Way back at the beginning of the academic year, my school provided a professional development session called “Looking for Learning.”* We watched some videos, did some group work and listened to a speaker talk about his company’s approach to teacher observations. I think no one really likes being observed by fellow teachers or supervisors. It’s nerve-wracking and opens teachers up to criticisms couched as helpful suggestions. Even though I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching, I do get nervous about inviting other people into my classroom. I wasn’t sure the observations demonstrated by the “Looking for Learning” speaker were for me.

The Observation

My job is to prepare a multi-level, multi-age group of students for their mainstream junior high school classes. One of the biggest obstacles has been trying to figure out exactly what the students are learning and expected to produce in these classes. Ideally, I would have a free hour here and there to observe other teachers, but I was literally teaching 6 periods a day with no free time to drop in on my students in their mainstream classes. So, when the Head of Secondary announced that he was looking for volunteers to observe a teacher in a pilot of the “Looking for Learning” process, I might have actually pushed people out of the way to sign up.

First, all the teachers who were participating in the observation met first with the presenter, who had been brought back to follow up on his original session. He explained the process and repeatedly stressed that we would not be paying any attention to the teacher but rather looking for evidence of learning. “Right, right,” I thought. “Who goes into an observation and then ignores the teacher?”

The following day, I met again with the presenter and the other observer for a few minutes before we went into the music class. During that meeting, we were again instructed not to pay attention to what the teacher was doing. We went into the class and stood at the back while the teacher kicked off the lesson by eliciting from the students the main points of the previous lesson. Then, the students started to work on their compositions on the computers. At that point, the observers started to move around the room and talk to a variety of students. I managed to speak with 4 or 5 in the 20 minutes we had left for the observation. I asked them what they were doing, what they had done the lesson before, what they learned that was new, and if they found it easy or difficult. I got lots of different answers, and I wrote down the students’ names and, as accurately as possible, what they said. As I got caught up in interviewing the students, I forgot about the teacher entirely.

The next day, we met again, this time I was with the presenter, the other observer and the teacher. In this meeting, we simply reported back what the children had said. Upon listening to our notes on one student, the teacher had to place him/her on a grid to say whether the child was “learning,” “treading water” or “drowning.” At times, the teacher was not surprised by what we reported a student had said. At other times, the teacher had not anticipated the comments of a student. For instance, one student, a girl the teacher considered one of the top in the class, actually said she found the computer program that they were using in the class quite difficult. The teacher hadn’t known that before, as the student had always produced quality work.

In the end, the strangest thing about this observation was that we did not comment on the teaching at all. We were not permitted to offer any kind of judgment (positive or negative) about the lesson or the approach of the teacher. As observers, we were merely reporters, trying to find out if the students were learning or not.

Move Over “Do you Understand?”

The benefits of this approach are, in my mind, twofold. First, we all know that the students learn both because of us and in spite of us; just because we have a great lesson plan, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all the students in the class are learning. Second, even though I have an overall idea of my students’ abilities (especially since I have a comparatively tiny class and I see the students often), I don’t always know I would be able to completely accurately assess my students “learning” at any given moment of a lesson on any given subject.

How has this changed my teaching? Not drastically, really. I am still pretty much the same instructor that I was before I stepped foot in the music class. However, I do try to make it a regular practice to stop mid-way through a random lesson (whenever I think of it, actually) and ask a few students what they are working on and if they find it easy. I have learned that it is not enough to ask students IF they understand; I have to ask them WHAT they understand.

Pronunciation is one element of language courses that often gets overlooked. Part of the reason for this is that experienced teachers know how difficult it is to learn the sounds of a foreign language as an adult, especially if that language is nothing like your own. This basically means we accept that Japanese students will always have a Japanese accent, that Koreans will always have a Korean accent, and so on. Incidentally, I always used to think in terms of learners “gaining” the accent of a foreign language, but I remember hearing a friend talking about a Japanese person he knew who had managed to “lose” her Japanese accent. That is an interesting way of looking at it. I wonder which viewpoint is more common among teachers?

Anyway, as well as acknowledging the difficulty of the task of teaching pronunciation, most teachers also realize that even with a heavy accent, the majority of learners will be able to make themselves understood to proficient speakers of English. The combined effect of these two beliefs is that pronunciation often gets relegated to a once-in-a-while exercise with the sole purpose of providing a bit of variety in the course.

There are at least two problems with this way of thinking. The first is that teachers, particularly those of monolingual classes, are often very poor judges of how comprehensible their students actually are to regular speakers of the language. When I lived in New Zealand, I did the examiner training for IELTS (International English Language Testing System). As part of the workshop, we had to watch videos of candidates speaking and assign grades. What soon became clear was that teachers were giving far higher grades to students of nationalities they were familiar with. For example, two teachers who had worked in Korea gave a Korean student a high grade for her speaking, whereas the teachers who had mainly worked with European learners gave her a low one. Their reasoning was, “We can’t really understand what she is saying.”

The second reason why pronunciation deserves more attention in language courses is that a learner’s knowledge of the sounds of a language will directly affect their ability to perceive and recognize those sounds. In other words, having good pronunciation is just as important for listening as it is for speaking. My limited understanding of how recognition systems work is that they compare sensory input with stored representations of a variety of forms. For example, we learn how the word “boy” sounds, and we then create and store a template of it in our brains. When audio signals reach our ears, they are run through the database in order to find matches. The same principle applies to the recognition of words and letters. You recognize “x” as the letter that comes before “z” because the marks on this screen fit the representation of that letter that you already have stored in your brain. Of course, you would probably recognize it if I wrote it as “X” too, and even if I wrote it by hand. The human brain has an incredible tolerance for variation that allows it to recognize shapes in a way that computers cannot. That is the theory behind those weirdly shaped letters you have to input manually on some blogs in order to post a comment. The system works because humans can tolerate greater manipulation of basic forms than computers can.

Even so, there are limits to the tolerance (I am using the word here in its engineering sense) of even the human brain’s recognition systems, and these become stricter when representations of objects or phenomena resemble each other. For example, in many cases, it is impossible for us to distinguish between “1,” “l,” and “I” when written in isolation because they look so similar. When that happens, the knowledge of language and context that I described in my previous entry kicks in and allows us to make inferences that go beyond the information that is being provided by the senses.

When a language student learns a new word, they create a template for it and store that template in their database. It is quite possible that when they reproduce the word from its template, the audio signal that results will be within the limits of tolerance of proficient speakers of the language, so the learner will be able to make him or herself understood. A problem arises, however, when the focus switches to listening. Because the template the learner has created does not really match the signal produced by proficient speakers, and because the learner’s recognition system will naturally have a more limited tolerance owing to their lower mastery of the language, there is a very good chance that they will not recognize what they are hearing. It’s a bit like going to meet someone that you have never met at an airport armed only with a photograph that was taken twenty years ago. If the person doesn’t actually look like the photograph, there is a good chance that they will walk right past you without you recognizing them at all.

Like all language teachers, I constantly struggle to make myself understood to my students. I have often noticed that the reason my students cannot understand what I am saying is that they have learned an incorrect pronunciation of a particular word. The following is a typical example of a conversation in one of my classes:

Me: Can you close the curtain?

Student: ??

Me: The CURTAIN.

Student: Curtain??

Me: (gesturing) The curtain!!

Student: Ah, kah-ten!!

It is almost as if they are correcting my pronunciation to match their internal representation of the word. Every teacher in Japan knows that we can easily make ourselves understood by simply saying a word the way our students say it, and I suspect the same is true of any teacher with experience of teaching a particular language group.

My point is that learners need to learn words as accurately as possible so that the template they create reflects the audio signal that is produced when proficient speakers of the language pronounce that word. If a learner creates a template that is significantly different, it might be close enough for their recreation of it to be understood by proficient speakers, but it may not be close enough for them to recognize the word when they hear it.

As teachers, I think we need to start realizing that pronunciation is just as much a listening skill as it is a speaking one, and we need to start giving it greater prominence in our courses.

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

All during our years of education and career training, one of the most important lessons driven home was that we need to stay focused, we need to keep our attention on what we’re doing, and we need to make sure not to get distracted. Nobody would disagree with any of this, right? Well, sometimes it’s not so easy to keep our eyes on that prize when it comes to testing.

One area where this became obvious to me in my early years of teaching ESOL was in testing listening comprehension. I realized that the tests I was given to use, created at various US universities and sold to schools like the ones I taught at, weren’t exclusively testing what they were supposed to be testing. Those tests almost always ended up inadvertently testing reading comprehension along with listening comprehension. Was that fair to my students? Not at all! If I want to test reading comp., I’ll test reading comp. But if I want to test listening comp., well, I shouldn’t be making my students read three or four sentences quickly and decide which written item reflects something they’ve just heard. I’m sure you see my point. For example . . .

The students hear: “There are quite a few students who have won scholarships this year.”

Then they quickly have to read the following and choose which sentence reflects what they’ve just heard:

1. Many students won scholarships this year.
2. Few students won scholarships this year.
3. A relatively large number of students won scholarships this year.
4. A few students got one scholarship this year.

The correct answer is 3, but it’s obvious that it wasn’t just listening comprehension that’s been tested; reading comprehension has been tested as well – and that’s just not fair.

So how do we overcome this problem of inadvertently testing reading when we really just want to test listening? It’s actually quite a challenge to accomplish because we need to rely on visuals, not reading, to avoid the problem. We need to come up with drawings, photos, and other kinds of graphic material that will reflect and not reflect each item that the students have heard. Here’s an example of what I mean.

The students hear the sentence and then look at the two pictures. They decide which one reflects accurately what they’ve just heard and that’s how they choose their answer. No need to inadvertently test reading comprehension, right?

Here are six more examples that I’d like to share with you.

So if you do test listening comprehension, do your best to find test items that will not accidentally test  reading as well. True, sometimes a small amount of reading can’t be avoided, such as in the “How much does it cost?” example  above, but I know you understand my point, and I hope you’ll be able to give your students fair listening comprehension tests if you decide to test them on this skill.

One other thing to keep in mind is the complexities of grading your students’ work in a writing class. How do you decide beforehand on how you’ll grade their work? Do you base your grading solely on their skill with the writing form you’ve just taught, e.g., a business letter or a basic composition, or do you grade them at the same time on the mechanics, such as punctuation and capitalization? And what about their grammar? Is it appropriate to judge them on their grammar in a writing class that focuses on forms of writing? Not such easy questions to answer, are they?

Well, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought. Let’s keep our eyes on the testing prize.

One day long ago my student teaching practicum supervisor, the one with the fine-toothed comb, asked me “Why are you planning to start your lesson with this jazz chant?”  I replied “Because it will be fun!”  At that, she sighed… not out of relief, mind you, but out of discontent.

My answer revealed that I had not fully grasped one of the key points about learning objectives: that they must allow us to measure what the students have learned.   “Fun cannot function as an objective of learning,” my practicum supervisor continued.  “How would you measure that fun?”  “What would your students learn from that fun?”

As I began my teaching career, those key questions continued to swirl around in my head, and even though they seemed relatively easy to answer, formulating learning objectives which were both specific and practicable (unlike some larger instructional goals) was not an effortless task for me. Often, the objectives I devised sounded fine, but after a second look, they turned out to be flawed, partly because they were more about what the teacher wanted than about what the learner needed.  Here are some examples.

• “Students will understand how to use possessive pronouns.”
• “Students will know how to talk about their personal life.”
• “Students will practice formal and informal greetings.”

Such objectives were decent and useful enough, I thought.  I wanted the students to understand this, to know that, and to practice those things, and I assumed that they would learn from the activities I had planned, but those activities were nowhere apparent in those objectives.  Worse, those objectives, as stated, were not measurable. How could I measure “understanding or knowing”?  What about “practicing”?  Was that measurable?

After some revision, those objectives became:

• “Students will use possessive pronouns accurately.”
• “Students will answer correctly at least three questions about their personal life.”
• “Students will demonstrate that they know the difference between formal and informal greetings.”

In these forms they seemed more exact, more task oriented, and, quite naturally, more measurable too.   

As the years passed, and I got better at orienting my objectives more toward learning than teaching, I created a strategy for deriving a learning objective from a “language carrot.”

A “language carrot” is a potential result of a lesson’s or week’s work, and a view to the details (perhaps rather, in keeping with the metaphor, composition) of that “carrot” can direct a teacher to a precise formulation of a learning objective.  The objective can, in turn, guide a teacher to exact instruction which results in measurable learning on the part of her students.

The first time I “dangled a language carrot,” it went like this…

I presented my students with a seven-sentence narrative in which all the sentences began with a grammatical subject, and beside it I placed a similar narrative including several sentences which began with present or past participle phrases.  (Enter the “carrot”…)  I then asked my students which narrative they preferred. To this, some responded “The one that’s not so boring!” but some also responded “The one that’s not so repetitive.”  At that point, I seized the moment and asked them “How would you like to learn the ‘tricks’ to writing the better one?”

The learning objective derived from that “language carrot” was:  By the end of this week’s unit, students will be able to write a narrative composed of five to seven sentences, at least three of which exhibit correct usage of present or past participle phrases before subjects.  

Have you had any adventures in developing your own learning objectives?

I want to thank all of you who took the time and put in the effort to respond to my little survey. I really appreciate the help you gave me and the insights that I received from looking over your acceptances or rejections of certain items and your comments on things. By adding them to responses I’d gotten from others, some very interesting observations and conclusions emerged.

Let’s review the 15 items listed in the survey. I hope it’ll be interesting for you to compare what you decided to change or let stand as is and see what my thinking is about each item on the list. I’m sure you noticed that I deliberately placed the same kind of discrete point in different environments to see if you’d perceive a difference in accepting or rejecting it depending on where you came across it. That was very telling. In what follows, you’ll see that I’ve highlighted “grammatical issues” in red and put any changes I felt necessary in blue within brackets.

1. You never know what psychopaths look like. They can look like you or I [me].

It’s a standard rule of grammar that a noun phrase or personal pronoun following a preposition or verb is considered the object of that preposition or verb and must appear in the object form if there is one. It’s become apparent, however, that many educated native speakers don’t adhere to that basic grammar rule when two personal pronouns, linked by and/or, or a noun phrase and a personal pronoun linked by and/or, follow a preposition or verb. When that linked second element is a personal pronoun, they keep it in the subject form.  I think this is a result of hypercorrection with people feeling it sounds “more educated” or “more refined” to say phrases such as you and I rather than you and me, even when the object form is what’s called for. The fascinating part of this phenomenon is that people never confuse the subject and object form after a preposition or verb if there’s just one personal pronoun involved, but when two or more are involved, then this improper usage takes over more often than I like to think. That’s why you’ll hear someone say She looks like me, but that same speaker may very well say She looks like my sister and I.

2. If folks who have preceded us in history did not do [had not done] that, as a woman, I’m not sure I would be a member of this legislative assembly.

I find it interesting – although troubling – that more and more educated speakers, movie and TV script writers, and others seem to be doing away with the use of the past perfect to represent a past imaginary idea. Here’s how real sentences and their imaginary counterparts should look, first in the general present or universal sense, and then in the past:

[real] Folks do that… → [imaginary] If folks did not do that…

[real] Folks did that… → [imaginary] If folks had not done that…

At the rate things are going and the frequency that I hear this change, we may very likely be heading to an accepted alternative way or new way of forming imaginary ideas in the past. It’s also interesting to note, by the way, that the native speakers who use the simple past when they should use the past perfect in these past imaginary sentences never make that mistake in the other clause involved that uses could have, should have, or would have:

If folks who have preceded us in history did not do that,

I’m not sure women would have gained political equality.

 3. The study’s author [The author of the study] claims that high fructose corn syrup contributes to adult onset diabetes.

I remember a time when there were clear rules about when it was and was not appropriate to use the -s genitive. The use sited here wouldn’t have been considered appropriate according to those prescriptive rules. To sum up the basic way the rules used to go, they were:

• We normally use the -s genitive for higher forms of living things that move (the boy’s bike│a lion’s stealth) even though we do have the option to choose the of genitive in certain circumstances such as a general observation (the stealth of a lion / the stealth of the lion).
• We use the –s genitive for things that are anthropomorphized (Solar energy will prove very important in the future, and the sun’s heat….│She’s a great seagoing vessel. Our ship’s cruising speed…).
• We use the -s genitive in formulaic expressions (a stone’s throw from here).
• For inanimate and abstract things (a room, a survey) and for lower forms of living things (an amoeba, a germ), the of genitive should be the correct way to go (the décor of this room as opposed to this room’s décor│the life of an amoeba instead of an amoeba’s life).

Nowadays, it seems, there’s more and more blurring of the distinctions that help us choose the -s genitive or the of genitive. The –s genitive is now being used on practically any kind of noun.

4. Was there a big argument between she [her] and her fiancé before the physical altercation?

Here’s another example of native speakers not realizing that a personal pronoun is supposed to be only in the object form after a preposition or verb. Somehow the speaker is treating the phrase she and her fiancé as a whole unit, making it sound okay to leave it intact instead of changing the subject to the object form of the pronoun she. But if we were to substitute she and her fiancé with they, you can be sure that the speaker would correctly say between them and not between they. Interesting, right?

5. The heat pump was broke [broken], so the house remained very cold for two days.

It’s amazing how many people use broke nowadays instead of broken as the past participle of break. I say it’s amazing because this “shouldn’t” be happening with a high-frequency verb like break – and yet it is. Normally a misuse of the simple past or past participle  happens with low-frequency verbs that people aren’t too comfortable with because they use them so rarely (The burglar creeped across our yard, low to the ground.)

6. There’s lots of products in the stores these days for teeth [tooth] whitening.

I have to admit that I was a little sneaky here. I’ve highlighted There’s, but as you can see, I haven’t put in a correction. The reason is that with so many educated native speakers using the singular form of this existential phrase for so long now, whether the accompanying noun is singular or plural, it’s become acceptable to do away with the subject/verb-agreement rule in this case. So it’s equally acceptable to say There’s lots of … or There are lots of …

As to the other item in that sentence, I find it amazing that so many people think there’s nothing wrong with saying teeth whitening. I can only guess that this is because, until relatively recently, it wasn’t a commonly heard term. Nobody says teethpaste or teethbrush, and nobody says feetprints or feet massage, right? But teeth whitening doesn’t seem to be jarring to many people. Go figure.

7. The kids thought the puppet show was really cool. They were loving it.

As you can see, I haven’t put in a correction. There’s a trend going on in the English-speaking world to make some stative verbs behave grammatically as active verbs, with like, love, and want among them (I’m just loving the intricacies of this murder mystery novel I’m reading. │ That’s what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.) As for I’m loving it, I think that when love is used in the progressive forms, it’s being used as a synonym for “enjoy very much”: The kids thought the puppet show was really cool. They were enjoying it very much.

 8. We can expect less [fewer] showers in the forecast over the next day or two.

Yes, yes, fewer + countable nouns, less + uncountable nouns. But how many times have you heard less used with countable nouns? Even though we’ve got our “rules,” it seems that more and more educated native speakers either use less in place of fewer themselves, or it doesn’t dawn on them that a grammar faux pas has been made when they hear somebody else use less with a countable noun. This is another example of what makes me feel there will be some major grammar changes at some point in the future when ungrammatical usages will become grammatically acceptable.

9. She picked up Brian and I [me] and drove us to the store to pick up some groceries.

I’m amazed at how many people think this one is acceptable – not in the responses I got to this survey, but in the responses I got from many others I’d asked about it. Betty Azar started pointing out this interesting phenomenon years ago in her grammar series, and I recall some teachers were almost scandalized that this should even be mentioned in a grammar book. The truth is, regardless of how “wrong” we know it to be since after a verb we should use the object form of personal pronouns, how long can you fight city hall, as they say? (You might want to revisit number 1.) I wonder if this illogical usage will someday be considered acceptable. I have a feeling it will be, much to my chagrin.

10. The express checkout is for ten items or less.

Notice that there’s nothing in red? That’s because this use of less is quite different from what we reviewed in number 8. It’s acceptable – in fact, normal – to use less when discussing things like money, distance, or time and in certain environments such as less than $50 │less than 50 miles │less than an hour or $50 or less│50 miles or less │an hour or less. It’s acceptable to use less when it means “under”: ten items or less = “under ten items.”

11. The cruise we took up the Danube last spring was so fun!

I don’t know why it started catching on that fun should be treated as an adjective in the environment shown above, but that’s just what’s happened. In my opinion, the correct usage would be so much fun or such fun, but not so fun. If I want to use so, I’d go with a phrase like so enjoyable. But once again, many people – including teachers – who were asked about this item, thought it sounded just fine. I’m sure this stems from the fact that we commonly and correctly use fun as an attributive adjective (a fun experience │a fun trip), but as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t hold true for it being used as a predicative adjective, which follows the head noun and a linking verb. A fun experience is okay, and an experience that was so much fun is okay, but the experience was so fun isn’t okay).

12. We found teeth [tooth] marks on the victim’s left arm.

There were people – including teachers – who found this perfectly acceptable, while the very same people didn’t accept teeth whitening that we discussed in number 6. And then there were people who did just the opposite; they wouldn’t accept teeth marks, but they found no problem with teeth whitening. Aaaarrggh! There are exceptions to the following rule, mostly involving items normally used in the plural (the arms race comes to mind), but the general rule is that when one noun is used adjectivally to describe another noun (as in a compound noun [starlight] or noun adjunct [birth defects]), the descriptive element remains singular just as adjectives in English remain singular even when the nouns they describe are plural. So even though the marks may have been made by two or more teeth, they’re tooth marks, and that’s the reason we say toothpaste and toothbrush and footsteps, too. Of course we aren’t thinking of just one tooth or one foot!

13. We drug [dragged] the heavy bag of top soil to the flower bed to finish preparing it for our flowers.

I have to admit that I’ve been blown away in the past few months by how many times I’ve heard people say drug as the simple past tense of drag. It’s astounding to me, but seems to be quite a common occurrence, especially in the American Midwest and South. I’ve checked various dictionaries thinking that I’m perhaps out of touch with current trends, but nope, I haven’t found any that list drug as an alternate for dragged. I’ve found shrunk in lieu of shrank and I’ve found bit in lieu of bitten, but I haven’t found that drug can be used in place of dragged. And yet I hear it used so often.

14. If they didn’t lose [hadn’t lost] their compass, they could have found their way out of the woods.

Here we go again. I wanted to try this kind of item one more time to see how people would react to it, and I was surprised again to find out how there are teachers, among others, who find this acceptable grammar. Maybe one day it will be, but at the moment, it’s still just wrong. We should not use the simple past in an imaginary idea unless we’re talking about either the present or some universal concept. We are supposed to use the past perfect in a past imaginary idea. Just compare these two and then I’ll rest my case:

[real] He loses his temper much too often.

[imaginary] If he didn’t lose his temper so often, more people would like him. He needs anger management classes.

[real] He lost his temper last Friday.

[imaginary] If he hadn’t lost his temper last Friday, the boss wouldn’t have fired him.

 15. Me and my secretary [My secretary and I] were met at the airport by the CEO himself.

Talk about a common ungrammatical occurrence! Here’s another one that seems to be popping up everywhere. I used to ascribe it to uneducated native speakers or kids who hadn’t had good language arts classes either in middle school or high school, but I can’t do that anymore. It makes me just shake my head and sigh every time I hear things like Me and him did this or Him and her did that. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Us and them did this, but it may just be a matter of time. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s always “somebody and somebody.” The speaker will never use the object form of the pronoun if there’s just one pronoun, i.e., Me did this or Him did that. Anybody looking for a great topic for a Ph.D. thesis? Hmm…

Thanks again if you participated in this survey. You may agree with my statements here or you may disagree, but it’s good if we can start a conversation about what’s going on in the English language, for better or worse. One of the participants mentioned that she’s noticed more and more of a rift in her native Russian between the “classically grammatical language” and the colloquial language. That’s true for English as well. Of course a living language keeps evolving; we know that. But whatever evolves still should make common sense, grammatically speaking, don’t you think? I don’t know if that’s always happening anymore.

Oh! Look at the time! I’ve got to go now. Me and my partner have to help our neighbor with her mowing.

I’ve written a couple of pieces for “Teacher Talk” dealing with my observations on how more and more educated English speakers seem to be using the language these days. For the most part, I avoided judging what I listed; I just wanted to point things out and have you think seriously about whether or not the discrete points I focused on should be taught or at least mentioned to students at the appropriate level and time.

What I’d like to do now is offer a little survey to find out what you guys think about 15 items I’m going to list. Please read over each of the following sentences that are reproduced verbatim from what I observed educated English speakers saying on numerous occasions. Then decide whether each sentence sounds acceptable to you or unacceptable. (I know you’ll be honest!☺) Of course you can add any thoughts you have about each sentence or a particular part of each sentence. Your thoughts will be most welcome!

You can post your answers and/or thoughts in the “Comments” section at the end of this piece. I hope you participate in this survey and that we get some meaningful feedback that will get all of us more in touch with how English is being used these days and how we might reconsider teaching certain points of grammar.

Thanks!

1. You never know what psychopaths look like. They can look like you or I.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

2. If folks who have preceded us in history did not do that, as a woman, I’m not sure I would be a member of this legislative assembly.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

3. The study’s author claims that high fructose corn syrup contributes to  adult onset diabetes.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

4. Was there a big argument between she and her fiancé before the altercation?

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

5. The heat pump was broke, so the house remained very cold for two days.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

6. There’s lots of products in the stores these days for teeth whitening.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

7. The kids thought the puppet show was really cool. They were loving it.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

8. We can expect less showers in the forecast over the next day or two.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

9. She picked up Brian and I and drove us to the store to pick up some groceries.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

10. The express checkout is for ten items or less.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

11. The cruise we took up the Danube last spring was so fun!

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

12. We found teeth marks on the victim’s left arm.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

13. We drug the heavy bag of top soil to the flower bed to finish preparing it for our flowers.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

14. If they didn’t lose their compass, they could have found their way out of the woods.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

15. Me and my secretary were met at the airport by the CEO himself.

 sounds fine                    doesn’t sound fine

Two Tours in Champagne

Although neither my husband nor I are Champagne experts, we do like a glass of bubbly from time to time. So, over a recent long weekend, my husband and I drove to the Champagne region of France. Our first stop was at the famous Tattinger Champagne house in Reims. There, we took a tour of the caves lead by an English-speaking guide. We learned where the grapes for Champagne are grown, how the bottles are turned periodically, and how they get the bubbles into the bottle.

After our tasting, we left the city of Reims and began to drive along the touristic Champagne route described in our guidebook. It is a beautiful drive, peppered by plenty of smaller Champagne houses along the way. After passing a few of them, we decided to stop at the Bernard Chauvet et Fils Champagne house. Our experience was completely different at this Champagne house. The tour was shorter, the tasting was free, and the proprietor spoke no English whatsoever. The tour and demonstration was entirely in French.

Now, as you might know if you are a regular reader of this blog, I have sporadically been studying French. However, my vocabulary is certainly not technical enough that I would have been able to understand what the proprietor of the smaller Champagne house was saying had I not seen a similar demonstration at the Tattinger house earlier that day.

My Teaching since Champagne

So, what does this have to do with language learning? Well, that day I had one of my long held suspicions confirmed; if a student learns about a subject in their own language, it will be infinitely easier for him/her to comprehend details about that subject in English. It seems so obvious when I write it, but it took my own experience before I fully realized how powerful knowledge in my native language can increase knowledge in a new language.

So, what impact can this have in our lesson planning? I currently teach English to students who are preparing to enter mainstream secondary school classes. For instance, after the winter holidays, one of my students is going to enter a year 9 Geography class. So, I need to make sure she has the language she will need to be successful in that class. In the past, I might have focused on teaching and reinforcing vocabulary and certain grammar, reading and writing skills. Since Champagne, however, I have decided to also include some time for her to use the internet and research specific topics in her language, French, as well. This will give her more ‘hooks’ upon which to hang the information she will get in English.

Another change I will make is with my students who are preparing for TOEFL exam. Many of the readings and listenings in this exam (as well as others like it) are academic and focus on subject specific topics. For instance, in the Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL Test by Deborah Phillips, there is a listening passage about whales and echolocation. That listening is far easier for students who already know something about whales than for those who don’t. Of course, it is impossible to predict what subjects will appear on the exam; however, it seems to me that it is good practice to encourage students to read up on a number of different academic subjects in their first language, especially on topics they are not already familiar with.

Many of you may have figured long ago that when students are familiar with a topic in their language, it is easier for them to access the information in English. Our students come to us with a (long or short) lifetime of experience and information. It makes sense to use that to our advantage as language teachers. I would be interested to hear how this affects your teaching. How do you actively encourage students to make use of their native language knowledge in your classes?

If you’re like I was in the classroom, you’re always looking for fun ways to teach something about English that your students need to recognize, understand, and internalize if they’re to master the language one of these fine days. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching elementary school kids or adults; everybody wants to have fun while learning, just as we teachers want to have fun while teaching.

So let’s take a look at one of the most daunting items of English, the prepositions. “Oh, no! Not those!” you say with a shudder. “Anything but prepositions!” Yes, I know how confusing they can be and how exacting they can be.

Well, I’m here to tell you that there are indeed fun ways to introduce, demonstrate, and successfully teach English prepositions. The way I used to enjoy the most was teaching those little bugaboos with hands-on activities, one of which was preparing food. Sounds weird, eh? Well, not so weird. For the following lesson, the prepositions that I’m going to target are at, down, in, into, off, on top of, over, to, under, and up.

Picture this: Your students come into your room at the start of class and start taking their seats. While doing so, they notice a long table in the front of the room, and on that table they see two large salad bowls and platters full of some common veggies used to make a tossed salad: two small heads of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, celery stalks, mushrooms, and scallions (green onions). There are also small bowls of pitted olives, crumbled, crisp bacon, and crumbled feta cheese. There are a couple of bottles of salad dressings, a knife¹ to cut up the veggies, a cutting board, and a salad fork and spoon to toss the goodies after they’ve been placed into one of the large bowls. Last but not least, there’s a stack of disposable salad bowls on the side. And make sure to have a roll of paper towels handy, too. Wow! I’m honestly getting hungry just writing this!

Begin your lesson by explaining to your students what prepositions are. Then you tell them they’re going to watch as you prepare a salad, and have them gather around the table.

Make sure to use only half of the veggies and toppings. You’ll see why later. Here’s a list of sentences that you can be saying as you describe what you’re doing while preparing the salad. Note that these sentences are deliberately kept short:

• I’m going to cut up all the vegetables.
• I cut the bottom off a head of lettuce.
• I tear the lettuce leaves into small pieces and put them into the bowl.
• I cut the cherry tomatoes in half.
• I add them to the lettuce at the bottom of the bowl.
• I cut the cucumbers in half lengthwise.
• I cut the halves into thin slices and put them into the bowl.
• I do the same thing with the mushrooms.
• Then I slice the celery and scallions into thin pieces.
• I put the mushrooms, celery, and scallions on top of the other veggies.
• I cut up the olives and sprinkle them and some bacon over the veggies.
• Now everything is in the bowl.
• I mix up all the veggies. How?
• I get under the veggies with my salad fork and spoon.
• I bring them up and let them fall down. I keep doing this until all the veggies are mixed.
• I sprinkle some feta cheese over the salad, and it’s ready to eat!
• I dig my salad fork and spoon into the salad.
• I pick up some salad and I place it into this small bowl.
• I take the lid off² a bottle of salad dressing.
• I pour some dressing over my salad.

As you describe out loud each action you’re doing, ask a couple of students to repeat what you’ve just said. Then repeat the sentence yourself so that the group has heard the preposition used four times.

Now that you’ve made your salad, ask for a volunteer to prepare a duplicate salad. Have the student describe what he/she is doing each step of the way just as you did. Once again ask two other students to repeat what your “salad sous-chef” says to reinforce the prepositions. Once your student’s salad is done, invite the class to use the disposable bowls and help themselves to some salad and dressing.

After the class has placidly munched on their salads, review each step you went through to prepare the salad and write the sentences on the board for your students to copy into their notebooks so they can review the lesson on their own at a later time.

You’ll find that a lesson like this will be lots of fun and will be quite meaningful for your students because it’s applying language to a real-life activity. This kind of lesson will go a long way to having your students internalize these basic uses of the targeted prepositions, and you’ll be able to answer any questions they may have after the demonstration with extra visual reinforcement if necessary.

So try out this culinary creation or think of other dishes that can be prepared easily in class and that give you the opportunity to use prepositions just was we have with the salad. How much more fun can a lesson get? You’ll find that hands-on demonstrations are a great way to teach these little bugaboos we call prepositions.

1. In many schools these days it’s against policy to allow a metal-bladed knife in a classroom for security reasons. If your school has such a policy, I’m sure you’ll still be allowed to use a plastic knife from the school cafeteria. Most of these are still adequate for cutting up veggies.

2. There’s always been an argument about whether or not it’s grammatical to say off of, e.g., I take the lid off of a bottle of salad dressing. The fact is that if you’re a prescriptivist, you’re going to say that of is not correct after off, but if you’re a descriptivist, you’re going to point out how commonly off of is used, especially in American English, thereby making it grammatical. Even though I don’t particularly like saying off of, I suppose it’s acceptable because it’s used so frequently, the same way I absolutely hate hearing the reason why, but have come to accept it in others’ speech because it seems that just about everybody goes along with that outrageous redundancy.

I always felt cheated as a child because my mother would never follow the advice of that lovely nanny, Mary Poppins. (She also refused to fly, too, to my great irritation.) In the movie, Mary Poppins has asked her charges to clean their room. The boys don’t want to, but she convinces them that a little fun can make a dull task palatable by singing that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Well, I am no flying nanny, but I can certainly appreciate Ms. Poppins’ message now that I am teaching young learners.

Grammar?!? Again?!?
After years of teaching adults who masochistically yearn for the pain of English verb tenses and the passive voice, I assumed that everyone cared as deeply about grammar. Not so! Have you ever tried to convince tired tweens and teens that the answer to their prayers lay in memorizing the simple past form of irregular verbs? Let me tell you, it is easier said than done. I tried everything from practice worksheets to tests to flashcards and more. Nothing could make these students learn their lists of irregular verbs. Nothing, that is, until I broke out the dice and the markers. Apparently the nanny was right all along; turning grammar into a game makes learning easier. The trick is to make the games as easy on the teacher as possible; no one wants to be cutting flashcards at 3:00 in the morning, that’s for sure! Following are some of the easiest games I know that have tricked my students into learning grammar again and again.

The Dice Game
First, give students a long and boring grammar handout. Then, divide the class into teams of 4 or 5. Pose the first question from the handout to the first students from the first team. If the student answers it correctly, he or she can roll the dice and the team gets the points shown. If the student is incorrect, the turn moves to the first person from the second team, and so on. For this game, a little dice will do, but it is much more fun when played with a big dice (I make mine from cardstock and stuff with tissue paper), especially when the dice goes from 0 to 5 instead of 1 to 6. Imagine the thrill of knowing that even though the other team just answered the question correctly, they still might not get a point! The winner is the team with the most points at the end of the exercise.

The Snakes and Ladders Game
First, give the students another long and boring grammar handout. Depending on the size of your class, you might divide students into teams and give each team a marker or just give each student a marker. Again, ask the first student to complete the first question on the handout. If correct, the student gets to roll the dice and move around the board. If incorrect, the student has to stay in place. Then, move on to the next student. The winner is the student or team that finishes the game first. I use Snakes and Ladders, but you can use just about any board game out there that involves moving around a board with markers and a dice. I just like the element of chance involved in Snakes and Ladders.

The Dot Game
Again, give the students another long and boring grammar handout. Then, draw a grid of dots, 5 across and 5 down, or more or less depending on the number of questions you have on the handout. You’ll need more dots than you have questions, but it’s a pretty imprecise science. If you realize halfway through that you have too many, cross a row out. If you realize you have too few, add a row. Again, divide the students into teams of 4 or 5. If the first student from the first team correctly answers the question, he or she draws a horizontal or vertical line connecting two of the dots. Then, move on to the first student from the second team, and so on. The lines don’t necessarily need to be connected. The goal of the teams is to make a box by drawing 4 lines. However, students aren’t confined to using their own lines, they can make boxes from another team’s lines. (It may take a while for students to catch on to this, but successful teams will quickly realize that they don’t want to leave a box with three sides for the next team to finish.) After a team makes a box, they write their team name in the box and they have to draw another line. If that line makes a box, too, they continue until they can’t make another box with their line. The winner is the team with the most boxes when the grid is finished.

I know the biggest criticism that can be leveled at using games like this in the class is that it makes for a teacher fronted activity. Yes, that is certainly true. It is a price I am willing to pay to bamboozle my students into enthusiastically completing a grammar practice activity that would normally been a struggle. After all, the kids are all engaged, they are all writing the answers in their books, and they are all learning. What more could I ask for?

I can’t remember who said it (I have a feeling it may have been Penny Ur), but I remember hearing a quote about teaching listening once that really made me stop and think:

We don’t really teach listening; we just keep testing it.

Whoever it was, I think he or she had a very valid point. Our standard methodology for teaching listening is a cycle of giving listening tasks and then asking questions in order to test the learners’ comprehension of what they have heard. In our defence, of course, it is difficult to see how we could do otherwise. Like reading, listening is a receptive skill that can only be developed through repeated practice, so there are good reasons for teaching it the way we do. Anyway, I was recently asked to do a presentation on this topic, and I started thinking about aspects of listening that do actually need to be taught rather than simply practiced. The first thing that came to mind was a list of general principles of which learners often seem to be unaware, and I want to write about the first of those today.

The first point is that we listen with our brains, not our ears.

Many learners think that improving their listening skills means developing their ability to recognize audio signals produced by proficient speakers of the language. In fact, the audio signal that most speakers produce does not contain sufficient information for it to be recognized in isolation. To hear an example of this, try saying the following sentence quickly.

“There was a great movie on TV last night.”

Now say it again at the same speed, but stop at “a.” Repeat the first three words, but keep your pronunciation exactly the way it was when you said the full sentence. Now dictate this segment of language to a proficient speaker of English and ask them to write down what you are saying. The chances are that they will be unable to do so. If you then complete the sentence, however, you will find that the listener is suddenly able to understand what just sounded like random noise a few seconds ago. The person will probably even tell you that they can “hear” the words now. Of course, the listener cannot hear “There was a” because you are not really saying it. The reason they think they can hear it is that after the words enter their ears, their brain takes over to decode the signal in the light of what went before, what came after, and what that person knows about the way English works. In other words, it is the brain that is doing the listening, not the ears.

You can see this process in action for yourself by playing around with an iPhone 4S. Even if you do not have one of these yourself, I am sure you have been bored to death by friends who do have one telling you about it and/or demonstrating its features. Anyway, Siri is a “virtual personal assistant” that, so its developers claim, is capable of recognizing natural speech. The interesting thing about Siri is that it only works when you have a good Internet connection. This is because it has to take the audio signal and process it through powerful servers in order to work out what has actually been said. If listening really were a matter of simply recognizing audio signals, this would not be necessary. The fact that it is necessary shows that it is the computers that are doing the listening, not the microphone.

I was quite skeptical of Siri before I tried it, because the voice recognition software I have used in the past has been worse than useless. Siri, however, is remarkably accurate, and it gets things right a lot more often than it gets them wrong. When it does make mistakes, however, it provides interesting insights into the challenges the human brain faces when it attempts to comprehend spoken language. One of the most difficult things about decoding the audio signal produced by spoken language is working out where the word boundaries lie. This is because different sequences of words can produce an identical audio signal. To give you an example of this, here is a true story about a message I tried to send the other day. On that day,  I was feeling particularly pleased with myself because I had managed to get up at 6 a.m., and I decided to send an email to a friend to inform her of this remarkable achievement. Picking up my phone, I dictated to Siri, “I just broke the world record for getting up early.” When it had taken a moment to absorb the sequence of sounds that came from my mouth, Siri displayed the following message on the screen:

I just broke the world record forgetting up early.

If you think about it, the audio signal produced by my original sentence and the one produced by Siri’s transcription of it would be identical, but no speaker of English would interpret those sounds as Siri did because that sentence simply does not make any sense.

Another issue that both humans and computers have to cope with is the problem of homophones (different words that share the same pronunciation). One way software engineers attempt to deal with this is by taking into account the relative frequencies of words. For example, “rain” is more common than “reign,” so when in doubt, the computer will opt for the more common word. This, however, can lead to mistakes. As a follow-up to my first sentence, I continued my message:  “Maybe I should contact the newspapers to tell them about my feat.” Before you read on, can you guess how Siri transcribed this sentence?

Of course, “Maybe I should contact the newspapers to tell them about my feet” is perfectly grammatical, and it would even make sense in some contexts. The problem is that in order to arrive at the correct interpretation, the listener has to hold in his or her mind a continually developing sense of what is being discussed. This sounds simple, and indeed it is—for humans. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately!), however, it is still beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful modern computers.

To summarize, it is important for learners to understand that the reason they cannot “hear” clearly what proficient speakers of English are saying is that the speakers are not saying it clearly in the first place, so the sooner they give up on that idea, the easier it will be for them. Other proficient speakers can’t “hear” English in that sense either. What allows us to decode the signal and understand what is being said is our knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar, and our ability to keep track of topics over the course of a conversation. As I said, we listen with our brains, not our ears.