Hello all, Ah, the fascination with grammar. Having taught adults in France for the last twenty years, I can attest to the fact that French learners are not...
Dan, Seems to me you have adopted a very reasonable standpoint. I puzzled over sentences like: I've worked here for 10 years. I've been working here for 10...
Dan, These are very good points. Students also have expectations and if we ignore those then we are not really doing our jobs. French students are interested...
I've worked here for 10 years. I've been working here for 10 years. The English verb system works primarily on aspect, although we do have two real tenses,...
Fluent speakers of English might switch between the two (have worked, have been working) without pause for reflection. The question is: is there one particular...
Some people will recommend corpuses, but they are really collections of linguistic corpses--artefacts. Does one really need 10,000 examples of something to...
That seems to address the reason why we shouldn't use the word 'gerund' if we are your grad student. BTW, TOEIC takers in Japan get caught out on not knowing...
Charles writes, in reference to the complexities of tense, aspect, mood and modality in the English language: "Most of which tourists at the world fair don't...
I accesed via Explorer with no difficulty. but the school computer has no antiv irus software installed (curious isn't it?) dogme@yahoogroups.com napisał(a): ...
i will contribute in a descriptively explanatory fashion. as of last year there is an exit test in foreign language as a requirement in Polish middle schools...
I agree, explanations are part of "reflecting on the language", which I find highly valuable as a step to help us speaking it, but IÂ add that "reflecting on...
I think part of the issue is this: once you get to teaching and learning English at the university, one of the goals is to master academic English, at least...
Charles, This is off topic, but interesting. I have never taught French speakers although I have lived and studied in France and speak French. I was not aware...
I may have mentioned this before in my sporadic surfacing - Since we are on the topic of grammar: When many years ago Wilga Rivers was in Seville, I...
A. Mark writes: " don't fully understand the resistance to teaching grammar. I know that grammar is much misunderstood and that a reasonable command of it...
This story by Tim Murphey might be of interest, especially to those teaching in Japan? I'm not sure what the Yahoo! site will do with this formatting, but here...
What is a caring 'in-comer'? Time to form a Dead Gaijin Poets' Society? It seems like an unlikely approach to get a point across, but I am really tired of...
Perhaps I'm thinking of how anglophones rely on cognates to struggle through French. One big problem with grammar in Japan is that they expect it to be taught...
It almost sounds, Charles, as if you are describing Germany! I would like to give you a link to a classic article on my website, but since it has been declared...
In fact, French learners do not expect English grammar to mirror French grammar. They just. expect to need to learn about the grammar, because with French, you...
I wonder if you took a survey of French English learners what their expectations of English grammar would actually be. Compared to Japanese, the two languages...
Charles, When you say "continuance level" do you mean the number of high school graduates who go on to higher education? There's an interesting article on...
Hi Daniel, Thanks for your explanation about French students' expectations of English grammar. This makes perfect sense. Many years ago I read Eugene Weber's...
... Yes, I think I should have written 'continuance rate'. ... Perhaps the even larger issue is huge numbers who never make it past the first year of...
Doesn't this all go back to sometime earlier than the Revolution? See for example Ramus's influential work on rhetoric, logic, grammar, duplicated all over...
And the Latins held up Greek as the perfect language. The whole notion is of course nonsensical, since language is as it is used. As Wittgenstein pointed out,...
Charles, Thanks for your response. It's difficult to compare university systems across national boundaries. Educational traditions, ideologies, and national...
The Romans naturally thought that Latin was the perfect language and their descendants in Europe happily believed them. Modern Arabs have similar attitudes...
Vance, First of all it looks like you've not read the whole exchange. The sentence you're commenting on was an illustration as to why another supposed...
