Problem areas for English language learners: infinitive tenses

 

A teacher has got strengths and weaknesses depending on their ability and natural inclinations. For example I am rather lousy at drawing --though I do try hard-- but I can make the most of every opportunity a text affords me to clarify, illustrate and further practise language issues.

I feel that some problematic areas for learners of English are not given proper attention by course or grammar book writers. If you look at a typical course of English, you will not fail to notice an excessive emphasis on tenses in the indicative mood so much so that one gets practice for the Present and Past tenses right into Proficiency level. To my mind, this is superfluous given that a B2 level student should be able to use those quite efficiently. On the other hand, there are other grammar points introduced well into a typical course that require further development and consolidation if only because they are too sophisticated to be assimilated by younger or lower-level learners.

In my experience of teaching mainly Greek people, one of those areas in English grammar which merit special attention and should be dealt with in more detail is the infinitive tenses and their inextricable link with modal verbs. My point is that the tense for most modal verbs provides no clue as to the time the verb phrase refers to and it is the tense of the infinitive that is the time marker. (Could for ability is a time marker but not for possibility whereas may or might are no time markers and one needs to denote the time by choosing the appropriate infinitive tense.)

However, in Greek and other languages, I imagine, it is not the infinitive but the subjunctive tenses which denote time.  As a result, it is quite difficult for Greek learners to comprehend the infinitive tense use or grasp the idea that the infinitive has tenses but does not agree with the subject in person. This leads to mistakes of this kind:

He should has tried more.

The above sentence shows that there is some understanding of infinitive tenses but not sufficient understanding of the infinitive as a non-conjugated form. The mistake is the result of mental translation in the mother tongue, which equates infinitive to subjunctive. (Greek is a morphologically rich language with person differences marked by different endings.)

In order that my students get enough practice of problem grammar areas, I take advantage of original texts which provide ample examples of a particular structure either underlining the examples of this particular structure or creating an exercise.

What follows is an instance of what I have tried to illustrate so far. In addition to infinitive tenses, the text lent itself to some practice of noun adjuncts (I have already discussed this in a previous post of mine in detail providing a methodology of making sense of noun adjuncts by Greek learners.)

The first exercise is meant to be completed before reading the news story and check in the process of reading it while the second evidently is to be done while reading the text.

 

Police step up search for missing hospital worker Petra Srncova

            The Guardian 11 December 2021

Put the words in the right order to reconstruct the noun phrases. Translate the phrases in your first language.

a.      hospital, missing, children’s, worker, a

b.     nurse, senior, a, assistant

c.      her, address, home

d.     a, conference, press

e.      home, her, country

f.       our, service, national, health

Read the news story carefully and put the verbs in brackets in the correct infinitive form:

A missing children’s hospital worker is believed to …….......................... (disappear) on her way home from work, police said on Saturday, as Labour MP Harriet Harman launched an appeal for information on her constituent^[1].

Petra Srncova, 32, a senior nurse assistant at Evelina London children’s hospital in Westminster, was reported missing on 3 December by a concerned colleague, and officers are intensifying their efforts to try to ………………………….(find) her.

Srncova is believed to ……………………………(leave) the hospital at 19.45pm on 28 November. She is thought to ……………………………. (wear) a green coat and ………………………………..(carry) a red backpack at the time, the Metropolitan police said.

It is believed that Srncova withdrew money from a cashpoint, before boarding a bus towards Elephant and Castle. She is then thought to ……………………………………(change) to a bus travelling southbound towards her home address in Camberwell, where she was last sighted at 20.22pm.

A man has been arrested in connection with her disappearance and remains in custody, the Met added.

“Petra is missing, and we want people to help the police find her,” Harman said at a press conference she held on Saturday afternoon in her constituency^[2] of Camberwell.

She added: “She’s been missing for quite a few days now, she’s only 32, she’s from the Czech Republic, her parents of course are desperately worried about her, and I feel we’ve all got a particular responsibility to ……………………..(ttry)and ………………………(find) her because she was away from her home country, away from her family, here working for our national health service.”

A Met spokesperson said police have approached her family in the Czech Republic and “they have not heard from her”.

They added:“Officers are growing increasingly concerned for Petra’s welfare and are asking anyone who has seen her, or has information as to^[3] her whereabouts, to ……………………………(make) contact immediately.”

Det Supt Clair Kelland, from the Central South Command Unit which covers the area that Petra lives in, said: “We continue to …………...... (grow) increasingly worried about Petra and we are doing everything we can to try to find her.

“Her disappearance is out of character and, of course, her loved ones are extremely concerned and want to know where she is.

“Please think about if you’ve seen her, or maybe come into contact with her. If you have any information whatsoever, please get in touch and help us with our inquiries.”

The Evelina hospital said on Twitter: “We are extremely concerned about our valued colleague Petra who is missing. We want to encourage anyone who may ……………………….(have) any information that could ………………………(help) to find her to contact the police.”

 

---

[1] ψηφοφόρος

[2] εκλογική περιφέρεια.

[3] about

The Future

 The times are a-changin and we are changing with them. Here is a recent creation right out of gloomland:

Το μέλλον

Έρχεται πολλή παγωνιά

Θα σιωπούμε αενάως

Η φωνή μας άφωνη

Θα μετεωρίζεται πριν απ’ το λόγο

 

Άνθρωποι σκιές

Θα πλανώνται στους δρόμους

Τα παιδιά ασπρομάλλικα

Θα ματώνουν τη σιγή με κραυγές

 

Θα κλαίμε χωρίς δάκρυα

Θα θρηνούμε χωρίς λόγια

Στον αδιάφορο ουρανό

Ένας παγερός ήλιος θα βασιλεύει

Using models creatively: An Interview

 

I have always been fascinated by the “magic” of science and I never miss an opportunity to apply it to materials I create for my classes.

This time it is a very basic interview, which I have called An Interview Like No Other, and which may be reproduced in a myriad ways as the student’s fancy takes them. (and believe me it takes them all over the place!)

The idea is that the students are called upon to work out a puzzle: who is the interviewee. By the by you can teach the difference between interviewer and interviewee and mention other similarly formed pairs (trainer/trainee, employer/employee and so on.

Back to the interview: the interviewee is a cloud and I have based the answers on popular science to the extent I could. The children loved the mental stimulation, but to my surprise not everybody could come up with the right answer, which pleased me … enormously!

What was, however, the greatest pleasure of all was some of the interviews A2 Level students wrote using the mould of my interview, which goes to show that children have not lost their ability to spin stories and to exploit creatively whatever is given to them.

You can use the interview at any level and simply recalibrate the language or your demands in terms of language, which evidently should be consistent with the level of English your students have.

Here is my interview:

 

Where do you live?

In space

 

Who are your parents?

Water and Air

 

What do you look like?

I come in all kinds of shapes

 

What do you do?

I float

 

What is your hobby?

Hanging over mountains

 

What is your enemy?

Weight

 

What happens when you put on too much weight?

I fall

 

 

And what follows is one of the most resourceful interviews by an eleven-year-old child (level A2):

Who are your parents?

Water, rocks  and ice

 

What do you look like?

I am red and white

Have you got any special features?

Yes, my sky and the sun become blue in the sunset

 

Have you got any life on you?

No, but there are some rovers on me

 

Have you got any neighbours?

Yes,  my two moons, Phobos and Deimos

 

 

And another one by a student of the same age and level:

Where do you live?

In a school bag

 

What do you look like?

 Square and usually colourful

 

What do you have inside?

Sheets of paper 

 

What colour have your sheets of paper got?

Sometimes colourful and other times black and white

 

 

 

Poems to stimulate the mind An approach to Wind on the Hill by A. A. Milne

Although little has been written about the “losses” of exclusively online education – at least, to my knowledge – I couldn’t fail to notice how some of my students seemed to forget words or structures which I considered assimilated especially because they had been taught and consolidated before the outbreak of the pandemic.

When such lapses occur, it only makes sense to do some remedial work so that the gaps can be filled and the students can continue learning effectively. One can cite a number of reasons for these setbacks:

the distractions of the medium (messages, pop-up windows etc)

internet connection problems

doing all the exercises online

the inability of the teacher to keep an eye on everyone on the screen or even impose discipline

the failure to prevent cheating in online tests

Poems can come in useful when you try to escape the boredom of yet another grammar drill online.

 

I find children’s poems about nature fascinating and easy for the children to digest even when there is some philosophical depth to them.

This time I took a well-known poem (Wind on the Hill by A.A. Milne) and created a task-based approach which requires the children to look at the icons corresponding to the gaps in the poem and fill in the words they think are missing. Since I give them the title of the poem, I do not provide the word “wind” in the poem. The poem is quite simple and you might want to introduce the theme by playing the sound of the wind before you present the students with the task. Many different answers will be provided, but what is important is how to get the students to think creatively.

On completion of the task, depending on the age of the children, you could ask them what ideas they associate with the wind. Probably, the obvious one would be freedom, but students know how to always surprise teachers. Ask them to write a few lines or even a poem on the topic wind and freedom. Some questions might help them get started:

• Can you catch the wind?
• Can you limit freedom?
• Should you limit freedom?
• How do we harness the power of the wind?
• Where would you go if the wind could carry you safely?

 Here is the poem:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lspdBdz3F0t5_jEzUTtdyk561k3CNj6E/view?usp=sharing

and my illustrated version of it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EeabhvOpcEqPpJedV1Mab5P9_9MiDic3/view?usp=sharing

The little snake and the iris : a leap of faith

 

Life is full of surprises; impossible friendships are struck in the most unlikely places between the most – on the face of it -- incompatible parties. Adults, being more experienced and less credulous, would find it hard to see any affinity between a flower and a snake, but children -- inhabiting the land of make-believe – might be fascinated by such a rare friendship. 

Basically the story is meant to dispel myths about snakes and, hopefully, question people’s attitude towards them. I had children in mind when I wrote it since their perceptions about animals and people (!) are still in the making. The choice of flower is purposeful too. Iris is the Greek word for rainbow and also the name of the goddess of the rainbow.

 

The lesson could start by asking the students some questions that will prime their minds to receive the story. Such questions can be devised by observing life in its humblest forms. For instance, ask the children how a butterfly relates to the sea. If they don’t feel equal to the task, ask them to draw a butterfly flying over the sea. Perhaps not a common sight but a possible one, I can assure you!

Here is the story and a powerpoint slideshow to help present the story. Thereafter,  the sky is the limit.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y5GN55xMJwjGqZfh5EQcVF4g2_FiDEhP/view?usp=sharing

 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QbsJ0DQmVLZcwRqNDPoDdNtjtT1sqP9VzN5OGtm8pL4/edit?usp=sharing

Improvising in the hard times of Covid-19

 

The pandemic has played havoc with our lives, personal and professional in many different ways. We are still in it so it is hard to make a final appraisal of the losses and the few gains (every cloud has a silver lining).

We, teachers, like our students, miss the physical contact and closeness sorely, and perhaps online teaching is taking its toll. Many of us found ourselves in the situation where we had to improvise a lot in order to keep up some semblance of normality, and I am no exception.

I have already digitised activities and games which were in paper form and have ransacked the internet for sources which will make my teaching more lively and stimulating, but I am not totally satisfied with the result. The reason is obvious: there is no substitute for real action in class especially when you teach juniors.

I came up with all sorts of ways that would add some physicality to our online classes, and regardless of whether they were still “fake” in a way, the children responded enthusiastically. So I invited the young pupils to hide in their room and ask the others to guess their whereabouts using (what else?) prepositions of place. I asked them to use cutlery (teaching basic vocabulary) to have a meal “together”. I joined them in miming action songs that I found online and so on and so forth.

And my efforts to whip up a bit more enthusiasm was crowned by a project that started tentatively but won the children over. I considered capitalising on some familiar vocabulary and at the same time introducing some more words which the children would find easy to mime after me. And since nature is what everyone missed most during the quarantines and lockdowns, nature it would be. 

I called my “sketch” The Elements and I had the children incarnate different elements by miming them after me. There is a very simple and memorable pattern to each line: I am (the element/noun) and I (the action/verb). The first time round it was the sun and the action was represented with movements of the hands in a radial pattern.

I am the sun and I shine.

Every time I introduced a new element, I got the children to repeat them all over --always using their bodies to mime. For words they didn’t know I accompanied each line with an image.

When our rehearsals were over, and taking advantage of the Christmas holiday, we all met up in the garden of my house--always at a safe distance from each other-- and I recorded them in the act so they would get a feeling of reward for all their efforts by watching themselves act out the sketch and have something to show for it.

Here it is:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZtKFTbNJ0LaR3JheQNfXfaUJpUmQOPTj/view?usp=sharing