Beyond the sentence...

Here's a selection of links and other bits and pieces related to IA902 Session 9.

Flax (Flexible Language Acquisition) is a very interesting website from New Zealand which aims to "automate the production and delivery of practice exercises for overseas students who are learning English". Meanwhile, Tom Cobb's Vocabulary Profiler is a potentially useful tool which can be found on his Compleat Lexcial Tutor website.

In terms of texts we looked at in class, you might be interested in reading more about Derek Bentley or in watching the film "Let Him Have It", which is based on his case.  The events of the Battle of Balaclava and Lord Raglan's miscommunication are also well documented online. For those with more literary tastes, there's "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, or a huge number online limericks. 

If you're tired of reading for now, you could always just watch any of the videos below, one of which involves the mysterious case of the Pineapple Princess:

Guy Cook - Discourse

Representing the Sentence

We looked at various pictorial representations of sentences in this week's session, so I thought I'd share some links for those of you who might want to do some exploring. Images of cuisenaire rods came from a teacher's blog, Pilgrims English Language Centre, and a commercial website. The image of colour-coded sentence parts came from a podcast for disability professionals, and the diagram that I still don't quite understand came from the blog of an American bookworm.

If you'd like to make beautiful syntax trees, phpSyntax Tree is incredibly easy to use, and I made these two images using a free piece of software called TreeForm:

Rules, Patterns and Words by Dave Willis

Pattern Grammar

Extracts from Pattern Grammar by Susan Hunston and Gill Francis courtesy of Google Books:



Read a review of the book published in Computational Linguistics here, or click here for an article by Susan Hunston entitled "Frame, phrase or function : a comparison of frame semantics and local grammars"

Clauses and sentences

This may seem like an odd starting-point for a discussion of clauses and sentences, but all will become clear eventually.  These videos accompany the Preparatory Task I have circulated for IA902 Session Seven:

Noun Phrases : Typical difficulties for learners

Here's a question for you in relation to this week's topic of nouns and noun phrases. Which of the following difficulties are most relevant to the context that you teach in? How serious are the difficulties and how can you help learners to overcome them?

1. Choosing the wrong word endings when attempting to form nouns from adjectives (e.g. *angriness, *youngtime).
2. Not using capital letters appropriately ( e.g. *I speak French).
3. Using countable nouns when the context is uncountable (e.g. *an information, *a good weather, * the news are good).
4. Using plural nouns as though they are singular (e.g. *The people is kind).
5. Making regular plural forms of irregular nouns (e.g. *a lot of womans, *three childrens).
6. Using plural forms of modifying nouns (e.g. * some pencils sharpeners, *a 16 years old girl).
7. Subject-verb agreement with modified nouns (e.g. * Successful users of the language is able to….).

(adapted from Parrot, 2010 pp. 18-20)