For years (and years and years), whenever I had to teach “listening”, I just popped the CD into the machine, pressed play and hoped for the best while the students scrambled to fill in the gaps, answer the questions or match the cards. I always had the sneaking suspicion that I could, and in fact, should, be doing a lot more to support my students’ listening development, but aside from listening practice and more listening practice, I was not sure what else to do. In spite of my many years of teaching and the confidence I feel helping students with speaking and pronunciation, I felt like a neophyte when it came to teaching listening. So, imagine my relief when, as the Speech, Listening and Pronunciation Chair elect, I was tasked with organizing an Academic Session at TESOL on teaching listening for the 2013 TESOL Conference in Dallas. It was actually Helen Solorzano who organized the session, and all I had to do was show up, take credit, and learn!

Top Down Strategies – Check!

So, here’s what I learned: it turns out that what I have been doing for all these years was, in fact, “testing” listening and not teaching it at all. I needed to back up a bit and think about listening as speech processing. Dr. Steve Brown spoke about how listening is a combination of top down and bottom up strategies. Stronger listeners make more use of top down strategies, which means they pull from their general knowledge about the context and the topic to make inferences about the listening. Happily, a lot of texts on the market encourage students to do this by including pictures and warm up questions designed to activate students’ prior knowledge about the topic. As a result, even in my very primitive approach to teaching listening, I did occasionally manage to expose my students to top down listening strategies.

Bottom Up Strategies – Yikes!

However, Dr. Brown also reminded us that teachers also need to help students develop their bottom up listening strategies, as well. In fact, even though less competent listeners rely mostly on bottom up strategies, more competent listeners can benefit from them, too. Teachers tend to focus only on top down strategies, which may be to the detriment of both our strong and weak listeners. So what are these mystical bottom up strategies? Well, I’ve actually been teaching them all along, just not in connection to listening. Dr. Brown pointed out that a robust vocabulary and strong pronunciation and grammar skills result in strong listening skills.

What was that Word?

Apparently, students need to know 98% of the words in a text, listening or reading, to interact with it easily. 98%! Obviously problems arise when students don’t know words. Misunderstanding of a text can be caused when a student replaces an unknown word with a known word, or when a student hears a smaller word instead of the bigger word (“miss” instead of “dismiss”, for instance), or when he/she gets stuck on one meaning of a word when the speaker means another (for example, when a speaker says “in this fashion” and the speaker understands “fashion” as in clothing). As a result, Dr. Brown insisted that there must be an oral component to any vocabulary lessons so that students know what words sound like, not just what they look like. Obviously to help students access the listening they need to do outside the safety of the ESL classroom, I need to be shoveling vocabulary at them as fast as they can learn it!

What did you Say?

As well, students need a strong understanding of English pronunciation norms to be able to phonologically process listening texts. They need to be familiar with concepts such as the strong and weak forms we rely on in English to make meaning. In natural speech, we also delete, assimilate, and blend sounds. How confusing is that? This really struck a chord with me because I will never forget the story told to me by one of my students. When he had just arrived in the US, he felt confident with his listening abilities. He had practiced with cassettes in Korea and considered himself to be an intermediate level student. However, when he went to McDonald’s, and the server asked him, “ulthtbefurereurtugo,” he was totally confused and frustrated. Rightly so! He could have read, “Will that be for here or to go” and understood it easily, but when it was spoken, it bore no resemblance to the ESL tapes he had so diligently listened to. The bottom line is that students need pronunciation lessons to develop their listening skills and, according to Dr. Brown, the connection between pronunciation and listening needs to be made more explicit in the classroom.

What did you Mean?

Clearly, for many of the same reasons, a strong foundation in English grammar makes listening texts more accessible for our students. First, they spend less time thinking through the grammar choices of the speaker (“Hmm, -ed means the past tense, so he must mean this happened yesterday …”), and they have more time to focus on the message. Now, if you are reading this particular blog, chances are you already appreciate the importance of grammar in the overall linguistic development of your students. Me, too! However, what I am doing more of now is both making sure students know what the grammar I am teaching sounds like (even the reduced forms) by finding examples (short and sweet) of the target grammar in a recording. I also like the idea of pointing out target grammar structures in listening transcripts after the main listening task has been completed, so that students can see and hear them at the same time. My students will not only know the past forms of modals, they will understand them in natural speech. Well, that’s the goal anyway.

I left the session at TESOL feeling empowered. Now, I can actually begin to teach my students to listen!

Ah, conference season! These days, of course, it’s really year-round, as different countries have their regional and national conferences at different times. For about the past decade, it’s become common for conferences to ask presenters if they’d like to have their emails printed in the program book. I always say yes, because one reason I attend conferences is to make connections with other professionals.

This is the first year, though, that I’ve had a slew of emails post-conference, from people I don’t remember meeting, requesting that I send them my entire presentation.

Some, of course, are not legitimate—like the one that began “Dear Sir or Madam” and was apparently sent to every email address in the TESOL 2013 program book, even to people who hadn’t given a presentation. But others are genuine; often from teachers who didn’t attend the presentation.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am sympathetic to teachers who had to miss one presentation because they were attending another (or were giving their own). I am sympathetic too to teachers who couldn’t stay for the whole conference, or who perhaps couldn’t attend at all, because of work or family commitments, or lack of financial support.

Overall, though, I’m not comfortable sending out my presentations. There are a few reasons.

The most important is that I don’t think my presentations would make much sense from just the slides. Most of a typical talk for me is just that—talking. It’s not written down, except sometimes on notecards. I worry that a picture would simply make no sense without me there to explain it. For example, what point am I making with this slide from a recent talk? I think different people would have different guesses.

In another recent talk, promoting a new coursebook series, I have one slide (not from the series!) that’s an example of a bad dialogue. Suppose that presentation goes out into the wide world, tied to my name, and somehow people assume that it’s supposed to be an example of a good dialogue? How will someone who wants to give my presentation (as several emails have said they wish to do) be able to answer questions that follow?

Finally, the presentations that I put together represent a lot of time and work. I spend time considering what to say and writing an outline; I spend time choosing images and designing the presentation to (I hope) be visually engaging. Often the information that I’m presenting is the result of years of work or study. There might even be some original thoughts in there! I’m proud of the presentations I give; they represent an important part of my professional life. Is it fair for someone else to claim all that in the few seconds it takes to download an email attachment, and then give my presentation as their own? My publishers sometimes sponsor my attendance at international conferences, for both commercial and academic presentations. They invest this money and effort because they feel that there is value—to them and to the profession—in me personally presenting this information (either that, or I am just a really charming dinner companion. But I think it’s for the presentations).

I feel I am a pretty accessible person. I have an Facebook page that is open to any teachers who are interested in talking about language teaching and learning (if you just post kitten pictures, though, or never write in English, I will probably hide you from my feed!), and I answer questions about my textbooks and thoughts on the ELT profession. I blog here. I present world-wide. I am thrilled that technology has removed so many barriers—geographical, time, and financial—to worldwide discussions in our profession. Given all that, I hope teachers can understand why I don’t feel comfortable emailing my conference presentations.

I am curious to hear from other presenters. Do you send out your presentations post-conference? Why or why not? I’m also curious to hear from those who request presentations. Do you feel they are easily understood, without having heard the original presentation, or without the presenter there to explain the slides? 

Even though many grammar series, including grammar guru Betty Azar’s, cover quantifiers from the beginning (Basic English Grammar) to the end (Understanding and Using English Grammar), my students seem to continuously struggle with using them correctly. They moan when we review them and moan when they get them wrong in their writing. Even my most advanced students appear to be mystified by the idiosyncrasies of English quantifiers.

Students Face Several __________ (Challenge/Challenges)

The problem, in my mind, seems to be twofold. First, students have to think about count and non-count nouns. At first glance, this distinction appears totally arbitrary when you consider that money is non-count, though clearly it is something we count all the time. Throw in irregular plurals (Seriously, person/people but fish/fish? How is that at all logical?) and you can have a frustrated class on your hands.

In addition to the perils of the count and non-count divide, students also have to choose from a confusing list of quantifiers full of linguistic booby traps. For example, consider the difference in meaning between “a little” and “little”. That tiny letter can mean the difference between being able to afford to buy a coffee and going thirsty. Another hidden quantifier trap lies in what Azar calls the “singular expressions of quantity”. There is almost nothing satisfactory a teacher can say to a student who asks why we say “each student” but “each of the students” when the meaning is essentially the same. It’s enough to turn a lovely group of students into a mob of pitchfork waving villagers!

Several __________ (Idea/Ideas) for Practice

There are many great grammar exercises which help students to master the rules and peculiarities associated with quantifiers. Gap fills, error correction, and sentence prompts are just several of the activities presented in Azar’s texts. In addition to grammar texts, though, I also wanted to supply my students with some other opportunities for practice.

One activity that I thought worked really well tested their knowledge of quantifiers and their visual memory. I created a PowerPoint containing several pictures from Google images of crowded or messy situations. I included a picture of a crowded refrigerator, a messy desk and a messy kitchen. Students had one minute to look at the picture before I clicked through to the next slide which displayed a list of quantifiers. They then had four minutes to work in pairs and write as many “There is / are …” sentences as they could. After the timer went off, the groups shared their sentences. They got one point for every unique, accurate sentence. For instance, if two groups both wrote “There are a few apples.” neither got a point. Or, if a group wrote “Every chair is blue.” but the chairs were green, they didn’t get a point. Or, if they wrote “Every one of the chair is green.”, they also didn’t get the point because the sentence was grammatically incorrect. In the end, the pair with the most points was the winner. The students were all engaged and really enjoyed this twist on a fairly frustrating lesson.

Another activity that is always a bit hit when we practice identifying count singular, count plural and non-count nouns is the flyswatter warm up game. I divide the class into three groups and give each a different colored flyswatter. I have the CS (count singular), CP (count plural) and NC (non-count) written on the whiteboard. All the students come to the front of the room, to make the changeover of the flyswatters quicker. (This is a very fast-paced game!) I call out a noun and the students with the flyswatters race to hit the correct letters. For example, if I say “water” the students try to be the first to hit NC. But, the students only get one shot at a correct answer. If they jump the gun and start wildly hitting, they may hit the wrong one and the person who is slower and more careful might get the point. Then, the student hands the flyswatter to the next in line and I call out another noun. The team with the most correct hits is the winner at the end. This is a guaranteed way to wake up a class and get their brains working!

But, aside from these two activities and a few board games I have found in teacher’s resources, I have struggled to come up with more fun practice for my students who STILL need more exposure to this tricky target language. Do you have any tried and true activities you can share?

————-

Editor’s Note: There are also a variety of activities on count/non-count nouns in the Classroom Materials section of AzarGrammar.com, including these:

Fun with Grammar section 6.4:   http://azargrammar.com/assets/fwg/FWGChapter06.pdf

http://azargrammar.com/assets/beginning/BEGExpansionActivities/BEGExp7.pdf

http://azargrammar.com/assets/intermediate/FEGExpansionActivities/FEGExp11.pdf

http://azargrammar.com/assets/advanced/UUEGExpansionActivities/UUEGExp7.pdf

http://azargrammar.com/assets/advanced/UUEGSongLessons/MyFavoriteThings.pdf

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist

In Part 4 of this series, I presented some quirky things that are happening in English these days, things which I have a hunch may become standard parts of the language or accepted alternative forms in the language as time goes by simply because they’re so commonly spoken, heard, and read by educated native users of English. These quirky things may just be aberrations, but if they’re not, we English teachers may have to accept that they will very likely be taught at some point in the future. Here are some more of these oddities that perhaps won’t be considered so odd down the road.

• An interesting observation I’ve made is that even though they’re referring to time, many native speakers use where – which signifies a location, of course – instead of using when, which signifies a time. To me it’s a very odd occurrence, and I can’t figure out why it’s so common. Here are a number of examples:

• There was a moment where I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own.
• There were instances where she just seemed to drift off into a daydream
• Did there come a time where you believed he had done it?
• It happened about ten years ago where I found myself wondering why …
• One test is called a hand drop. It’s where a neurologist takes the patient’s hand and …
• I’m lucky to be in a time where more people champion human rights than ever before.

In each and every example above, it’s clear that when is the appropriate word to use since it deals with time as do all the words preceding where in these sentences. I don’t know if this use of where will ever be considered okay, but that doesn’t mean it won’t continue to be commonly heard.

• What follows is nothing new, but the question is, will reflexive pronouns eventually be acceptable in this usage? It’s important to reiterate here that all of the following examples are direct quotes from educated native speakers.

So what seems to be happening? This use of a reflexive pronoun as the subject or object in place of the personal pronoun seems to apply only to 1^st person and 2^nd person, both singular and plural:

• “How are you, Al?” “Fine, thanks. And yourself?”
• The only two people who know the answer are John and myself.
• Everybody knows, myself included, that we all need …
• So, if I get this correctly, Patrick, your father, and yourself were all there, correct?
• There’s greater intelligence in the universe than ourselves.
• Myself, Dirk, and his grandfather decided to fly together to Houston.
• We’re going to the company picnic this Saturday. What about yourselves?
• The cop gave parking tickets to Ann and myself. We hadn’t noticed the no-parking sign.
• All the neighbors are being invited, including yourselves.

Perhaps you feel that this use of these reflexive pronouns has a place in conversational English. You may feel that such a use fills a desire on the part of the speakers to give more stature to themselves or to the person(s) being addressed. This may very well have its roots in the colloquial habit in Irish English of using himself and herself to show that a person of high rank is being discussed:

    “Is Himself having dinner at home tonight?” asked the cook.
     “I’ll have to check,” replied the butler.

But the following is an example that just demonstrates plain bad grammar – and this utterance was made by an educated speaker, mind you! Even though you can hear native speakers make this error, I don’t think it will ever become standard in the language:

They’ll just have to look up the property taxes themself.

• Our house’s heating system needs to be revamped.
  The average income’s decline in the US shows the recession is still a big threat.
  Serious Problem Found in Cars’ Trunks

There was a time when we were taught that we should use the –s genitive for higher life forms (human beings and most animals) and for time expressions like today, last week, next month. We were also taught that there were pat phrases that used the –s genitive like your money’s worth and a stone’s throw from here and nouns that are commonly anthropomorphized like ships and celestial bodies: the Titanic’s hull, the moon’s gravitational pull. For inanimate objects and lower life forms like insects, we were taught to use the of genitive (e.g., the heating system of our house; the decline of the average income in the US). And, in other cases, we were taught to use noun adjuncts rather than any genitive form: car trunks; kitchen cabinets.

Now, it seems, anything goes. People use the –s genitive on just about any noun, as you can see in the examples that started off this section.                                                                    

• I want them to pay for the damages they caused to my apartment.

I made mention of this change to the use of damage in a previous contribution to Teacher Talk entitled “Explain THIS, Part 4,” but I think it’s worth briefly mentioning it again. It used to be that damages referred to money awarded in court at the end of a law suit to a plaintiff for having suffered some kind of loss or injury caused by a defendant. But when referring to harm done to property, it’s been traditional to say damage, a singular, uncountable noun.

Well, that’s changing rapidly. More and more native speakers now say damages when referring to harm done to various parts of an object or various incidents of harm done to a property. Even judges are using damages instead of damage for harm done to different parts of something such as an apartment.

• It was so fun!

This is interesting. When fun is used adjectivally, it traditionally comes before the noun it describes (e.g., It was a fun party. / We had a fun time at the beach yesterday).

But this kind of adjective is not used after a copula like be, so when we say It was fun, fun is actually an uncountable noun in this case. That’s why it’s not traditional to use so before it because we use so + an adjective, not a noun: so amusing, so entertaining, so enjoyable – but not so fun. If we want to use an uncountable noun like fun, we need to employ such: It was such fun. This traditional rule seems to be changing rapidly, though, for many native speakers.

• Here’s another grammatical form that seems to be going through a transformation among native speakers, educated and uneducated alike. The past perfect, which has traditionally been used for the past subjunctive in imaginary sentences (She wishes she hadn’t flunked her midterm exam) and the past subjunctive in imaginary conditional sentences (If she hadn’t flunked the midterm, her parents wouldn’t have restricted her social activities so much), is being replaced with the simple past, which has traditionally been used for the present subjunctive in imaginary contexts (I wish I were rich. / If I were rich, I’d buy a castle in Ireland). So the simple past is being used in the subjunctive clause in both  present and past imaginary sentences. Here are examples:

• He just wishes he knew more than he did when he made that decision.
• If Babe Ruth wasn’t a pitcher at the beginning of his baseball career, he would probably have hit over a thousand homeruns.
• If there wasn’t a firearm on the scene, tensions wouldn’t have escalated so much.
• Do you feel you wouldn’t be here today if you didn’t have the pepper spray to protect you from that bear?
• If we didn’t smell the gas leak when we did, the whole house could have blown up.

The currently correct grammatical version of these sentences is:

• He just wishes he had known more than he did when he made that decision.
• If Babe Ruth hadn’t been a pitcher at the beginning of his baseball career, he would probably have hit over a thousand homeruns.
• If there hadn’t been a firearm on the scene, tensions wouldn’t have escalated so much.
• Do you feel you wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t had the pepper spray to protect you from that bear?
• If we hadn’t smelled the gas leak when we did, the whole house could have blown up.

People often ask me how long it took me to learn Japanese, and I normally tell them that it took me about six months. When they look surprised, I add, “But it took me about two years to learn how to learn it.” This is not a joke; this is exactly how I feel about the stages I went through when I began learning the language. Of course, I didn’t really learn it in six months, but I did go from not being able to say anything to being able to survive daily life in Japan within that time frame.

The two years prior to that six-month period were not completely unproductive, but they did involve a great deal of frustration and time-wasting because I failed to grasp a number of key concepts about the learning process. The particular misunderstanding I want to focus on today is the idea I had that learning a language should be “linear.” In other words, I believed that I would study a particular item, understand it, master it, and then move onto the next thing. As anyone who has learned a foreign language will know, that is simply not how it works.

One experience that still sticks in my mind is the time when I was taught the expression shika nai, which means “only.” The problem was that I had already learned another word (dake) that also apparently meant “only,” and I couldn’t understand the difference. To be more exact, I couldn’t really understand why there had to be a difference. “English seems to manage okay with just one way of saying ‘only,’” I thought, “so why does Japanese need two?” In the end, I decided to give up trying to work it out and just use the simpler dake.

After that particular lesson, I moved on to other grammar, some of which I understood immediately, and some of which remained a mystery in spite of my teacher’s valiant efforts to explain it. The reason that the dake/shika nai lesson stayed with me was that approximately a year and a half after I had tried and failed to make sense of it, I was standing in a car park in Japan with a friend who commented that it was fairly empty that day. I replied in my best Japanese, So da ne. Kuruma wa nidai shika nai (It is, isn’t it? There are only two cars). I vividly recall being amazed at the words coming out of my mouth and thinking, “When did I learn how to use that!?” (Just in case anyone is interested, the difference is that dake is neutral, whereas shika nai implies that there is/are not enough of something.)

This and other similar experiences helped me to realise that learning a foreign language is not a like climbing a ladder, and that grammar is not learned one neat step at a time. If someone had tested me on my ability to distinguish between dake and shika nai six months after I had studied it, they may well have concluded that I needed to study it again. As it turned out, however, what I actually needed was time to allow what I had studied to filter through into my database of retrievable knowledge about the language.

When I talk about this topic at presentations, I compare the study of grammar to the art of plate-spinning. For those who have never seen this, it involves balancing a plate on a pole, spinning it, and then trying to repeat the process with other plates while continually coming back to each one and spinning it again so that none fall off. The goal is to have as many plates spinning simultaneously as possible. My experience of learning Japanese grammar was a bit like that: by studying a particular structure, I put it on a pole and started it spinning. I then moved on to other things but kept returning to each point I had learned in order to keep them all spinning.

The problem with this analogy is that there is no endpoint; the plates just keep going round and round. Recently I have been thinking that a better analogy might be that of planting seeds in a garden. No one would expect to see a seed immediately turn into a flower, but that does not mean that it needs to be replanted; it just needs the right amount of sunshine, water, and, of course, time. If you wanted to create a beautiful garden, it would not be very efficient to plant one seed and then wait until that seed flowered before planting the next. In a similar way, it does not make sense to expect to learn the grammar of a foreign language by mastering one piece of it before moving onto the next. As language learners, we all have a “grammar garden” that is flowering in some parts, still developing in others, and barren in the parts we have not yet touched.

Another important point to think about is what we set out to achieve when we teach grammar. Some teachers may say that their aim is to enable the students to understand or use a particular grammar point, but I prefer to say that my aim is simply to raise their awareness of it. As I wrote in a previous post about my “New Car Theory,”  the acquisition of new items seems to follow a sequence of “priming” and “triggering.” Teaching grammar points primes those items in the learner’s brain, making it much more likely that they will be noticed, or “triggered” later on by further exposure.

Mastery of complicated structures can only be achieved through a cyclical process of priming and triggering that takes place over time, and the initial teaching of the point is simply the first step in that process. In most cases, we cannot assume that something has been learned just because we have taught it, but that does not necessarily mean that anything the learners fail to master immediately needs to be taught again.

Of course, in the same way that a seed needs sunshine and water in order to grow, grammar will need review and practice in order to develop, but the fact that a seed has not yet flowered does not necessarily mean that it  is not growing.

Don’t you just love it when inspiration strikes in the middle of an activity and turns a so-so lesson into a great one? It doesn’t happen that often to me, actually. My “great” lessons are almost always the result of careful planning and hours spent cutting out little bits of paper, but once in a great while, it all comes together in a moment of glorious on-the-spot quick thinking.

My job at the British School of Brussels is to prepare and support my students for survival and success in their mainstream classes. I have had my eyes opened to the joys of content-based language learning, and, as a result, my lesson plans often veer away from pure grammar activities. For most of my students, the vocabulary they need for their chapter on Atoms and Elements in their Science classes supersedes their need to properly use the past perfect. However, I am always on the lookout for that perfect lesson that seamlessly blends grammar with content.

How to Make Bread

So, anyway, my “grammar and content unite” moment happened after several of my students had just begun their cooking classes. We’d done all the kitchen utensils and verbs associated with cooking to death, and I was trolling the internet for an idea that would allow me to revisit cooking in a new way. I came across a great video called How It’s Made: Bread. Now, the title alone might have got many of you thinking, “Aha! The passive!” Sadly, this did not happen to me. Not right away. After watching the video, I typed up several sentences that described the process step by step.

• The ingredients are ground in a mill.

• The ingredients are mixed together.

• The dough rises for 3 hours.

• The dough is kneaded for 8 minutes.

• The dough is divided.

• The dough is rolled into balls.

• The dough is folded and rolled.

• The dough rises for 1 hour.

• The dough bakes for 20 minutes

• The loaves cool.

• The loves are cut and packed.

I printed one list for each student and cut the sentences into strips that I mixed up. I was pleased to review some of the vocabulary related to baking that they had already learned (grind, mix, rise, knead, fold, roll, bake and cut), and then the students watched the video and put the strips of paper into the order in which they happened in the video.

Better than Hangman!

As they raced to put the sentences into the correct order, I nervously watched the clock and realized that I had not planned enough to keep them occupied for the next 20 minutes of the class. Gulp! At that point, I noticed that many of the sentences were in the passive. I had not “officially” covered the passive voice with them, and I was hesitant to begin a heavy grammar lecture, but this seemed to be an opportunity too good to miss. So, I had the students copy the sentences into their books leaving spaces between each one. We watch the first part of the video again and I asked them who was grinding the flour. After they told me it was a mill that ground the flour, I asked them how to change the sentence they had in their books to show that. It took a couple of tries and some cooperation, but they eventually went from “The ingredients are ground in a mill.” to “The mill grinds the ingredients.”

We worked together to convert all of the passive sentences to the active voice without me once bringing out the dreaded colored diagram with arrows pointing from the subject to the object. The students got a clear understanding of how to use the be verb and the past participle (luckily most of the verbs in this example are regular, so we avoided discussing the long lists of irregular past participles) to make the “doer” the head of the sentence. Later, we went on to practice more with the passive and we will continue to do so, as this is an essential grammar skill for communicating about subjects like Science, and they still have a long way to go before they can use it fluently. However, by using this video in the class as a way of reviewing cooking terms, I was able to, accidentally, painlessly introduce them to this tricky (and heavy) grammar point.

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist 

There are lots of really quirky things going on in English these days, and I have a hunch that some of them will become standard parts of the language as time goes by simply because they’re so commonly heard and read. So when will we be teaching them? That’s an interesting question. I wonder what your take on this is.

At any rate, here are just a few examples I’ve noted over quite some time. And remember that all of these examples come from educated native speakers:

• Change in Stative Verbs

Many stative verbs, which are traditionally used only in the simple forms of the tenses and aspects, are now being used in the progressive form more and more often, perhaps signaling a significant change in this area of grammar:

• It’s close to the end of the game, so for sure they’re not wanting their opponents to get any more points.
• We weren’t believing any of what he was claiming.
• The kids are loving their new board game. Look how into it they are.
• She’s having to look for a second job now to make ends meet.
• What they’re needing is more money for a down payment.
• I guess I just wasn’t understanding where you were going with that story.
• Where did he go? I’m not seeing him.

• The had in the phrase had better is just about disappearing:

• You better read the fine print before signing.
• He better not try to do that by himself.

• Please reference the below article for more information.

The word below is not an adjective; it’s either a preposition or an adverb, and in this sentence, it’s an adverb. That means it should follow the article: Please reference the article below for more information.

By the way, the same holds true for above: Please read the instructions above to see how this is done. I’ve come across the mistaken positioning of the adverbs below and above quite often: Please read the above instructions to see how this is done.

• It’s becoming more and more common to hear the object form of personal pronouns used as the subject of a sentence. Here are some examples:

• Him and my brother did it.
• She claimed Kathleen told her the truth when her and Kathleen were talking the other day.
• Me and her were the only ones at home at the time.
• Her and I left the party early.
• Them and their parents were told to make appointments to see the principal.

You’d think the sentences above were all uttered by uneducated native speakers, right? Well, surprise, surprise! Some were spoken by highly educated people – one even by a teacher!

Notice the two variations of the same subject? Look again at the third and fourth examples: Me and her / Her and I. Of course the traditional form should be She and I in both sentences. I find things like this fascinating!

• It was just awful! We drug all those heavy potting soil bags to the car, and not one employee helped us.
• After the successful attack, the wolf spider drug its prey into its burrow to feed on it.

Just as I’ve cited the strange use of object personal pronouns used as the subjects of sentences, you might also think that the two examples here showing the use of drug as the past tense of drag were uttered by uneducated speakers. Well, once again I have to say surprise, surprise! Both were said by quite educated native speakers, and I have found that more and more people, especially in the American Midwest and South, seem to use drug as the past of drag instead of dragged.

What I find quite remarkable about this is that it goes against the natural tendency of English to regularize verbs and nouns. For example, dive  > dove/dived; leap > leapt/leaped; plead > pled/pleaded. In this case, oddly enough, just the opposite has happened. A regular verb has been made into an irregular verb: drag > drug/dragged.

At the moment, I don’t believe this alternate past tense form is accepted – at least not in any dictionaries I’ve looked at – but perhaps drug will one day be an acceptable alternative for dragged just as dived is an acceptable alternative for dove.

• In each of the following sentences and news headlines, you’ll note how the names of countries have been used where their corresponding adjectives should have been employed:

• Life is dangerous in many Mexico towns because of battles between drug cartels.
• Thousands of refugees have been streaming over the Lebanon/Syria border into Lebanon.
• There will be two Great Britain divers in the semifinals in platform diving.
• China Wedding Party’s Cars Plunge into River
• Egypt Pyramids Discovered On Google Earth, Researcher Says

In each example above, there was absolutely no reason to use the name of the country when the adjectival form should have been used, but this seems to be a growing trend among journalists even in spoken English. We do have adjectives for all the countries listed above. For example: Life is dangerous in many Mexican towns because … / Thousands of refugees have been streaming over the Lebanese/Syrian border into Lebanon / There will be two British divers in the semifinals …

What strikes me as so odd about this strange usage is that none of the people who wrote these headlines or sentences would ever write something like Drought Suffocating America Midwest. If they think that America sounds odd here, why do they think all these other misuses are acceptable? Very strange indeed! In short, since an adjective exists to identify each of these countries, it should be used, but we’ll have to see if this trend takes hold.

• What? Are these somebody’s teeth marks on this apple? Yuck!
• For teeth whitening, dentists recommend a limited number of over-the-counter products.

I’m sure you’ve heard phrases like these. Do they bother you? If they don’t, to be consistent, shouldn’t you say teethpaste instead of toothpaste and an ants hill instead of an ant hill? Whether we have a compound noun (two nouns written together as one word to create a new word) or a noun adjunct (the same as a compound noun, but with the words written separately), the first element always functions as an adjective to describe the head noun (the second element), and because it functions as an adjective, it’s usually singular, even though it may represent something plural. That’s why we say tooth marks and not teeth marks; footprints and not feetprints. And keeping with this, you’d expect to hear tooth whitening.

I said that the first element is usually singular, but that’s not always the case. We do have exceptions for words that aren’t commonly used in the singular. For example, when it comes to arms meaning “weapons,” we say the arms race because we don’t normally put arms in the singular.

Before I leave you this time, I’d like to suggest that you read this very interesting article at the National Public Radio (NPR) website on the very topic under discussion in this series of mine on how English seems to be evolving:

In my next installment, we’ll look at more quirky items in English that ESOL teachers may be teaching one of these days as standard elements of the language.

By Tamara Jones
EAL Instructor, British School of Brussels
jonestamara@hotmail.com

Dictations as the Wide Collars of Language Teaching?

I was recently chatting with a colleague about the disappearance of certain “old-fashioned” activities from the language learning classroom. Often, we are so swept up in encouraging communication that we forgo lessons that promote competency. One of the babies that long ago seemed to get thrown out with the grammar translation bath water is doing dictations. For years and years, maybe even as long as I have been teaching, it has been considered very uncool to subject students to the painful task of writing something verbatim. After all, it’s not a real-life communicative task. We very rarely find ourselves writing stories exactly as someone tells them, do we? So, why make our students do it?

The Redeeming Qualities of Dictations

Well, as it turns out, there are some very good reasons to include dictations in our language teaching repertoire. They can offer effective practice for decoding the sounds of English. Dictations can “reinforce the correlation between the spelling system and the sound system of a language.” (Alkire, 2002) They can also help students identify grammatical and pronunciation features, as “dictation activities where students compare their version of the text to the original can increase their ability to notice aspects of the language which are sometimes overlooked, as well as mistakes which they commonly make.” (Lightfoot, 2005) Finally, for the overworked teacher, dictations can provide a quick, useful lesson that requires just a little preparation, a benefit which, in today’s hectic working world, cannot be underestimated. Clearly, there are many pedagogically sound reasons to include dictations into our lessons.

A Dictation that Won’t Put your Class to Sleep

The criticism most commonly leveled against dictations is that they have the potential to be deadly boring. It is certainly true that if delivered in the wrong way, a dictation can make your students’ heads nod. However, it is possible to give students dictations that are fun and interactive. In fact, I have even used dictations in my class that have resulted in students darting around the room, shouting and laughing.

When I want to give my students reading, listening, pronunciation and writing practice, I give them what I call a running dictation. I find an interesting short story or brain teaser, like the one below from http://www.bigriddles.com.

A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims “I can’t operate on this boy.” “Why not?” the nurse asks. “Because he’s my son,” the doctor responds. How is this possible?

I type the text, sentence by sentence on a paper and then cut the paper so that one sentence is on each strip of paper. Then, I mix the strips up. I also cut an appropriate number of strips of paper for each pair of students, so they can write one sentence on each paper.

Once the class begins, I divide the students up into partners. They decide which person will be the listener/writer and which partner will be the speaker/reader. Then, the speaker/reader runs (they really do run, even the adults!) to my desk, where I keep the papers. (You can also tape the strips of paper around the room.) The reader/speakers read the sentences on the strips of paper and then run back to their partners and dictate the sentence. The listener/writers write what they hear. Then, the reader/speaker goes back to the desk, either for another look at the same paper or for a look at the next paper. Once the team has dictated and written all of the sentences, they race to unscramble them and solve the puzzle. (In the case of the story above, it is possible because the doctor was the boy’s mother.) Students really do enjoy this activity, and, from the laughter that rings out in the classroom, you would never guess they were doing something “boring” like a dictation.

The evidence seems to suggest that activities like dictations can be extremely beneficial for students. The key is to make them as interactive and interesting as possible. How do you use dictations in your classes? Do you have any interesting twists on this “oldie but goodie”? Please share them, if you do!

Alkire, S. (2002) Dictation as a language learning device, The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. VIII, No. 3, http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Alkire-Dictation.html
Lightfoot, A. (2005) Using Dictations, http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/using-dictation

By Ela Newman
Instructor in Developmental Writing and in ESL
University of Texas at Brownsville
newjgea@aol.com

Advice about Compliments …  the Surprise of the Hour

“Well, at least they have a healthy pile of magazines I can shuffle through,” I consoled myself after hearing that it would be a bit longer before the doctor could see me.  Passing over the monthlies dealing with sports, cars, and teenage-hood, I settled on a magazine concerning lifestyles–and that’s where I found the surprise of the hour… an article entitled 10 Things Your Mother Never Taught You, which included a section on how to take a compliment.

“Really?” I thought, questioning the piece’s relevance to the average American audience.  To my at-least-somewhat-assimilated mind (which has lived in the US for about ten years now), most Americans seem to accept compliments almost automatically.

Responses to Compliments…  Spitting

As I began to read the section, I recalled having to adjust my reactions to compliments when I relocated to the US.  In Poland, where I was raised, people almost invariably downgrade or even reject compliments.  Reading on, I found mention of someone’s relatives who, in the face of a compliment, spat three times in order to avoid bad luck.

The Formation of Compliments…  the Basic Patterns

Forming compliments is actually fairly easy in (American) English. As Manes and Wolfson (1981) explain, there are three top basic sentence patterns for compliments.

• Noun Phrase + be/look + (really) Adjective:

              Your eyes are really beautiful.

• I + (really) like/love + Noun Phrase:

             I really love your new office.

• Pronoun + be + (really) Noun Phrase including an adjective:

             That’s a really impressive essay. 

Attitudes about Compliments…  Cross-cultural Interpretations 

Many ESL lesson materials which are designed to teach students how to make and respond to compliments engage students in discussions about the ways compliments are used in various countries. This makes sense because such lesson content is a must if we want our students to succeed not just linguistically but culturally, pragmatically.  We need to aim for understanding, and to help them avoid embarrassing themselves or offending their (American) interlocutors.

Here are a few statements illustrating cross-cultural interpretations of compliments.

• New Zealanders think that Americans’ compliments are rather insincere because they are paid relatively frequently (Wolfson 1981).
• Nigerian English speakers accept compliments at a very high rate (93%) since it is culturally important for them to be in agreement with others and to be cooperative (Mustapha 2011).
• In Arab societies, where humility is a virtue, deflecting compliments is much more common than accepting them. Interestingly, compliments on someone’s skills at something are often viewed as requests for help (Falasi 2007).
• The Japanese seldom use compliments, and when those are paid in English,  “linguistico-cultural” transfer often results in a response like That’s not true in order to show politeness (Daikuhara 1986).
• Poles will accept a compliment if it seems sincere.  For example, if you compliment a Pole on a positive change in appearance (like a new hairdo), the change must be significant.  Otherwise, the comment will likely be considered spurious (Bhatti, Zegarac 2007).

Dilemmas about Compliments…  Circumstances and Questions

Even if paying and responding to compliments is not overly challenging in terms of the sentence structure and diction required, the pragmatic concerns of cultural context compound the difficulties surrounding compliments.  Added to this set of circumstances is a set related to the personal preferences of individual speakers.

Unfortunately, the pragmatic complexities of compliments are often under-treated in ESL textbooks.

The Teaching of Compliments…  The Need to Tweak Our Materials  

I recently revisited some teaching materials which focus on compliments, and I found that they suggest various discussion topics, list sample sentences, and outline role-play activities.  Moreover, some also suggest the approach of observing native speakers’ natural responses to compliments, which certainly appeals to reason, particularly if students note the age, sex, etc. of the native speakers involved.

However, while many textbooks and lesson materials may more or less effectively guide students toward a competence in accepting compliments, very few include content aimed at helping students succeed at deflecting flattering comments.

Even though Americans routinely accept compliments with a Thank you or some equivalent, it is culturally permissible to deflect a compliment on grounds of personal preference.

Regretfully, many ESL students finish their courses without sufficient ability to express their personal preferences in the face of compliments, and too often end up saying what they can say rather than what they want to say.  

To insure that our students can react to compliments in a culturally-acceptable yet personally-natural way, our lessons on compliments should include exercises not only on how to accept compliments (however culturally typical this may be), but also on how to turn them down.

A Fuller Lesson on Compliments…  The Acceptability of a Range of Responses

While preparing a lesson on a more complete range of compliment responses, which would include those expressing some level of rejection or non-agreement, we may consider the compliment response strategies classified by Pomerantz (1978).

Among those which express acceptance or agreement, one finds strategies such as those of comment history (exemplified by a sentence like I bought it in an antique store in Maine.) or reassignment (exemplified by a sentence like Oh, my mother knitted it for me.).

Response strategies for expressing a level of non-agreement fall into the following categories:

• scaling down        It’s really very old. 
• questioning          Are you sure it matches my shirt? 
• disagreeing          I actually really hate these shoes. 
• qualification         They are not bad, but I do need a new pair.

While practicing non-agreement responses as well as agreement responses, students may be provided with a list of compliment scenarios and a set of small cards indicating the types of responses to be practiced.  Such cards may be stacked for pairs of students and then drawn from so that students compliment each other and respond in turn.

As a result of such an approach, our students, we might expect, would later be able to express their thoughts or feelings in response to compliments more effectively and naturally.

For instance, if one of them honestly believes that a T-shirt on which she or he has just received a compliment should have been relegated to duty as a garage-shelf-cleaning dust rag long ago, our student would have the means to express that belief accurately and appropriately, downgrading, questioning, or actually disagreeing (diplomatically) with the compliment.

May we never see, in any doctor’s office, a magazine article entitled 10 Things Your ESL Teacher Never Taught You, one of the things being “How to Reply to Compliments in a Culturally Acceptable and Personally Preferable Way”…

Bhatti, J. and Zegarac, V. “Compliments and Refusals in Poland and England: a case study.” Research in Language 10  2007): 279-297.

Daikuhara, M. “A study of compliments from a cross-cultural perspective: Japanese vs. American English.” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 2 (1986): 103-134.

Falasi, H. A. “Just say ‘Thank You’: A Study of Compliment Responses.” The Linguistcs Journal 2 (2007): 28-42.

Manes, J. and Wolfson, N. “The complement formula.” In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational Routine. (1981). The Hague. Mouton.

Mustapha, A. S. “Compliment response patterns among speakers of Nigerian English.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011): 1335-1348.

Pomerantz, A. “Compliment responses. Notes on the cooperation of multiple constraints.” In J. Schenkein (Ed.),     Studies in the Organisation of Conversational Interaction. (1978). New York, San Francisco, London: Academic      Press.

Wolfson, N. “Compliments in cross-cultural perspective.” TESOL Quarterly 15 (1981): 117-124.

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist

 In Part 2 we took a look at some things in English which, although considered ungrammatical by conservative language users, have nevertheless become commonly used features nowadays. At least they aren’t silly or illogical in a common-sense way of looking at things.

Now, however, let’s take a little time to check out some elements of English that really are silly or illogical if you step back and think about them objectively, even though they, too, have become standard features in the language. Here are examples of things that educated speakers say and write.

• They say they’ll try and get here before sunset.
  I know you try and save some money every month for your kid’s college fund.

Try and is a very commonly used phrase that goes way, way back to who knows how long ago. But if you dissect it, you can see on different levels why it’s really very silly and illogical. In the two examples I’ve cited, they’ll try and get here and you try and save money, my question is, try WHAT? If it’s “getting here,” shouldn’t the speaker just say they’ll try to get here or they’ll try getting here? And in the other case, shouldn’t the speaker just say he or she knows that the other person tries to save or tries saving some money every month? In these versions I’ve suggested, we clearly see what those people will try: “to get here” and “to save some money.” But that try and get here and try and save money really throw me for a loop. It seems that they’re trying to accomplish two things, with the first of those things simply not mentioned.. For me it just doesn’t work, it’s illogical, it’s silly – but for many, many native speakers, it’s fine. Go figure.

To add to this silliness, can you use this phrase try and with he, she,or it? Let’s try to do so: She says she’ll try and get here … That’s okay.  /  I know she tries and saves some money every month. Oops! That’s not okay. It doesn’t sound right. Hmm … How about I know she tries and save some money every month. Nope. That doesn’t sound right either. What’s going on, you ask? What’s going on is that we don’t use the phrase try and with a 3^rd person singular subject in any form of the present, just in the future. How strange is that!

And if you want strange, here’s more strange: You don’t use this phrase in the past either: They tried and got here … No, that doesn’t work. I know you tried and saved some money … Forget it! If you stop and think about it, try and really is silly and illogical on many levels.

Now, what about saying stop and as I’ve just done (If you stop and think about it …)? Why is stop okay when try isn’t? It’s okay because I really am talking about stopping some activity in order to think about what’s being discussed: If you stop (reading this blog entry) and think about it (what we’re discussing), try and really is silly.

Who would think you could say so much about a two-word phrase like try and! Well, it’s a standard phrase in English now, so here’s one of many great examples in which silliness wins out in language.

• This show was pre-recorded in front of a live audience. (They’re talking about a TV sitcom.)

 I love this statement, which I first remember being said at the start of each episode of the hit comedy All in the Family back in the 1960s.

First off, we have a very silly statement. The show was pre-recorded? Really? Doesn’t that mean that the show was recorded before it was recorded? What?? Of course that’s not what they mean to say, but that’s what it means. And this statement is still being used.

Second, when they say in front of a live audience, of course they mean that during the show, you’ll hear the reactions of real people sitting in the audience, not canned laughter. But it does sound very funny. They wouldn’t record the show in front of a dead audience, would they? All they really need to say is This show was recorded in front of an audience.

• The last showing of this movie on Saturdays starts at 12:00 a.m. 
  The office always closes for lunch at 12:00 p.m.

These two are silly because 12 o’clock is neither a.m. nor p.m. When you say 12:00, it’s either midnight or noon. The designations a.m. and p.m. start at 12:01, but these two silly time phrases are commonly used.

• My name is Dr. Lynn Sousa.
  His name was Captain John Walker.

I think commonly heard sentences like these are silly because Doctor and Captain are not part of those people’s names. I guarantee that you won’t find those titles on their birth certificates! What should be said is My name is Lynn Sousa. / His name was John Walker. If there really is a need to mention their titles, what should be said is I’m Dr. Lynn Sousa. / He was Captain John Walker.

• It’s become acceptable to use they, them, or their instead of the 3^rd person singular forms when it’s not known if somebody is male or female. For example,

If somebody leaves their valuables inside their car in the store parking lot,the management is not responsible for any break-ins or thefts.

In this case, somebody could be a man or woman, so instead of using the awkward he/she and his/her, it’s become acceptable to use their just to simplify things. (Of course this problem could easily be  avoided most of the time by simply using a plural subject (If people leave their valuables …), but almost nobody thinks of doing this.

However, take a look at the following.

• The speaker knows she’s talking about a man:
  This is someone who really knows their stuff. (It should be his.)

• The speaker knows he’s talking about a woman:
  How could somebody say such a thing in front of their six-year-old daughter? It should be her.)

• The speaker is aware he’s talking about an all-woman’s team:
  Every member of the relay team did their job perfectly. (Correct word: her.)

• The caller realizes she’s talking about another woman:
  “911. What’s the nature of your call?”
  “Yes, I have someone here who’s been physically abused by their husband. I think she needs medical assistance.” (The right choice: her.)

• The speaker is looking directly at a father when he says this, and he’s referring to the father:
  I understand a father wanting to protect their child, but … (It should be his.)

It seems that the use of the 3^rd person plural has become so common that even when the speaker knows that the somebody is a man or woman, the 3^rd person plural form is still used. I think that’s bizarre! It’s commonplace, but bizarre!

• Do you mind if …? / Would you mind if …?

These phrases are quickly losing their meaning. More and more native speakers think they mean “May I …? or “Can I …?” instead of their real meaning of “Will it bother you if …?” or “Is it a problem if …?” Listen to how native speakers respond to requests that start off with one of these phrases and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll hear people respond by saying something like “Sure” or “Okay” instead of “No” or “Not at all.”

If somebody asks, “Would you mind if I took a photo of your dog?” the traditional response is “No, not at all” when the speaker means it’s okay. That’s because the speaker is really communicating, “No, it won’t bother me at all” or “It’s not at all a problem.” What you’ll hear instead is “Sure,” which actually means they’re saying “Sure, it will be a problem.”  But that probably won’t stop Sure or Okay from eventually becoming standard answers to these two questions when their real meanings are lost completely at some point in the future.