What I learnt about Rules Patterns and Words
The promised but much-delayed continuation of Quotes from Rules, Patterns and Words, and hopefully a good example of an Easy TEFL Blog Post the busy or uninspired (like me) can copy
On grammar
“the present continuous and the present simple can be used for both present and future-… they are, in fact, non-past rather than present tenses” pg 115
“If we are talking about a singular noun, which our listener cannot or does not need to identify, we use the indefinite article a(n)” pg 128 (the “or does not need to” bit was new to me, although not sure how to adapt that for a classroom description yet)
“Adverbs which say something about the whole clause, such as naturally or surprisingly, usually come at the beginning of the clause” pg 32
On collocations
“Frequently occurring nouns found with a that-clause are claim, danger, difficulty, news, story, theory” pg 159
On other language points
“Very often the er/ erm occurs just after a possible completion point, a point at which the speaker may be seen to have finished a turn” pg 187
“If someone asks for directions to a particular place, the usual response is to look for some kind of orientation:
A: Can you tell me how to get to the post office?
B: Well, you know the Town Hall on the High Street?” pg 197
“Normally we use there when we talk about the existence or occurrence of something (an accident) or when we are talking about the location of something (in the drawer). Otherwise we usually use it” pg 32
“After the determiner we may see one adjective or two, extremely rarely more than two” pg 33
“clefting is more frequent in spoken than written language” pg 135- which is strange, because we usually teach it with reference to texts of history etc.
“We can group these words [double object verbs] into the following groups:
Group 1: GIVE/ SEND: give, offer, hand, pay etc.
Group 2: BRING: bring, get, buy, fetch etc.
Group 3: ASK/ TELL: ask, tell, read, teach etc.” pg 39
“In the case of quantifiers there is a closed set of items of around thirty words and phrases” pg 78
“We can identify three kinds of measurers:
- Partitives: Words such as beginning, middle, side, back, which specify a specific part of something
- Quantitives: Words to quantify uncountable nouns, such as item of furniture or a loaf of bread
- Collectives: Words used to quantify countable nouns, such as a bunch of flowers, a bag of sweets” pg 82
“Particularly common noun modifiers are those which describe the location of another noun such as the car door, the kitchen window, the town jail” pg 86
“Corpus studies suggest that the hypothetical would is found about six times as often without an accompanying if-clause as in an explicitly conditional sentence with if.” pg 98
“- we often use phrases with it and that’s to highlight the coming sentence in a number of different ways: it is true that…, it is possible that…, it is likely that…, that’s why…, that’s what…
- the frame, the + Adj. + thing is…, is often used to show the relevance of the sentence which follows: the main thing is…; the annoying thing is…; the worrying thing is… etc…
- this… is used with verbs to explain the significance of a previous stretch of text: this means that…; this suggests that…; this shows…” pg 135/136
“there is a reluctance in English to have a to-infinitive or a that-clause as the subject of a sentence. We are more likely to see or hear, It was a real pleasure working with George, than Working with George was a real pleasure” pg 158
Teaching ideas
A nice vocabulary revision activity which I had never thought of and fits quite nicely into my recent teaching approach:
“Here you have a number of words to do with robbery, and a number of words which act as distracters. In this example, all the distracters are to do with travel. You could choose distracters from any field which the students have recently studied” pg 55/56
Some other nice bits that also raised some doubts
“The –ing form of the verb is used for:
1. Describing someone or something:
There were two girls eating fish and chips
2. After am, is, was, be etc.
3. After see, look at, hear, listen to etc.
Listen to them talking
4. Before am, is, was, be etc.
Dialling 999 is free
5. After stop, start, like etc.
6. After when, before, instead of etc.
Remember that when dialling a number from within you do not need a prefix
Before attempting to break the door down the man tried…”
pg 123 (more examples given in the book). Not sure I can see the value of teaching such seemingly unconnected forms together, but nice to have a summary for myself, and there is always the chance that there is a connection that we can’t make conscious sense of but which will stick together in students’ brains if they are taught together or that English seeming to be systematic and limited makes it more manageable and motivating. I still think choosing something more interesting in both topic and possible ways of teaching and leaving this to pick this up as they go along from reading etc makes more sense, though.
“There are a number of adjectives in English which are frequency followed by the to-infinitive and which typically feature in the frame. It + BE + Adj + to + Verb… They all function as an evaluation of some sort and can be divided into groups according to meaning:
Group 1. GOOD/ BAD: better; polite
Group 2: EASY/ DIFFICULT: easy, difficult; possible
Group 3: USUAL/ UNUSUAL: unusual
Group 4: WISE/ FOOLISH: important; safe” pg 37/38
I’m not sure how teachable this is (the author seems to think it is more teachable than tenses and determiners), but we could do one group at a time in the hope of that helping their subconscious understanding and retention of the words and associated clause structures, or we could present it as a way of showing them that English isn’t as random as they thought and so hopefully making it seem systematic and therefore manageable.
“the word about… has three basic meanings:
1. Concerning a particular subject: Think about it. I read a book about that recently.
2. Approximately: It takes about two hours… It’ll cost about a hundred quid
3. To indicate general spatial orientation: It’s late. There’s nobody about. We spent the morning just walking about town.
…
The verbs associated with the first meaning of about are all to do with communication. Francis et al. (1996) list over 120 verbs associated with this meaning. These range from words like ask, know, talk, think and write, which would be found in an elementary course, through to words like mutter, quibble and whinge… In the same way, Francis et al. (1998) identify around thirty nouns denoting items used to communicate, which are associated with about. These include very frequent words, such as book, story or letter, and also relatively infrequent words like anecdote, fable and yearn… Their list of adjectives runs to over 400, varying from happy, sad, worried and angry to infrequent words like bullish, phlegmatic, leery and effusive”
pg 148/ 149. Again, don’t know if I’d teach it this way as millions of native and non native speakers have learnt these forms without needing that generalisation.
A more critical examination of the book coming up in Rules, Patterns, Words and Doubts soon (that’ll be the TEFLtastic definition of soon, not the literal one, no doubt…)
Tags: Quotes
