participle problem

[Glenski]

My "wonderful" Japanese grammar book has a review lesson sentence that reads:

My mother was tired because she had been working all day.

The lesson for next week is on participle usage, so the above sentence was changed in the book to read:

Having worked all day, my mother was tired.

A student has read ahead and is surprisingly interested in what he sees as a blooper or something terribly confusing. He says that "had been working" does not match the altered form "having worked". He is asking why the new form isn't "having been working".

Here's my take on it, and I would like the opinions/advice of the experts here.

1. I see the first sentence as stating mom was tired because she had been working all day (and may or may not have finished working). If she had finished working, the because clause would have read "because she had worked all day". If it had been written like that, the newly altered second sentence would make perfect sense to everyone. Is this about right?

2. I figure the first sentence was dragged from some earlier text (the current one is book 3, so maybe the first sentence came from book 2 in the series), and the author simply wanted some form of consistency, although he didn't refer to any page numbers. In doing so, he didn't take into account the difference between "having worked all day" and "having been working all day", so I might call this a typo/blooper/blunder in the writer or publisher. What do you think?

3. Is there an alternate answer? Can you actually say "having been working" in the second sentence? Sounds unnatural to me.

[lolwhites]

I'm not a fan of participle clauses myself as they can be clumsy and potentially ambiguous (like the time the head teacher at my secondary school angrily announced I saw a sandwich walking down the corridor). However...

I don't think there's anything wrong with having been working all day.... Adding the continuous aspect changes the meaning slightly, in the same way as it always does when you combine it with perfect aspect, but I get the impression that your student is of the If I See It Written Down One Way Then That Means Any Other Way Must Be Incorrect school of thought. He could use a gentle introduction to the concept of grammar as choice to bring him down from planet Vulcan.

As is so often the case, both are correct, they mean different things and so the answer to the question "Is this right?" is "It depends what you're trying to say." Students often find this answer unsatisfactory as it doesn't spell things out in clear black and white, but students who take that view of language rarely get past intermediate level.

[Stephen Jones]

Having been working all day, my mother was tired.
Seems both correct and natural to me.

There is very little difference in meaning, if any, between
Having worked all day
and
Having been working all day
just as there is little if any difference between
She was tired because she had worked all day
and
Sne was tired because she had been working all day.

In other cases there would be a difference.
[/i]She was tired because she had done the spring cleaning[/i]
implies that the job is finished, but
She was tired because she had been doing the spring cleaning.
doesn't. This does not apply in the particular case you give.

So, basically you are right, and also lucky to have a perceptive student. The 'publisher's blooper' you refer to is more of a minor inconsistency bought about by the equivalence in meaning in the particular example disguising the possible difference in meaning in others.

I can go into the technical differences between the perfect continuous and perfect simple if you wish, but do not think it necessary for this example.

Keep up the good work with the Japanese. Just hope your students never lose their inhibitions because if they do you'll never stop them talking!

[Glenski]

I get the impression that your student is of the If I See It Written Down One Way Then That Means Any Other Way Must Be Incorrect school of thought. He could use a gentle introduction to the concept of grammar as choice to bring him down from planet Vulcan.

Planet Vulcan is pretty much Asia, so you have just insulted a lot of people with that innocent remark. Don't expect any changes in any Asian countries in the near future/century.

the answer to the question "Is this right?" is "It depends what you're trying to say." Students often find this answer unsatisfactory as it doesn't spell things out in clear black and white, but students who take that view of language rarely get past intermediate level.

Well, that explains Asia again, in case you didn't know.

[woodcutter]

Glenski, you are the only one who thinks that Asians are Vulcans, and thus the only one doing the insulting.

Asians probably suffer from a over-average number of useless English teachers who paper over their inadequacies with fuss, feathers and iron rule mongering. However, with effort, you can undo the damage, and more serious and intelligent students usually know better.

Asians are poor at English mainly because English is bleedin' difficult if you don't speak an Indo-European tongue, come from a totally different culture and are taught by people who don't know the language very well.

[lolwhites]

Glenski - Here in the UK I've taught Vulcans from all over the world, not just Asia, and I've taught Asians who managed to acquire the concept of grammar as meanings rather than laws. Your question referred to an individual student, and I made a judgement about that individual student based on your observation. I certainly wasn't extrapolating to include an entire continent, so please don't put words into my mouth.

[Glenski]

woodcutter,
Japanese do not learn how to speak English properly as a whole NOT for the reason you stated. If you knew anything about how badly they are taught in junior high school and high school, you would know.

lolwhites,
Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but to compare Asians you have taught in the UK with Asians in their home country is like apples and oranges. Not only are the motivation levels totally different, but their external surroundings are equally different. ESL vs. EFL

[lolwhites]

Since I've never taught in Asia myself, I have no way of knowing if the students in my classes are representative of the population but I suspect not as the fact that they can afford to come to such an expensive country in the first place may well set them apart from their compatriots. Quite how that would affect their attitude to language learning isn't clear to me. However, one would expect that the fact that they are constantly exposed to language which doesn't fit what they were taught at school should open their eyes somewhat.

Then again, all generalisations are false.

[Andrew Patterson]

Then again, all generalisations are false.

Isn't that a generalisation itself?

[lolwhites]

Actually, I think Mark Twain said it first.

[woodcutter]

Glenski - I said that the standard of teaching is generally poor in Asia. Where is our bone of contention?

[fluffyhamster]

Often the level of the non-native teacher's English isn't the problem (they can speak very good English, and would make good translators and perhaps even interpreters); rather, it's the purely personal interest they take in the language, an interest that does not extend to thinking things through pedagogically to a satisfactory degree beyond the strictly demarcated and therefore always limited syllabuses they like working with(in). The net result is that the English they offer students is always either too banal, or too complex and very context-specific (i.e. a function of whatever stilted text is being waded through, and of little use productively for anyone other than those who might want to emulate said text's style); there is never an exploration of how one might say it differently, or indeed say something completely different (that isn't in the coursebooks at all).

Functional reasons for using a form are usually absent in planning, and it takes a somewhat willful AET (speaking of Japan here still) to ensure that whatever examples and practice ensues in the classroom will make any sense to especially the less motivated of the students.

As an example, only yesterday I had to assist with a "Did you...?" lesson in which the only nod to discoursal factors was the rule that a student could only write the name of a person who'd answered 'Yes' to whatever question on the bingo sheet (once the sheet was full of names, the game would then proceed with the JTE calling out names rather than the activities).

It was more than the JTE wanted to think about to come up with genuine questions based on things one could assume anyone with e.g. a TV might have seen last night (on the news, or a good, popular movie or big sports event etc), or to not include questions on the sheet that no student in the class would ever have done (e.g. 'Did you wash the car yesterday?' - not even 'your father's car', and how would anyone know A was going to wash it anyway etc!?).

Of course, these "simple" things become clearer to students who stick with it, but if the approach can't even get these things straight it bodes ill for the curriculum as a complex, organic whole, and you have to wonder if students wouldn't enjoy a course even more (beyond the bingo) if it did actually cohere well and make sense overall (but the argument seems to be that the effort required to properly contextualize anything will turn students off...although that argument is forwarded by the Japanese teachers, not the students themselves!).

As I've said before, a lot of these teachers would get a rocket and undoubtedly learn a lot if they taught their native language (e.g. Japanese) for a while, before returning to or embarking on a career in "EFL".

[woodcutter]

I've met some rotten interpreters.

You offered me advice, Fluff, about becoming a Chinese teacher, and it is something I would find very hard. So much of what I try to do and enjoy doing is dependent on having a flawless English accent, a ready wit, a deep knowledge of the culture, a whiff of exoticism etc. It is much, much harder to teach your second language, much harder to teach a notional functional syllabus in an interesting fashion even if you only have the slightest doubt about what you are saying. With the dynamics of a conservative Confucian nation, it is harder still.

I don't know that much about Japan, but as I mentioned, one of the reasons I got kicked off the MA was that I do contend that China, Korea and Japan have a lot of the same things going on, and a similar conservative Confucian culture. (they all claim deserted islets like silly beggars, for example!). I rather doubt that the average middle school teacher in Japan is that hot at English, though I don't doubt the criticisms you make.

(By the way, my wife is pregnant, I would seem to be staying put, and I'm considering doing one of those despised Australian on line MAs)

[fluffyhamster]

I don't think real doubt or ignorance is actually the problem; rather, there is often a deliberate limiting of the facts, blurring of likely or useful context and a disregard for EXACT wordings in functional exponents (for example, the misuse of/fudging with 'the' - seeing as we aren't talking to a member of our own family in the context of the classroom - in 'Did you clean the car/walk the dog', above).

Many JTEs can hold their own quite well in conversation, but are content to peddle linguistically dodgy fare because they feel the students don't need to know very much ("acquisition", whilst not exactly a term I want to champion - perhaps we could just say "natural learning", "learning in action", "picking things up" etc - seems to be something these teachers do not believe in, or at least feel is unimportant until some unclear future time in the students' "learning").

Of course, teaching your second language is always going to be a process plagued with more doubt than teaching your first, but that just makes the seeming "certainty", the faith many JTEs have in their not quite satisfactory materials and predagogy all the more puzzling. There's really no excuse for making do with so-so stuff anymore when there are so many increasingly excellent references resources now available (some of which are bilingual(ized)), and I would maintain that all that is required to make the leap from unsatisfactory to satisfactory teaching (content) is a belief that satisfying the students' less conscious (that is, REAL, authentic and eminently authenticable) learning processes is of great importance.

Many JTEs have the ability, experience and resources to produce better lessons, but hold themselves back because they don't seem to believe the students need or want well thought-out, intuitively appealing (to common-sense) and therefore motivating input (they seem to prefer to explain in L1 around the unsatisfactory, difficult and often decontextualized examples rather than improve on the examples); the JTEs don't need to learn English all over again, just make a better and more principled selection (e.g. principled in terms of natural discourse structure) from what they already know or are at least aware of (and if the JTE has such poor English that they can't make use of reference works etc, then they really are in the wrong job).