What I feel since teaching English here for a month is a great lack of knowledge in the English language. I’ve graduated in a liberal arts degree from the University of Alberta back in Canada and yet I feel teaching grade-school English to be quite the challenge. I love working with the children and the curriculum at my school is solid. My trouble is that many times I feel I myself am re-learning the English language. I know why a student’s sentence is wrong, but sometimes I forget why it is wrong. I think I gotta study harder.
I really regret studying English first language. It’s almost as if, back home, the second language kids got more drilled with grammar rules. Many times, just like you , I know a sentence is wrong, but don’t ask me why!!
It may help to just write out the incorrect sentence on the board, and then write the correct version below it. This way you can better explain the differences in grammar and such to your students or Chinese teachers, should they ask. I feel the same way with my editors.
BTW, I usually say “That one is wrong,” when someone asks me what’s the difference between A and B.
Glad to know I’m not the only one in this position… I can almost never really explain why a sentence is right/wrong based on grammar rules or such, just my own history with the language
My learning curve was steep when I started to teach. My handwriting was appalling, as was my spelling. Things have rapidly improved. But I can sometimes get stumped with trying to explain grammar rules. This happend yesterday with who/which/that. Thankfully I’ve got some great colleagues that I can run ideas past and they don’t look at me as if to say " You’re the native speaker, you should know!"
There was a very interesting thread recently in which we discussed me/I for six pages…
It takes work to brush up your English, but there is no better time to do it than now. I know I’m a lot more confident with my ability in English than I was two years ago. I certainly type much faster too!
Sometimes when I can’t put my finger on what’s different between a right and wrong sentence, I find it helps to come up with more examples. Change some of the surrounding structure and come up with places where what is wrong in one sentene is right in another.
Even if you know the answer yourself, I think it’s often better for the students if you can give them more examples and just point out things students might miss. (Like how in one set you have noun phrases following a verb and the other verb phrases following it.)
For what it’s worth, Chinese people often can’t explain why what I just said in Chinese is wrong, grammatically. I just get the “we don’t say it that way” thing. It’s for the same reason: native speakers don’t HAVE to learn grammar, they’re swimming in it all the time, from the first time Mummy starts talking to them onwards.
I keep my copy of Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage in my classroom for explaining grammar to my 2nd and 4th graders when a mistake comes up and I can’t think of why it’s wrong (or if I’m not quite sure if it is or not). I look up the error or usage in question in the book and then simplify the explanation for them. Ask any one of my former students, who are now in the 6th grade, what the perfect tense means and they will tell you “It’s the past of each tense,” and then will draw you a timeline showing that.
I am one of those freaks of nature who actually loves teaching grammar and looks forward to grammar day…Wednesdays for 4th grade and Thursdays for 2nd grade. I even took elective grammar classes in university. My favorite lessons are teaching perfect tenses and clauses.
This is a really good thread. It’s a huge help to a teacher to study grammar. And as others have said, now is a great time to improve one’s grammar knowledge. Teaching day-in day-out certainly makes the study of grammar more interesting and relevant. A few years ago I would never have foreseen myself using grammar books as bedtime reading!
I think it’s helpful to study more than one perspective on grammar as well. I’ve found Rutherford’s “Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching”, and Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman’s “The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course” interesting and useful. The latter, among other approaches, uses transformational grammar; something I don’t fully understand yet but am learning about.
Of course we need to be judicious about the way in which we apply this knowledge to the classroom. All SLA theorists (including Krashen!) agree that explicit grammar teaching is useful in some way at some stage, but research so far shows that we need to be thoughtful about the timing, the extent and the nature of this teaching.
[quote=“ImaniOU”]
I am one of those freaks of nature who actually loves teaching grammar and looks forward to grammar day…Wednesdays for 4th grade and Thursdays for 2nd grade. I even took elective grammar classes in university. My favorite lessons are teaching perfect tenses and clauses.[/quote]
Oh god do I hate grammar, but I agree Swan’s book is great !!! BUt as of late, I’ve been feeling that my grammar and english has gone down because I have to correct so many papers that are filled with ‘bad’ english. Anyone ever feel a moment like that while teaching?
[quote=“Namahottie”][quote=“ImaniOU”]
I am one of those freaks of nature who actually loves teaching grammar and looks forward to grammar day…Wednesdays for 4th grade and Thursdays for 2nd grade. I even took elective grammar classes in university. My favorite lessons are teaching perfect tenses and clauses.[/quote]
Oh god do I hate grammar, but I agree Swan’s book is great !!! BUt as of late, I’ve been feeling that my grammar and English has gone down because I have to correct so many papers that are filled with ‘bad’ English. Anyone ever feel a moment like that while teaching?[/quote]
I feel like my English is reverting to some sort of grade school sing-song version of its former self. I find that my vocabulary is starting to become limited to the words on various vocab lists put out by my buxiban, the GEPT, etc. I have been in Taiwan for less than two months. However, this is the sort of English that allows me to communicate with the children and adults alike here.
I hear you stop tearing out your hair when you stop caring, but I fear my hair will be gone well before that.
True. But of course you have to be really careful about committing anything incorrect to chalk. Red crosses (or teach them the linguistics *) can help.
I make little comments in my students’ homework. Their homework is to use half the word list (17-18 words a week, 5-6 for vocabulary and 12 for spelling) in a short story of about one or two paragraphs long. They keep this in an ongoing notebook which I edit for grammatical, pragmatic, and orthographic errors each week with from Friday night to Wednesday afternoon to complete the assignment. In one student’s notebook, this week, I wrote a short note about using “Me and my friends didn’t see it” and how 1) Me cannot be a subject (we just finished the last three grammar units on subjects and predicates)…that it would be like saying “Me didn’t see it.” and that when writing in English, we put pronouns after the nouns in a compound subject (compound subjects and predicates being this week’s grammar lesson) therefore, “My friends and I”.
I try not to point out things that are over their heads, but I do pick my battles and build lessons on the ones that have become ingrained. We did a writer’s workshop on using the past in narrative writing (aka stories and personal narratives) as opposed to present tense, usually, in informative writing (e.g. how-to and persuasive paragraphs) so I point out errors along these lines when I see it occuring in their homework.
Their homework assignments are the only pieces of writing where they don’t go through an editing process, but are still expected to uphold high writing standards…compared to journaling (ungraded and used strictly for content) and project/essay writing (graded, but goes through writing process).
It’s a great way for me to see how much they are applying what they know and learn to free-topic writing.
Unfortunately, when I took over a class from another foreign teacher once, I discovered that he had taught the students to write “me and my friends/brothers/etc.” as the subject. Looking at the students’ workbooks, you could see many places where he had crossed out things like “My friends and I went to the store yesterday.” and added the correction “Me and my friends went to the …”
What exactly is a teacher supposed to do in a situation like this?
On a related note: I felt that after 5 years in Taiwan, my spoken English had deteriorated, possibly because I couldn’t use the kind of vocabulary I would use at home with native speakers.
