Profiling a student

[jools230575]

Hi there

I am new to the forum and was hoping that a kind soul out there could help me out.

At the present time I am doing the Trinity TESOL course. Part of the course requirement is to profile a student.

The profile contains numerous things which I can get my head around, but there are a couple of things that I know it seems daft but I can't quite work out the differences between them.

I have to write about: how a student uses singular and plural forms

and then follow this with

How a student uses countable and uncountable nouns.

Could someone explain the difference between the two as I am stumped. I know what a plural and singular form is etc but the line between these two subjects appears to be very thin.

Then the final thing that I am stuck on is

Verbs and tense forms

Use of tenses

Again what in the heck is the difference

I know this sounds thick but I can not for the life of think what is meant and how I distinguish between the two.

Thanks for any help. It is most appreciated

Jools

[Volga_05]

Hi, I hope I can help on that if it's not too late.

The grammatical category of Number is quite a simple one to comprehend unless you're a Japanese or Chinese speaker. In Japanese, for instance, the distinction between countable and uncountable is not recognised, therefore plural/singular forms pose major problems.

This is what, even a very proficient speaker, will produce:

In Japan, industrial product is cheap. Because we have an economic growth. But vegetable is expensive. Because we Japanese have a few lands.

From the above example you can see that the speaker finds it difficult to distinguish between countable and uncountable and therefore singular is used instead of plural ('vegetable' or 'vegetable', it's mass for him/her), because there's no such a distinction in his/her L1.

The category of Number exists in such languages as Russin, Polish, German, etc. Speakers of those languages will not have difficulties with comprehending the category of Number.

However, there might be differences in tense formation. E.g. in Russian tenses are formed synthetically (by means of suffixes) and not annalytically like in English (by means of auxiliaries). Therefore Russian speakers will often forget to use auxiliaries and produce sentences like: You liked playing football when you were a child? When you came?

The use of tenses is different as well. E.g. in Russian they use the future tense in both clauses of a conditional sentense. Whereas in English we use present subjunctive, past simple or past perfect subjunctive in the if-clause and future subjunctive in the main clause. Compare:
Russian 'If it will rain, we won't go out'
English 'If it rains, we won't go out'

In the above example the tense is formed correctly (it will rain), but it's used incorrectly. It should've been 'it rains'

That's the difference between tense forms and tense use.

I don't know what your students' L1; if you're interested in further reading I would recommend 'Learner English' by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith

Good luck!!!