Teacher Discussion Forums

Let's assume the answer is apples. How would you answer this question in a whole sentence?

"(My favourite fruit is) apples": just because there is a plural -s there doesn't mean the verb should be "are" , and is+apple is obviously strange too.

Anyway, I hope you aren't drilling people in full-sentence answers to questions - there should be enough input in terms of verbs etc just from the question itself, and unrelated statements etc, in a representative, proportional (i.e. "lexical") syllabus (re. Sinclair and Renouf 1988 etc)! Some might argue that enhanced input=improved uptake etc, but I think there is then a danger that it leads to skewed production, or at least occupies the learner's mind more than it otherwise should be.

I guess that whole-sentence answers are supposed to more or less mirror the question word for word.

My favourite fruit is singular, so is is used because verbs agree with the subject. The fact that the object is a plural noun is irrelevant. To broaden the idea, consider:

Was it the Italians or the Chinese who invented spaghetti
My favourite football (soccer) team is Wolverhampton Wanderers
BUT Wolverhampton Wanderers are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen
Apples are my favourite fruit

Although, as fulffy quite rightly points out, if someone asked me "What's your favourite fruit?" I would probably not answer in a full sentence. Let's try and keep it natural.

Presumably you're not meaning to be prescriptive about "WW are by far...", and are just implying that whereas there is a choice of "are" or "is" there ("WW IS by far..."), with "My favorite fruit/team", only "is" is possible (vs. My fave CDs are these ones here) - right, lol?

Hmm, I always find it a bit brain-bending to need to think of "My favourite fruit" as being grammatically singular. OK, I can see the "set", with its singularizing boundary line, but it contains so much more variety than a football team (the members of which I kind of mentally "subsume" under/down to just their logo or name). Just waffling on here!

My gut feeling is that Apples is my favourite fruit would only sound right in the west of England, as in:

Apples is moi favourite fruit, they is, moi duck, ooo-aaar!

Thank you for your responses. Of course it is an unnatural reply to the question but you have to remember that sometimes students do give unnatural responses-many of them have been drilled to death a long time before they stroll into my classroom! 'My favourite fruit is apples'. however correct still sounds odd but perhaps simply because I'd never say it.

What exactly would you say, then? (Just curious!).

apples

Ilunga wrote: ...'My favourite fruit is apples'. however correct still sounds odd but perhaps simply because I'd never say it.

A good observation, I think. Some (perhaps many) teachers don't make it.

But now you ought to ask yourself what you are going to teach your students, and why. Do you continue with the full sentence response (since I assume their textbooks and prior teachers have suggested this) as the one they should use, or do you teach them what you yourself might say? You also ought to know the reasons for your choice.

Larry Latham

Remember what Michael Lewis says in The Lexical Approach:

Teacher: Can you say that in a full sentence please?
= I understood you perfectly, now please repeat yourself unnecessarily in a more complicated way

oranges

Hey all!

Drill work is sometimes redundant, as it is often focusing on the production of a certain structure or combination of sounds or substitution or transformation. One of those transformations, in order for drill work to be truely useful, is the avoidance of redundancy. So, if in English we frown on the repetition of proper nouns (which is the reason for being of the personal pronouns, after all), we should also be frowning on the use of complete sentences that simply mirror the question asked in the drill. "What is your favorite fruit?" asks the teacher, "I like apples and oranges," replies the student. There the student has made a complete sentence without falling into unnatural repetition of the original structure. "Did the boy break the glass window with a ball?" What teacher would ask the student to produce "Yes, the boy broke the window with a ball." How about a nice, simple "Yes, he did"?

So often my students are wading through the mud of making complete sentences, mucking up the word order and the verb forms, repeating proper nouns when they ought to be using pronouns. "My name is Juan" and "I am 12 years old" being standards that I always identify for them as "English Class answers" when in the "real world" the utterance would be something like "I'm Juan" or "I'm 12". They are always amazed at the simplicity of these answers and almost always retort with "but my teacher at school insists that we make complete sentences and pronounce each word separately and clearly." Are their teachers native English speakers? Almost never. Having given class to many of those non-native teachers, I know that their English may be well studied, but is hardly ever fluent and not a good example to the younguns who tend to take everything taught at face value, and later become adults with horrible speaking habits.

peace,
revel.

What teacher would ask the student to produce "Yes, the boy broke the window with a ball." How about a nice, simple "Yes, he did"?

Or even "That's right, he did" or just "That's right"? When was the last time you saw "that's right" in a textbook?

Teachers like the one Revel describes are the reason my classes in the UK are full of students from Spain and Italy who insist on using grammatically correct, but totally unnatural utterances. Worse still, they think that using full sentences all the time makes their English "better" because they're doing what their teacher back home gave them good marks for.

Ironically, it's these teachers who enjoy the best working conditions while the natives slogging away in academias trying to encourage the student to use natural English are paid a fraction of what their counterparts in the state system get.

Good morning all!

Right on, lolwhites! You must have worked in Spain. Maybe the same is true in other European countries where English is not the L1.

One of the selling points of these academies is that, having native teachers, the students will supposedly have the advantage of good pronunciation and structural models to improve upon their school classes taught by non-natives. Take vocabulary, for example. I don't know if my numbers are totally correct, but I believe that English has some 10 times more "words" than Spanish. The non-native teacher tells his/her students that mirar is "look at" and students get all in a tuss when I tell them that I want the word "watch" because of the context. "My teacher says it's look at!" they exclaim. I point out that in order to get a good grade with their school teacher they will probably have to write "look at" on the exam at school. I also point out that we have many different words for the use of the eyes in English: glance, stare, glare, goo-goo, etc. "Then I have to learn one thing for one teacher and another thing for another!" they whine. "No," I point out, "in my class I will accept any vocabulary that is contextually well used. You just need to be aware that there is not just one way to say this or that in English, just as there is not just one way to say that or this in Spanish."

The pity is, in the academies we are often forced to use books that are just as poor as the ones being used at school. We try to keep the students one year ahead of the level being taught at school. We have little time to drill pronunciation or do interesting communicative activities, we have to finish eight units before the end of the trimester and give an exam that no one then looks at besides the teacher. And, as lolwhites points out, we have no job security, are paid poorly, have wretched hours, no vacation pay, etc....just some observations for anyone thinking about heading out to Spain and getting a job in a non-regulated educational situation.

What can we do? Oh, it hurts me to say this, but I guess if one has to pay the rent or mortgage and wants to eat, one shuts up and does the hour and collects the meagre wage and hopes that at least half of one's students get the point and that the other half get a little better grades at school.

peace,
revel.