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)

What is a word?

I've never tried embedding an element from Google Books in a blog post before, so this is just an experiment, but anyone tackling question 1 for their assignment will recognise some text on page 4!

What is a modal verb?

To give the quotation in my previous post some context, Michael Lewis presents it in a book which otherwise sets out to show that we *can* simplify descriptions of English grammar in a useful way (i.e. it's not as complicated or difficult as some like to claim).

A question that Michael Lewis asks is whether or not HAVE TO is a modal verb. I suppose this means we need a definition for modal verbs.  If MUST is a modal verb, what makes it a modal verb?  How can we recognise it as a modal verb?

There seems to be a general consensus that the following verbs are all modals: can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would. Ron Cowan, for example, refers to these 9 as "pure modals".

In what way(s) might HAVE TO be different to the verbs in this list?

Modal Verbs

There is no doubt that the overall  picture of the modals is extremely “messy” and untidy and that the most the linguist can do is to impose some order, point some regularities, correspondences, parallelisms…This subject is not one that lends itself to any simple explanation.

(Palmer, 1979.cited in Lewis, 1986, p.99)

Is this true of your experience, either as a teacher or as a learner (or both)?  Can you give examples of any difficulties you have experienced?

PronSci

I've been following a discussion of ideas on Pronunciation Science (!) on the IATFEL Pronunciation Special Interest Group mailing list, and wondered if it's something you'd like to look at and discuss.  The gallery is very interesting, although I have a colour vision defect, so I'm not sure if I can really see what the authors want me to see!  On the pronsig mailing list, I was quite surprised to see a comment from a participant arguing that " if the teacher is not a native-speaker of the language, it is probably better that the students don't hear her speak it"claiming.  The same writer, however, also believes that using "Pronunciation Science", anyone can "teach" perfect pronunciation of English.  She's one of the brains behind Pronunciation Science...

Any thoughts?

Session Four Overspill

Below are video extracts from presentations by two Michaels - McCarthy and Hoey - both of whom have an interest in what we can learn from corpora.  Both talks here touch upon what corpora tell us about the "behaviour" of particular words and particular contexts.





This British-Council-sponsored IATEFL website features documents and videos from the past five IATEFL conferences, and may be a good site for exploration when your eyes get tired of reading.

Session Four: Links for the Lab

It will be a good idea to keep this web page open and visible throughout the lab session.  The powerpoint presentation is full of screen caps from websites, some of which you will be encouraged to explore.  A list of links in the order in which they will appear is below:

1. Oxford Dictionaries Online
2. Google Fight
3. Leeds University Collection of Searchable Corpora
4. Wordsmith Tools
5. Wordle
6. Dr Johnson's Dictionary
7. AWL Highlighter
8. Oxford Collocations Dictionary (google it!)
9. Compleat Lexical Tutor
10. Collocate Cloud
11. Touchstone : from Corpus to Coursebook
12. Cobb, T. 1997 "Is there any measurable learning from hands-on concordancing?" System 25 / 3

If I've missed anything, let me know and I will add extra links later.