Archive for the ‘Punctuation’ Category

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

Not completely TEFL-related, this one, so TTV doesn’t stand for Test Teach Vegetate (the alternative to Test Teach Test for students with limited attention spans like teenagers and kids whose additive and sugar fixes are starting to wear off). No, this is the newest addition to my list of “Linguistics that don’t put you off your breakfast” resources, Teachers’ TV.

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How to make writing fun seems to be a “popular” problem, so here is a list of links I promised someone on the TEFL.net forums:

 All good TEFLtastic writing fun:

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-emailing-errors-team-game/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-megaform-interview-guessing-game-writing-and-speaking/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-business-chain-email-letter-writing-game-lower-level-version/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-business-chain-emails-letters-writing-game/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-business-email-or-telephone-guessing-game-lower-level-version/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-business-email-or-telephone-guessing-game/

www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/formal_letters_alex1.htm

www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?catid=58082&docid=154413

www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?catid=58025&docid=144605

And no so fun, but still useful:

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-add-the-punctuation-writing-cae/

www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-letter-punctuation-practice-pre-int/

Many apologies that most of it is not in easy to use formats, I suggest cutting and pasting into Word or Wordpad or equivalent, making sure the pages stop where the dotted lines are, and then printing

And one more mention for the last post on fun writing tasks:

www.tefl.net/alexcase/archives/153

A recent editorial from the Asahi Shimbun gives a perfect illustration of the difficulties of teaching English and American academic writing and debating style to Japanese and other Asian students. First of all it does that great Asian almost zen-like trick of giving two diametrically opposed points of view and never coming down on one side or the other.

The other argument they use that would never make it further than the letter pages of a British or US newspaper is that the reason why Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma was wrong to say he accepted that the Hiroshima bomb was historically inevitable was because it could upset people. If he was right or wrong is seen as almost irrelevant, only the results of his words matter. And I’m not saying that this Japanese use of language is wrong, but seeing words only as an emotional thing not as a way of grappling intellectually and bringing the other person’s argument down like the average British man’s conversation in a pub is a huge leap for me. Not that some Japanese men don’t spend all their time using facts and logic to argue with their friends too. They certainly exist, and they are called ‘otaku‘.

Not that anyone is asking me, but I say as it is impossible to say what would have happened if the A bombs weren’t dropped it is impossible to say one way or another whether they saved or caused more death and suffering.

Trying to find fun stuff to practice emailling in class is one of the banes* of my life, so I think I deserve a little smugness on having come up with a new idea on how to do so. You can see the results on the page “Worksheet- Email error game” on the right. Click now! No, not later, now!

Was it good for you?

As an extra treat, will try to summarize what can make emailing lessons fun:

The fun emailing lessons magical formula

• Make it competitive
• Give time limits 
• Have teams
• Give points
• Make first reading tasks quick and easy
• Make writing tasks interactive (students read and respond to each others’ emails, e.g. deciding if the advice written in it is good or not)
• Cut it up into bits of paper, and if possible get them to shuffle them around
• Turn over the sheets during some of the activities to vary the interactions
• Test their memories, e.g. by having an email on the board that disappears word by word
• Test their logical powers, e.g. by asking them to solve a murder mystery where the clues are all emails
• Use pictures for the arty ones, such as covering emoticons
• Introduce language that is totally inappropriate for business emails too (e.g. What’s up dudes!!), to lighten things up and show them what they can’t do
• Get them moving, e.g. standing in a line in the same order as the cut up paragraphs of the email they are holding or showing thumbs up and thumbs down in response to emails you show them
• Er, that’s it…

Any more hints? Any requests? Am confident I can come up with at least one more fun lesson, or at least more confident about that than I am about ever working out how to give you access to said lessons in an easier to use format (Sorry!) 

*What on earth is a “bane”??