This is the garden next to an elementary school here in my neighborhood in Brasilia. It's a picture taken by my father last spring and it's a good literal and figurative description of where I am now. I'm in the middle of a teaming garden, beginning to produce flowers, next to my more mature co-inhabitants who support and frame my efforts.
That's how I feel about this blog: I'm putting out some thoughts, some questions, which are answered, developed, built upon by others who have "been there, done that" and are happy to share the experience. My many thanks.
My next question then . . . as teachers, which areas of grammar do we feel the least secure about? What grammar points would we like to review and see in a recycler course? Prepositions, articles, verbs?
2 comments:
Hi, Pat.
What a beautiful photo! What is that gorgeous flowering tree?
I like your analogy of a "teaming garden"
(very creative play on words: "teaming' / "teeming"). It's an apt metaphor for what I call "co-teaching and co-learning" because a garden isn't truly a garden unless there's a variety of flora, with each plant showing a different type, color, stage of development, size, and so on.
I also like the fact that you've created your blog not only to share your own thoughts, but also to elicit questions and comments from others who have "been there, done that."
You asked the following:"As teachers, which areas of grammar do we feel least secure about? What grammar points would we like to review and see in a recycler course? Prepositions, articles, verbs?"
My off-the-top-of-my-head response:
Extra work is always needed with prepositions, articles, and verbs—prepositions because even though many preps can be directly translated from Portuguese to English and vice versa, they aren't interchangle (e.g., in, at, on); articles because though Portuguese and English both have them, they're used differently; verbs because the use of tense, aspect, and modality is sometimes very similar but often strikingly different in Portuguese and English.
Here are some other things that I'd add, particularly for high intermediate–advanced students:
— reported (indirect) speech, particularly the use of "back shifting" of tenses;
— use of conditionals and subjunctives;
— relative clauses;
— tag and negative questions, plus statements as questions;
— participial adjectives (in particular, -ed / -ing pairs like bored vs boring;
— gerunds vs infinitives;
— phrasal verbs vs prepositional verbs;
— inverted word order with negative expressions ("Never have I heard such a thing!");
— differences in punctuation and usage for conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs ("You didn't study, so you didn't pass" vs "You didn't study; consequently, you didn't pass").
I could probably think of additional examples, but in my experience, all of the above are particular bugaboos.
All the very, very best—
Dennis in Phoenix
Dear Pat,
You're a poet and born writer. I won't get tired of saying to you what a wonderful blogger you are. In this co-learning experience we create meaning exactly in these blogs, forums exchanges. The whole is way more than we could ever do or learn individually. Just like a flower which will only blossom under certain soil and weather conditions...
Do you mean a recycler for us, educators? Or for our students? You know what? I'd love to have a recycler for us, educators, in which we could discuss the many approaches we could use to teach grammar points profiting from these digital tools available out there. I'd love to have ideas, views from other educators. Maybe a project for the future? Or even some blog posts of ours doing that, right? It doesn't need to be something formal. In fact, nowadays more and more informal learning is reshaping the way we learn.
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