I have two high intermediate adult students who are still making the same grammar mistakes in their spoken English that they were a year ago when I started with them. They’re constantly screwing up on their formation of tenses and the use of articles and prepositions.
I see them an hour and a half a week and use Touchstone 4 as a rough baseline. We often depart from the text to do targeted lessons on topics such as presentations and networking at conferences. In addition, I also give them supplementary grammar exercises, along with regular reading material in the form of graded readers. They themselves supplement the class every week with material from Studio Classroom. To add to this, over the past couple of months they’ve also been making Friday a speak English only day.
My own ideas of making them improve include making better use of the book - currently, I skip the reading and writing exercises. I also plan to give them more regular tests to increase the feedback on how they’re going. There’s also a Touchstone website which I will suggest they make use of.
I should note that these students don’t express the slightest dissatisfaction with me as a teacher. Quite the contrary - they tell me how lucky they are to have me, and recommend me to others.
Any ideas on effective ways - that won’t lead to student revolt - to get these students to start producing better English? I’m not certain anything I’ve suggested here will help.
It’s also worth noting that their L1 is probably going to run interference constantly. My wife and I speak English every day and she still makes mistakes with tenses, plurals, articles, prepositions and all the rest of the standard mistakes, despite me correcting every time she makes a mistake, her actively asking me whether particular nouns are countable or not, her reading English by herself, etc. She has improved greatly since when I met her, but she still makes basic mistakes all of the time. She’s only just recently started using things such as perfect tenses, but she still gets those wrong most of the time too. I suspect that she may never get such things correct 100% of the time (or even 90% of the time) because there’s just too much L1 interference and she didn’t really start speaking English until she was an adult.
I know that’s probably not much help, but it could be the reality.
steelersman: Indeed, some native speakers don’t always use tenses correctly. I don’t habitually get them wrong. I’m perhaps rare for my generation in that I actually use the subjunctive mood in daily speech.
I realise that direct correction may not be the solution, which is why I try a variety of approaches, including simply speaking correctly. That sounds funny, but I encounter a great many native speakers in this country – supposed teachers of the language to non-native speakers – who speak fluent Chinglish around Taiwanese people, and who occasionally even lapse into it with other native speakers.
Anyway, my original point was that a person can be exposed to people speaking English well (and even live in an all English environment), be intelligent, well-educated (both by his or her own culture’s/nation’s standards and that of another culture/nation), be a very motivated student and still not acquire another language that is error-free, especially if the languages are markedly different.
Good question. They think they do - there’s quite a bit of pressure on them as prospective academics to schmooze and present at conferences. I wonder how long that resolve would last if I cracked down on them with some serious drills etc. That said, I do think they’d be willing to work hard at whatever I suggested. I’d have to have some confidence in the method, myself, however.
[quote]t’s also worth noting that their L1 is probably going to run interference constantly. My wife and I speak English every day and she still makes mistakes with tenses, plurals, articles, prepositions and all the rest of the standard mistakes, despite me correcting every time she makes a mistake, her actively asking me whether particular nouns are countable or not, her reading English by herself, etc. She has improved greatly since when I met her, but she still makes basic mistakes all of the time. She’s only just recently started using things such as perfect tenses, but she still gets those wrong most of the time too. I suspect that she may never get such things correct 100% of the time (or even 90% of the time) because there’s just too much L1 interference and she didn’t really start speaking English until she was an adult.
I know that’s probably not much help, but it could be the reality.[/quote]
The situation you describe with your wife is pretty much how it is with my girlfriend - I’ve lived with her for the last 3 years and she still makes a ton of mistakes. With her and the op students I wonder if its a matter of comfort - they reach a level of competence and the ‘bad habits’ just sit there and become very hard to go beyond.
Two hours of dedicated practice 5 days a week plus a couple of hours of homework every day would get them over the hump. In the absence of that I still hold out hope for some skillful ways to get them really improving.
Oh dear, who hasn’t had those adult students who can never wake up to the fact that they are supposedly ‘learning’ a foreign language with all of its weird convolutions? What I have found with this type of person is that they are actually trying to find a way to fit their learned English into a Mandarin concept or context, if you will. How many times have you not heard,“But that’s the way we say it in Chinese.” From the minds of such erudite investigators of our language, our lives in Taiwan are enhanced with such verbage as, “Open for running business”, “Welcome to contemplate your food”, “Please walk when no cars are actual” and other such bits of social illumination.
Now you know why the Taiwanese will always know more about English grammar, spelling and punctuation than you, as a lowly native speaker, can learn in several lifetimes.
Gee! Ain’t it fun?
After reading your post again, I am curious about these points: I have two high intermediate adult students who are still making the same grammar mistakes in their spoken English that they were a year ago when I started with them. They’re constantly screwing up on their formation of tenses and the use of articles and prepositions.
In my opinion, ‘high intermediate’ students should not be making these kinds of mistakes routinely. Why did you not start correcting their basic mistakes at the beginning?
I see them an hour and a half a week----To add to this, over the past couple of months they’ve also been making Friday a speak English only day.
It really comes down to the learner, their environment and their motivation. Perhaps it is a controversial thing to say but, with adults, what the teacher does is not the most important factor. Other problems are the learning methods most often employed by local students, including over-emphasis on translation and memorization of meaningless vocabulary.
There’s a little exercise that I used to do with some of my one-on-one students to focus on their grammar:
(Stolen from Toasty’s post)
It really (comes/came) down (for/to) the learner, (theirs/their) environment and (theirs/their) motivation. Perhaps (it/she) is (a/the) controversial (things/thing) to say but, (with/when) adults, what the teacher (do/does) is not (this/the) most important factor.
etc…
Make them read it aloud and pick the correct form/article/word/whatever when they arrive at it. You can tailor it to their main problems (I had a student who kept dropping her ‘s’, eventually I made 80% of it about ‘s’ for a few weeks… she got a lot better!). It makes them slow down and think about each word before they say it, which might be why it seems to work for me. I’ve used it on both children and adults.
[quote=“tsukinodeynatsu”]There’s a little exercise that I used to do with some of my one-on-one students to focus on their grammar:
(Stolen from Toasty’s post)
It really (comes/came) down (for/to) the learner, (theirs/their) environment and (theirs/their) motivation. Perhaps (it/she) is (a/the) controversial (things/thing) to say but, (with/when) adults, what the teacher (do/does) is not (this/the) most important factor.
etc…
Make them read it aloud and pick the correct form/article/word/whatever when they arrive at it. You can tailor it to their main problems (I had a student who kept dropping her ‘s’, eventually I made 80% of it about ‘s’ for a few weeks… she got a lot better!). It makes them slow down and think about each word before they say it, which might be why it seems to work for me. I’ve used it on both children and adults.[/quote]
Nice idea, but it’s kind of beside the point (at least the one I made). You can bet they’ve seen oodles of grammar drills in their time. And, really, slowing down and thinking of every word is what they are already doing. In fact, what they are doing is translating, hence the problems. Direct correction really won’t do much, although the student will think you are a ‘real’ teacher for doing so (common local teaching technique). The student will have to commit to increasing their exposure to the language through books, films and immersion situations. There is a certain point at which progress becomes very difficult if the learner does not increase their contact with the desired language. The student needs to be realistic both with their goals and how they intend to acheive them. For a lot of people living here, basic spoken communication with L1-influenced errors is about as far as they will progress.
Well, yes. However, I think it’s also because some of these concepts simply aren’t natural to a native Chinese speaker. In the instances where my wife seems to more frequently conjugate verbs correctly, it’s because they’re really, really common verbs, so I wonder if it’s simply because she has literally heard a particular conjugation of a very particular verb tens of thousands of times, but with other verbs (which she gets wrong), it’s because they’re fairly novel or uncommon (even though the grammatical rule is regular).
Prepositions are probably really difficult for anyone. I remember having issues with them studying French because there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence from one language to another. As has been mentioned, the student has to let go of his own L1’s conventions, but that’s not so easy to do.
All of this is despite my wife coming out with some pretty low frequency vocabulary or odd idioms that I know she has picked up from me after only hearing them (and asking what they were) a few times. I knew a guy here who moved to the U.S. when he was fourteen and went right through college in Canada and then worked there for a few years (so he’d spent half of his life in North America) and he still routinely said, “Open the light.” (Turn on the light.)
I don’t think it’s always lack of effort on the part of a language learner. I should imagine that if an L1 Indo-European language learner and an L1 Mandarin language learner both started learning a new language that had verb conjugations, the L1 Indo-European student would pick them up much more easily than the L1 Mandarin student because these concepts are integral to the former student’s L1, but not the latter student’s. Likewise, I’m sure if my wife and I both tried to learn Thai, or maybe even something like one of the tonal African languages, she’d find the tones much easier than I would.
Nice idea, but it’s kind of beside the point (at least the one I made). You can bet they’ve seen oodles of grammar drills in their time. And, really, slowing down and thinking of every word is what they are already doing. In fact, what they are doing is translating, hence the problems. Direct correction really won’t do much, although the student will think you are a ‘real’ teacher for doing so (common local teaching technique). The student will have to commit to increasing their exposure to the language through books, films and immersion situations. There is a certain point at which progress becomes very difficult if the learner does not increase their contact with the desired language. The student needs to be realistic both with their goals and how they intend to acheive them. For a lot of people living here, basic spoken communication with L1-influenced errors is about as far as they will progress.[/quote]
OK, that’s true! Part of the problem (especially if they use English frequently and always make the same mistakes) could be that they’ve already ‘acquired’ the mistakes as part of ‘correct’ English, so they barely notice them themselves. I do that with Chinese and my boyfriend’s English suffers from this as well - nobody corrects you the first hundred times you used them, so it became subconscious.
When errors become fossilized in this way, they are nearly impossible to permanently correct.[/quote]
Nonsense. That’s why God invented sticks and cattle-prods.
[quote=“Dial”]I have two high intermediate adult students who are still making the same grammar mistakes in their spoken English
My own ideas of making them improve include making better use of the book - currently, I skip the reading and writing exercises. I also plan to give them more regular tests to increase the feedback on how they’re going. There’s also a Touchstone website which I will suggest they make use of.
[/quote]
Tease ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ apart. The grammar mistakes you observed may not be due to the lack of grammatical competence in English. If they do well in written grammar exercises and spoken grammar drills, then the mistakes in spoken English are at the ‘performance’ level, not at the ‘competence’ level. If they don’t, keep working on improving their competence.
It took me years as an English major to manipulate the verb conjugation, final s, tense consistency, and all the pieces that don’t exist in Mandarin in a more ease manner in my spoken English. If they are only practicing with you once or twice a week, give them some more time.
i have had students like those in the past…one class get on them about those particular errors and stress to them to slow down and remember the basics first…after getting stopped a few times, they’ll remember.
Turn on the tape recorder and engage them in things THEY think are interesting. When they make a grammatical error correct it and try to get some sense of whether they know “why” it is wrong, sometimes that will easy to clarify for them and sometimes it won’t. If it is do so and if isn’t just say the way they say it sounds funny and repeat the corrected form. Be sure they know what the sentence MEANS. Focus on the rhythm of the sentence and sort sing it with them till you are satisified they have the music of it down, with connected speech, reduced syllables etc. Keep it convesational and keep finding ways to use the pattern you are focusing on. Use the pattern in questions, and negative and positive statements. If there are patterns that are being confused contrast them and make sure that they know what the difference in meaning is. Move on and keep it conversational, when you get to the next error you want to work on (focus on the really gross ones first) repeat the process AND work in the patterns worked on previously.
A lot is made about increasing comprehensible input but if the input is going to be tailored to the student you have to create it together. Keep and note book with example sentences, vocab etc. and in the next class (which is also recodred) run through a quick review and then get started on something else.
If they are actually motivated they will listen to the tapes and if they aren’t brain damaged they will improve quickly enough that instead of being frustrated by the same mistakes you will all be delighted at the progress.
Anyway, that is exactly what I do. Seems to work a charm.
The OP mentioned that the students didn’t express any dissatisfaction with the teaching, so they obviously like the classes. This would suggest that you could lower your expections of them. The important thing is that they enjoy learning English.
As has been mentioned, high level learners often screw up with tenses, prepositions, articles, and so on.
Are they making these errors in writing or speaking? What is their short/long term goals? Are they likely to be using English with foreigners/work for a overseas company? study abroad?
.