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joyce L

Michael Swan | Teaching grammar - does grammar teaching work? - 0 views

www.mikeswan.co.uk/...teaching-grammar.htm

creativity grammar teaching swan

shared by joyce L on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • joyce L on 18 Aug 11
     
    great article to read on teaching grammar
joyce L

A is for Aspect (2) « An A-Z of ELT - 0 views

scottthornbury.wordpress.com/...a-is-for-aspect-2

aspect Thornbury presentperfect

shared by joyce L on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • This strikes me as fairly confusing advice that does not provide students a sense of when they should use the present perfect.
  • She noted how there is a kind of causality with the present perfect sentences, particularly those puzzling ones that refer to past experienc
  • This same ‘so now’ shortcut can be useful in cases when there has been a past experience with a present effect. Ex. “The taxi has arrived” = So now it is here. Or “He’s drunk five cups of coffee.” = So now he’s a bit jumpy. Michael Swan in “How English Works” has a nice exercise that has students match present perfect to the present meaning (p. 151)
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • ‘Hi Sally! Did you eat yet?’ ‘Hey Jason. Uh, yeah. I ate already.’ In US English (at least that of the ‘Friends’ variety) the present perfect seems to be on the way out.
  • Interestingly, Chinese has the same ‘aspect’ ideas as English, although this is shown by adding particles and not conjugating the verb as in English. In Chinese you have a form which describes experiences “I have been to America” and another form which describes changes of state “We’ve run out of paper” and so on. This means that, unlike German learners, Chinese learners have no trouble with the concept of the perfect, they stumble on the form
  • a grasp of the basic concept of both progressive and perfect aspect isn’t best achieved by means of collocations, particularly adverbs and adverbial phrases. This in fact is what many coursebooks attempt to do, by strongly associating the present perfect with phrases beginning with either ‘for’ or ‘since’ (although they tend to get diverted by the different collocations within these phrases), or with ‘just/already’ or with ‘how long…?’
  • “Language has a fundamentally social function….. processes of language acquisition, use and change are not independent of one another but are facets of the same system…..This system is radically different from the from the static system of grammatical principles characteristic of the widely held generativist approach.” op cit p2 (Wiley Blackwell, 2008)-
  • that perfect aspect – albeit in a reduced and formualic way – is relatively early acquired (in L1) to express the function of ‘past event with present consequences’, and Klaus, who argues that, in L2, it is relatively late acquired, due to difficulties learners have of assigning it a function that is not already served by another form (i.e. either the past simple or the present simple)
  • similar examples of learners sticking to the ‘devil they know’, over-using one form at the expense of another, because the underused form is either not perceived at all (there is only a small difference between ‘I read this book’ and ‘I’ve read this book’, after all), or it is considered to be redundant – just another way of saying the same thing.
  • At higher levels, the link between tense choice and discourse probably is more important to focus on ( I’m thinking of your materials relating to tense choice in short news articles – the story of an escaped monkey in Uncovering Grammar).
  • I like the idea of looking at the present perfect as just another collocation. Let the context determine the meaning then repeat the particular collocation lots of times as in a substitution activity – then back to task – re-anchoring the language so to speak. We could even throw the description “the present perfect” out then and just approach it as another fixed expression.
  • In English, you have to make a decision which tense fits your intentions, and the form itself is very easy. In the beginning, you can get away by not making this decision and choosing the simplest tense.
  • n this second short video on the English tense and aspect system, I take  a look at perfect aspect.
    • joyce L
      joyce L on 06 Aug 11
       
      Aspect is not like tense - the concept is related to perspective of the speaker i.e. the concept of pyschological distance...often the confusion arises when it is taught as a tense - marking time
joyce L

Kendall's Reported Speech print friendly article - 2 views

www.developingteachers.com/...repsppf_kendall.htm

grammar indirectspeech

shared by joyce L on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Swan writes that the tense does not need to be changed when the present, future, and present perfect reporting verbs are used (because there is normally no important change in time). (7) In addition to this, the past simple and continuous tenses in spoken English are often left unchanged, provided there is no confusion relating to the relevant times and actions. (8) Finally, in regard to modals, must changes to had to; past modals remain unchanged: would in the above example remains as would in reported speech.
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