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credoquaabsurdum - 10 May 2005 17:22 GMT

This post is addressed to upper-level language learners and language
teachers. It may not make much sense to those of you who have not
studied formal grammar intensively.

* * *

In Greece, we only have two real problems with getting the principles
of article usage across to upper-intermediate/advanced teenagers and
adults.

First, it is very difficult for Greek speakers to both understand and
successfully apply the general rule that plural countable/uncountable
nouns used in a wholly general, wholly abstract sense do not normally
take an article, i.e.:

Life is funny. (All life, generally.)
NOT * The life is funny.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. (Yeah, right.)
NOT * The guns don't kill the people. The people kill the people.

Second, Greeks easily understand but do not always successfully apply
(dare I say acquire?) the general rule that a singular countable noun,
except in certain collocations, normally takes a determiner.

I am a teacher.
NOT * I am teacher.

Moreover, these two grammatical forms are inevitably the first to go to
the wall when students stop studying English formally.

Does anyone else have these same problems as a teacher (or had them as
a learner) and what do/did you do to get around them? I have several
solutions, all of which I consider only partially helpful and not
particularly responsible, although they do help students perform well
on standardized tests, which is unfortunately the primary goal of
teaching English in Greece.

Do you have similar problems with other grammatical phenomenon? Which
ones?

Thank you for your time.

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Jan - 13 May 2005 07:50 GMT

Students in Turkey also have problems with articles, but different ones
to Greeks: there is no equivalent of the determiner 'the' in Turkish,
so students will very often omit it, producing sentences such as:

*Have you locked door?
*There's a house in my picture. House is big.
etc.

Unfortunately most of the coursebooks and grammar books I've seen focus
on the tricky articles (at school/at the school, in the world etc.) and
give lots of dull rules; 'articles lessons' were never popular with me
or my students. One method I used to introduce the demonstrative 'the'
in a more interactive way was to take a pile of board markers and pens
of various colours (some the same), and practise sentences such as
'take a blue pen' (more than one), or 'take the red pen' (only one).
Students can continue this in groups, and it is slightly more rewarding
than texts and gap-fills. Perhaps, credaquoabsurdum, this would be one
way to practise determiners with singular nouns, too.

We also did gap-fills in various creative (and uncreative) ways, and
'add the articles' to texts that had been stripped of them. At
intermediate level, I had a lesson where I put a simple short paragraph
on the board stripped of ALL articles (a/an/the), and asked students to
comment on anything they thought was wrong with the text. Interestingly
enough, even above-average classes took a while to notice the lack of
articles, and often picked up other, 'phantom' problems first.

Meeting a language that doesn't use 'the' (I think it's the most common
word in English?) is a bit of an eye-opener to its redundancy in many
cases; maybe this redundancy is why it takes my students so long to get
it. It doesn't always carry or add meaning that wouldn't be implied
within the context of a conversation anyway. This seems to put it on a
par with the third person 's' that students take ages to acquire.

Yes, in summary I'd be interested in hearing any other creative ways to
teach articles, or any other views on the subject.

Jan

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Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / May 2005

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