formulating Plan B in making arrangements for a social event", "Promising to do something if time permits", and "Jokingly threatening a friend"; obviously these are not things that can be comfortably broached early in a course, even if the linguistic means to achieve them are not structurally actually that difficult or complex.

Of course, what messes up any course's careful ordering is that blessing/bane of teachers, the so-called intermediate student. Most of them would have a fit if you asked them to go right back to the beginning, or even just to take a fairly rigorous functional test of their "level", but I like to imagine that a really good book would teach them a lot and could even get rid of some of their fossilized errors.

Wow I sounded a bit like woodcutter in that last paragraph!

[JuanTwoThree]

Unfortunately (tongue firmly in cheek) the needs of students prevent us from teaching a couple of modals and then the present perfect of regular verbs with "Have you got?" before embarking on "Do?" and "don't" . Wasn't something like this order suggested in Iconoclast's postathon?

The pesky students do insist on asking questions like "You like this city?" "Where you live? "You like our food?" from the very beginning so we have to get stuck into that straightaway.

In the same way we have to deal with "be" being the verb with most forms, irregular plurals of common nouns, the two most common adjectives having irregular comparatives and a long list of etceteras before the relative normality (!) of the middle part of the language.

Is there really a way of manipulating the order in which things are needed/taught so that regular models can be seen before these tricky items come up? I used a book that introduced "Do you have?" and kept quiet about "Have you got?" to suit its purposes. Of course I forgot all the time.

By the way it's trite though true to observe that adult beginners feel the need for past forms before the youngsters do.

[JuanTwoThree]

Double post, sorry.

I wonder if some conditionals aren't too tricky before a certain age. If/will is easy, it's a time clause for pessimists and can be "done" with When/will, assuming that the students are old enough. How many parents have said "IF" and then later heard "You promised!"

And I've had this conversation with my ten-year-old son:

"You didn't do your homework"

"I didn't have time"

"You mean you would have done it if you had had time?"

"But I didn't have time"

and so on.

complexity of thought = complexity of grammar?

[fluffyhamster]

OK, I have a question: if you were writing a course, where would you deal with Present Perfect? Quite early, soon after Simple Present, or only after having also introduced Simple Past first (i.e. Simple Present > Simple Past > Present Perfect)?

Hi JTT! I wasn't advocating teaching 'a couple of modals and then the present perfect of regular verbs with "Have you got?" before embarking on "Do?" and "don't" '.

I would also 'deal with "be" being the verb with most forms, irregular plurals of common nouns, the two most common adjectives having irregular comparatives and a long list of etceteras before the relative normality (!) of the middle part of the language.'.

[fluffyhamster]

complexity of thought = complexity of grammar?

I don't think it's a matter of being complex or fancy, I think it's a matter of students being logical and clear, and sticking to the most basic forms and word orders possible (unmarked forms). If they use a complex form to express their thoughts, it should be because there is no other means to do it more efficiently.

That being said, does basic language always do a subject justice?! We appreciate mots justes, n'est pas?

[JuanTwoThree]

"a couple of modals and then the present perfect of regular verbs with "Have you got?" before embarking on "Do?" and "don't"

That's exactly what I would like to do: have a nice model for questions and negatives well established. I don't say that you're advocating it. As I say, it's not possible.

But present perfect before past simple isn't a bad idea. It helps to model auxiliarity. And after all, the first often preceeds the second in a conversation (Have you? Yes. Oh, when did you?) and it enters early on into classsroom language: "Have you all finished?.

[fluffyhamster]

But present perfect before past simple isn't a bad idea. It helps to model auxiliarity. And after all, the first often preceeds the second in a conversation (Have you? Yes. Oh, when did you?) and it enters early on into classsroom language: "Have you all finished?.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Present Perfect would be a great bridge back into (rather than from) the past, and the past is where we could then stay awhile.

You don't often see these kind of sleek superhighways in textbooks: they seem to prefer to park students at crossroads with stuck traffic lights, behind pile-ups involving Simple Past and Present Perfect.

[revel]

Hey all.

I'll begin by pointing out that in my first class with kids today, I had them copying "We will be quiet in English class" fifty times before ten minutes had passed. And this afternoon I have kicked an average of one student out of my class per class, so I've had a long, hard day and what follows will probably sound pretty b*tchy.

What gets my goat is this or that book that assumes that somewhere earlier (probably in the same program the book was written for) students have already learned and practiced sufficiently just those basic forms that they will need to make questions or negate sentences, or just construct a nice sentence with a subject and a verb. Naturally, the basic structures are explained in cute little side-bars in all of these books, but students are usually looking at the bright, colorful photos of Beckham or Boobie Spears, are never very interested in the texts that are presented, don't know more than half of the vocabulary (I'm talking about significant words in the text, not "a" or "can" or "they"), and are totally unable to pronounce more than one word at a time when trying to reply.

In my opinion, all of these students need a good whipping with some structural drilling. They should not be struggling to make a Do or Does question when the theme of the unit they are studying is modals or the three plus zero conditionals. Learning the basics also includes learning the exceptions. All verbs have an auxiliary, even simple verbs in the simple present have the understood "do" there, which can be added for emphasis. All questions are made with an auxiliary. All modals behave like the verb to be when making questions and negatives. Learning how to manipulate the verb "be" in sentences, questions and negatives gives students the firm basis for the same manipulation when they get to language items that are more challenging for their understanding of English.

Perhaps English teaching is so verb-centered because the verb is where the action is. There are only seven personal pronouns, 115 prepositions (someone will correct me on the total number of prepositions, I suppose), a finite number of articles and auxiliaries etc...while there are thousands and thousands of verbs out there. I personally believe that this verb-centered teaching must be done step by step, so that a student that does not control the verb to be in questions, negatives and sentences should not be asked to take on the auxiliary "do" in questions and negatives. And by the same token, the student should not be asked to handle continous constructions until "be" is conquered in its simple presentation. And perfect constructions should not be approached until continuous manipulation has been mastered. Once it has become clear to the student that all of these verb forms are manipulated in the same way, we will have freed up their brains from thinking about how to make the sentence correctly, allowing them time for considering what they mean when they say (or usually, write) such and such a form or read such and such. At this point in their proficiency, I don't think it matters much in what order they learn more complicated English.

And, above all, teach them to say it with rhythm, liaison, reduction, intonation and automatically. Why on earth do we let them spit out "Yes....he....does" when to me it sounds like "yesidas"?

Uff, sorry folks, but if I were King of the World, all those text books would be heating homes in Russia in the winter....

peace,
revel.

[woodcutter]

Woodcutter is a *beep*-cat in relation to that!

[woodcutter]

Sorry, I didn't imagine I was being rude! Can you answer the fill-in-the-gap question above correctly?