Archive for the ‘noun phrases’ Category

Unsurprisingly, all taken from the book of the same name (some of which is viewable on Google Books here):

“When our students produce accurate question tags, we feel we and they have succeeded. When they fail to do so, we feel that they have failed. Unfortunately, if we measure success in this way, when language programmes are usually characterized by failure rather than success” pg 16

“What most teachers have learnt from experience is that learners fail to learn a great deal of what they are supposed to learn, but that they also learn a great deal which they have not been taught. There is, however, evidence from research and from our classroom experience that instruction does help learners to approach their task more efficiently as they struggle with the complexities of language” pg 23

“The important thing in a teaching context is to devise a methodology which has the following six features:

- an acceptance that the aim is to support general language development rather than to teach discrete language items;

- a recognition of the fact that learners are engaged in building a meaning system;

- the provision of opportunities for learners to improvise with the language they already have;

- incentives for learners to refine their language to meet different communicative demands;

- classroom procedures which will encourage learners to think carefully about how language is structured and how it is used;

- ample exposure to spoken and written texts to provide opportunities for learners to explore the language for themselves” pg 215

“It seems that the basic ordering of elements in the noun phrase is acquired fairly easily by learners, as errors in this aspect of structure are relatively infrequent. But unless they are given guidance and encouragement, learners often fail to take full advantage of the potential of the noun phrase, particularly with regard to postmodification” pg 34

And a nice simple definition of collocations:

“We say that words ‘collocate’ if they occur together more frequently than one might expect” pg 45

Food for thought (and hopefully comment).