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Category Archives: grammar
Around the verb in 80 minutes #1: Introduction: a bit of history
Since 1066, Latin (Romance language) and Anglo-Saxon has formed a confused layer cake comprising of overlapping strata and forgotten bits and pieces all over the centuries. In this layer cake, Latin was the prestige language – and still is.
In this linguistic layer cake: a humble “spade” (Anglo-Saxon) will never convince anyone to call it [...]
Around the verb in 80 minutes #2: Rationale: Covering Grammar
The title to this second post in the series ‘Around the Verb’ is inspired by from Scott Thornbury’s book “Uncovering Grammar” where grammar is not a thing to be learned, but rather a process that emerges as learners language needs become more sophisticated.
The term “cover” such-and-such grammar point has the rather unfortunate implication of mystifying [...]
Around the verb in 80 minutes… #3: How many tenses are there in English?
I start this stage of the workshop by asking how many tenses there are in English. I have asked this question many times. Learners are never consistent with their answers. Incredibly, teachers are similarly inconsistent. This is a shocking revelation given the focus on grammar on so many EFL course books, publications and courses.
How does [...]
Around the verb in 80 minutes… #4: Start of session – the bubble.
This section of the series owes a great deal to Glenys Hanson and her article “The English Verb Tense System: a dynamic presentation using the Cuisenaire Rods“.
In this section, I introduce the notions
that time and space and time is flexible and subjective
that we choose verb forms according to the meaning we want to realise [...]
The Article Flowchart
Simon Mumford and Nesta Parry presented this week a short seminar on academic writing at IEU, Izmir. In the seminar they focussed on common mistakes of L2 academic writers thast they met as academic proof readers of academic work. They chose to focus on articles, prepositions and relative clauses. My interest was to see [...]
Around the verb in 80 minutes… #5: The rods and the chart.